#1030 Virtual-On Oratario Tangram (DC) Bosses (2/3): Bradtos gameplay
0Gameplay of the mid-boss Bradtos in the Dreamcast port of Sega’s Virtual-On Oratorio Tangram.
So, from what I can tell, Bradtos is basically two Z-Gradts stuck together, who work in unison. And are powered by some sentient crystals or something. I would say this is weird but I have played Burning Rangers; a game also made by Sega which also featured something about sentient killer crystals from what I recall.
Bradtos is the mid-boss of the game. He fires more projectiles at you than a Touhou boss, and only becomes vulnerable when he splits apart and reveals his crystal…at which point he then spams even more projectiles, cause why not.
He’s not dramatically interesting, nor dramatically difficult idea, and given that his design is eventually just a reworking from Virtual On 1 I’m not overall impressed by him in the same way that I was with Tangram, which wasn’t a hell of a lot to begin with anyway. Again, not a fan of the virtual-on bosses in general. That said, I’m glad I could play as him…for how little time it actually was. Emulating this game used to be so much more stable on Windows 8, but on Windows 10 it’s suddenly more prone to crashing unfortunately. I’ve noticed it a lot with the older emulators I’ve used on Windows 10, and I’ve even run into more issues with Taito Type X games in Windows 10 than I did on Windows 8. It’s natural that programs get less compatible over time as operating systems change, but it also unfortunately means that much of what people have been able to accomplish with game-hacking (especially for arcade titles) may well become inaccessible in the future, as older, necessary emulators are no longer updated or made compatible with the current software out there, and we just end up losing access to things we took for granted before.
I bring all this up because, for some reason, this was the best footage I could honestly get for Bradtos. He crashed the game even more than Tangram did for some reason; sometimes just pressing the triggers buttons at the beginning of a match would cause it to crash, for instance. It doesn’t really matter, as just like Tangram playing as him involves spamming the trigger buttons until the opponent dies, but when you have an oddity like this you really want to enjoy it for all you can. That said, what you see is what you get here; any more footage would have just been the same thing, anyhow.
On a side note, I got to play this game back when I lived in Dubai, like many of the titles I've covered. It was in a sit-down cabinet with curtains on the sides, from what I recall, so you were really immersed in it. The thing I remember most about the game was actually just how much the character selection screen confused me; I had never seen a selection screen before where you did anything other than move right to left, so I just assumed there were only two playable characters in the game, but for years that just never seemed quite right to me. Years later I got to play it again and, lo and behold, I was right. Moving up and down on the selection screen never occurred to me then, for some reason. Just one of those weird things I remember.
Up next, the hidden boss of the game.