#621 Virtua Striker Hidden Team: FC Sega gameplay.
0Gameplay of the hidden team FC Sega in Sega's Virtua Striker.
So, here's Sega' Virtua Striker. I occasionally feel a need to remind people that Model 2 emulation still isn't perfect. There's only one emulation for it, and it hasn't gotten any better in about ten years. Plus, the guys who develop mame are useless and won't add a dirty hack to enable Model 2 in mame because of some anally retentive reason or another. By the time I'm done with this series, it wouldn't surprise me if I had to make occasional videos until 2030, considering how slow mame devs are to find fixes for games.
Virtua Striker's main emulation is sound desync. Its sound will simply desync after a while (so, not matching up to the footage anymore), and as result it gets to be jarring and tedious after all. Still, it's the best we've got I suppose.
I never really cared for V.S. growing up. I only spent some of my early childhood in the UK, but I remember Virtua Striker and Neo Geo machines in particularly being pretty ubiquitous. When I went to live in Dubai however, there were some a plethora of imported arcade games from around the world (including things like Fighting Layer, a Japanese version of Vampire Saviour, SoulCalibur, Virtual On, Alien vs. Predator, X-Men vs Street Fighter, and so on) that I just kind of forgot about the game. As I didn't really grow up in the UK football culture, it took me years to be about to really appreciate it, and so I tended to dismiss football games for years, until I ended up learning about and playing some good titles like Super Sidekicks and Sensible Soccer.
All those years later then, do I appreciate Virtua Striker now? No, not really. I've complained in the past that 3D titles have a kind of slow, sluggishness to them compared to 2D titles. V.S. exemplifies that, with its often quite slow and tedious gameplay, particular in contrast to something more fast-paced and user friendly like the Super Sidekicks series. The game always felt like I was wading through mud, and taking shots was such a difficult feat that I think it took five matches when first playing before I even scored a goal.
The V.S. series always featured a hidden team or two, with one in particular in V.S. 3 being very interesting indeed. Here however, we have the hidden team F.C. Sega, which appears to contain the likenesses of the devs who worked on the game. I certainly always appreciate a hidden team, and I think this was a good choice to make. That said, even with what appears to be improved abilities, I just couldn't get used to the control style of this game. Though I attempted to hamfist my way to eventual playthrough, the blatant rubberbanded AI in the game (who suddenly get better right after you've scored a goal) meant that I could rarely ever score victories. So, as a result, this is definitely a game for the sake of thoroughness more than anything else. Still, I'll at least try to cover the rest of the V.S. arcade series in the future, though not for quite a while yet.
Next up, we take a very curious look at Virtual-On. Prepare for bewilderment.
Also, a few days ago I reached 900 subscribers. Woot! Less than 100 subscribers to go before 1K, holy shit. Thanks so much to everyone!