FX Fighter (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
131A playthrough of GTE and Argonaut's 1995 3D fighting game for PCs running MS-DOS, FX Fighter.
Played through with Jake on the second difficulty level. All of the prerendered CG bio videos from the intro have been put together and are shown at the end.
I played this game with the emulator targeting performance equivalent to about a P120, which is a fair amount higher spec than the game's minimum requirement. This is necessary to play with all the details turned up without stuttering framerates, but something in the difficulty setting is regulated by the CPU speed - the faster the processor, the harder the AI becomes. Long story short - playing this game on level 2 on a P120 like I do here is roughly the same as difficulty level 6+ on a 486/50.
FX Fighter was a pretty highly anticipated game when it was first release in the early days of 3D PC gaming. Argonaut's announcement of a SNES release to showcase the Super FX2 chip's capabilities brought a lot of hype, and ultimately disappointed many when the game was cancelled. If you look at the prototype footage of the SNES game, though, it's clear that development continued on in the form of this PC version, and it's 1995 release on CD for DOS was met with a fair amount of acclaim.
Hailed as being the PC's response to games like Tekken and Virtua Fighter, the smoothly animated texture mapped characters went a long way to silencing those that criticized the PC as a platform incapable of replicating the bleeding-edge arcade tech. (I can't believe they made it look this good running in VGA!) The backing tracks were an excellent representation of the synth-based dance music that dominated the charts at the time, and though the gameplay was a bit simple and the AI was infuriatingly cheap on most of the difficulty levels, most that played it at the time (100% me included) still hold some pretty fond memories of time spent with it.
I also remember this game being an insane system hog. Back in 1995, I was able to run it with all of the graphics details set to their highest on a Pentium 75 with 16megs of memory, but it struggled to maintain a smooth frame rate (despite the fact that a Pentium 75 was still an incredibly expensive beast of a machine at the time). Cutting down the details helped smooth it out, but it still hurt that a $3000 PC had a hard time keeping up.
This is being played through DosBox, and these performance issues still persist. Though most of the fights are smooth, the final fight with Rigil eats the framerate pretty badly in spots. I can't help but think that this was just the game itself, and would be rough in places regardless of the hardware powering it. Anyways, this game did for PC 3D fighters what GameTek's Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo port did the same year for 2D games.
It's a great fighter, and went a long way in proving just how capable PCs of the time were. You might scoff and say the Playstation did 3D better, and you wouldn't be wrong. BUT, this was rendered completely in software (no 3D accelerator chips were around yet!) - yeah, ask the PS1 to brute force this on its main CPU alone and see what you get ;)
And if you recall seeing a different playthrough of this fighter in my channel, you'd be right. However, that recording is over three years old and the video quality isn't so hot, so I wanted to update with a new play. I also finally able to get FX Fighter Turbo running at high settings with good speeds recently, so I'll be uploading that soon too.
Hope you enjoy the video, playing it was a huge nostalgic rush :)
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