FX Fighter Turbo (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
146A playthrough of GTE Entertainment and Argonaut's 3D versus-fighting game for PCs running Windows 95, FX Fighter Turbo.
Played through as Jake on the medium difficulty level.
This video is a replacement for my original playthrough of this game. If you've ever tried to play this game, chances are you've run into issues with it. It's extremely sensitive to the speed of the machine it's running on (don't go higher than an original Pentium chip or you're asking for trouble with it!). Sometimes it'll go several times the intended speed, othertimes it'll play at 1-2 frames per second. It's beyond frustrating, and its even more so through emulation.
Anyways, this IS emulated - I got it FINALLY to run properly in Dosbox. For anyone that wants the secret to playing this, create a HDD image, install Windows 98 Second Edition on it, including drivers for the S3 Mach64 graphics chip and the SB16 sound card. Install DirectX 7 and Daemon tools, and then load the game through the CD image (it has to be placed on the HDD image that Windows is installed to). For Dosbox settings, I had this running on the dynamic Pentium core with cycles set to 80k with 64megs of RAM. It ran flawlessly - my jaw dropped. I know I've tried it before like this, and I have no idea what I did differently this time. So anyways, the game is running at a reasonable framerate now, with all of the graphic details turned up as high as they'll go. *Side note* Sorry for the little bit of the intro that doesn't have sound. My copy glitches and lets out this squealing static noise in certain parts of the video - I've muted the affected section to spare you the ear pain it causes.
As much as I loved the original FX Fighter, I had high hopes for this one when it came out. Unfortunately, it's largely the same game, and the changes never really struck me as terribly important.
There are two new characters here that don't appear in the original, and a couple of new game modes. There are "bloodlust" moves, but they aren't fatalities or anything like that - they're just slightly more brutal combos that end with a spray of ... blood? I'm not sure, sometimes it's red, but othertimes is blue, green, pink, whatever.
There's also a turbo mode, as the title would indicate, which can be fun if your computer can handle it, butif you want to stretch the legs of the game's ancient network code (it supported online play on 33.6k and faster connections), well, good luck. Probably not so easy in the modern day, but it is there.
All in all, it was a reasonable sequel, but it just didn't change things up enough for me. The movesets were largely the same, and despite the sharp uptick in system requirements, the graphics are only marginally cleaner looking and better defined, and by the end of 1996 when this was released, they really weren't terribly impressive. Good, but not impressive. And really tacky. REALLY tacky. Like Jake - he has a game logo t-shirt, camouflage pants, and frosted tips now. I mean, after winning the tournament, did he see George Michael on VH1 and then decided he needed a makeover? *Sigh*
Oh well, it's fun nonetheless. I'm not sure it was worth the years of efforts to get it playing, but I'm glad I finally got to really play it as it was intended.
Oh, one last thing - this is not the S3 Virge version. I don't have that video card, and from the little I've read, though it makes the game look better, it also kills the framerate due to bottle-necking. This playthrough was all done through the software renderer.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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