Ultra Vortek (Jaguar) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
320A playthrough of Atari's 1995 versus fighting game for Atari Jaguar, Ultra Vortek.
Played through on the normal difficulty level with Volcana.
It had been awhile since I had pulled out the old Jaguar, so I figured it was about time. Ultra Vortek is, by Jaguar standards, a pretty good fighting game. By most standards, it's a hyper-violent, well-produced yet mediocre and somewhat underwhelming Mortal Kombat clone.
The graphics look great. It's obvious that a lot of effort went into them - there are a reasonable amount of frames in the character animations, the CG characters are usually cool in their design (except Mercury, wtf happened there? Since when does mercury look like congealed seminal fluid?), and the backgrounds are really nicely detailed and animated. The whole thing strives so hard to be metal it hurts, but it does succeed to some extent. Everything is dark and brooding, and there's some representation of Hell or Satan in nearly backdrop. The music, thankfully, backs up the overly enthusiastic visual theme. It is pretty metal, with a lot of loud overdriven guitar samples and gated reverb dominating the audio. It sounds like the music was done with some sort of tracked module format (the samples and how they are used remind me a lot of what you might hear on an Amiga), and even if everything is pretty synthesized sounding, it sets the tone of the game pretty well. Especially given how small the cartridge rom is (32megabit - big by SNES standards, but c'mon!), I was impressed by how much they managed to pack in here.
The gameplay is reasonable. It's certainly not on par with Mortal Kombat, but it's got the basics down. It's got the classic leg sweep and uppercut move, and each character has a good number of special moves. Unfortunately, a lot of them are quite difficult to pull off. The motions are simple, but the Jaguar's D-pad is a bit awkward, as is the three-button layout for a game like this. Oh well, at least they didn't require you to use the 10-key pad for special moves. You'll see Volcana twitching pretty badly at a few spots, though, and I guarantee just about every one of them was an unsuccessful attempt to use one. The AI, even on normal, can be pretty cheap. It'll trap you in a corner and not let you out if you aren't careful. The easiest way to deal with it is to be cheap right back, hence my love of Volcana's jumping fire missile in most of the fights.
I did lose once or twice, but I thought those rounds unnecessary to leave in, so I axed them. This is why the battle numbers don't always follow consecutively at the beginning of the later matches.
I also didn't show off any of the "Poop" annihilation moves. I believe Volcana is one of the few characters that doesn't have one. However, if there's enough interest, I might be persuaded to put together a video of the different finishing moves.
So, overall, Ultra Vortek is on of the three "playable" fighters on the Jaguar. It's about as good as the okay Dragon and Primal Rage CD port, and I certainly prefer it over Double Dragon V. It's also way, way better than the abysmal Kasumi Ninja and Fight for Life.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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