Another slow day since I don’t have any money so I spent most of it playing Virtua Fighter 5

At the moment there are too many good games and not enough time to play them and there’s no sign of the glut of games stopping before Christmas either.

I’ve always loved fighting games, the thought of being an ass kicking mofo certainly has an appeal and never owning a PS2 until late into it’s life DOA 3 was a great love on the original Xbox (as it was pretty much the only fighting game). Going slightly further back Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast was the first fighting game I took the time to get good with and my Mitsurugi was quite formidable, even if I do say so myself.

The Dreamcast also came with the gems SFIII and Marvel vs Capcom 2, both of which saw a lot of play. Since getting a Xbox 360 it has allowed me to travel back to the time when I never had a SNES and my cousin paid £60 for a copy of SFII; I believe he paid a similar price for Killer Instinct and *lols ahead* Rise of The Robots. To be fair he did learn polymetamorphic titanium alloy from it, so £60 well spent I say.

DOA4 was beaten a long time ago and although SFII gets dusted off every month or so, when I try to defeat the game without losing a round, the Xbox 360 has been rather dry on the beat ‘em up front, arcade aside, which was a great disappointment. One series I’ve never liked though is the Virtua Fighter games. So Virtua Fighter 5 was not an instant purchase for me, however ten minutes with the demo meant I bought on the weekend it came out.

Virtua Fighter 5 looks amazing and plays great. Since my last experience on the Dreamcast with Virtua Fighter 3:TB the series seems to have come on imeasurably. My recollections of the game were that it was inaccessible, slow and ugly. Now, if you pick the right character, it’s fun even when mashing buttons, lightning quick and one of the best looking games on the Xbox.

I’ll state right now that probably the only reason I’ve enjoyed it as much as I have is because I picked Jacky Bryant as my first character. While selecting who to go I just looked at the styles of martial art and as Jacky is a Jeet Kun Do expert I knew roughly what sort of moves I would have at my disposal. Not because I too have mastered Jeet Kun Do, but I’ve watched a lot of Bruce Lee movies and although Jann Lee wasn’t my favourite character in the DOA series, he was quite easy to play with.

Arcade mode is much as you’d expect. 17 different characters to choose from each with a distinct fighting styled doing battle with 5 or 6 varying opponents of increasing difficulty until you get to the boss who hands you your ass. The difference here is you only get one shot at her but you don’t need to defeat her to complete the arcade mode, unlike another game I could mention where you have to beat the cheating boss, suck on it Jelly Kasumi!

I’ve always found that after defeating the arcade there’s little else left to entertain the solo player but Sega have addressed this here with their Quest mode. In Quest mode you travel round virtual arcades playing other virtual characters, compete to win prizes and tournaments and customise your character. It’s an excellent addition that has seen my waste quite a few hours to reach Warrior level (two grades above 10th Dan). One slight complaint is my record currently stands at 156 -6, with my first loss only coming in the later stages of a tournament and only now are the fights starting to be a challenge as opposed to earlier where I was playing against a virtual punch bag. To be fair I could have upped the difficulty but I would like to have seen the computer characters throw more than one punch per round whilst I worked my way up to around 4th Dan.

Eventually though all the opponents in the arcades (several hundred) will be beaten and yellow star of defeat will be beside every opponents name. The Xbox version doesn’t let the fun stop there though, online means that you’re always guaranteed* to find a fresh fight just a moment away and even on my rubbish 2Mb connection there’s no noticable lag or forced slowdown a-la DOA4.

The variety of opponents, the difference and depth of each character means that you’re unlikely to ever need another fighter until the next gen of beat-em-ups arrives, although I’ll still be keeping an eye out for the new Tekken and Soul Calibur. This game is a real example of what the Xbox is capable of and a damn fine game to boot.

Metacritic score – 91

*Guarantee expires 1979, terms and conditions apply, see press for details.