Product description
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Disc(s) only. Ships in generic case. Disc(s) are professoinally
cleaned. Guaranteed functional or replacement.
.com
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Realistically animated fighters, wonderful 3-D environments, and
the deepest gameplay to grace the fighting genre--what more could
you want? Although Virtua Fighter 3 tb isn't without fault, it
valiantly manages to bring all those things to the Dreamcast
incarnation. VF 3 tb has always been less about over-the-top
acrobatics and more about the raw realism of martial arts. In
fact, one of the game's characters, Shun-Di, virtually mimics
Jackie Chan's "drunken style" from the Drunken Master (
/exec/obidos/ASIN/6304151225/${0} ) movies.
New to this third installment of the Virtua Fighter series is
the team battle mode, which lets you take a team of three
fighters head-to-head against either the computer or a human
nent. The U.S. version also sports a much-improved practice
mode: you can now set the computer nent's difficulty levels
and even configure their attacks. VF 3 tb successfully combines
stunning visuals with multilayered gameplay, which makes it a
must-buy for fans of the series. --Sajed Ahmed
Pros:
* Deep and rewarding gameplay
* New versus mode and improved graphics for the U.S. version
* Arcade-quality character and environmental graphics
* Complicated fighter artificial intelligence is effectively
challenging
Cons:* Only 12 characters, and no hidden fighters
* Fighting depth can be lost, as success can also be had through
button mashing
* Lack of peripheral options such as the now-standard theatre or
quest modes
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Review
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There was a time not so long ago when the words "Model 3" were
acknowledged with equal proportions of awe and respect. It was
Sega's newest arcade hardware, and a mighty one million polygons
it did move. These days, such numbers are almost commonplace,
with the arrival of the Dreamcast and the impending arrivals of
polygon crushers from Sony and Nintendo. However, when the Model
3 hardware first debuted, it was with Virtua Fighter 3, the
ship fighter borne of Yu Suzuki's AM2 development team.
To think that in 1997 Virtua Fighter 3 almost made it to the Sega
Saturn is, in hind, practically hysterical. To this day, the
Model 3 hardware has only recently been superseded by the
relatively inexpensive but comparable-in-performance Naomi arcade
board. As PlayStation fans got every installment of Tekken ported
right to their favorite console, Sega fans had to languish until
more powerful hardware arrived.
Now that time has come, and the question is whether Virtua
Fighter 3 (the complementary "Team Battle" tag amended), with all
its encompassing history, has been worth the wait.
As fans of Virtua Fighter will attest, VF3 (as well as its
predecessors) is one of the deepest games you will ever play.
When it comes to technique, move combinations, and overall feel,
few games can boast the sophistication of VF3's fighting engine.
While not as instinctive, perhaps, as a 2D fireball-throwing,
dragon-punching series that will go unnamed, VF3 features a depth
nearly unsurpassed in the 3D arena. Certainly, button mashing
will certainly get some gamers a fair a of success in the
one-player mode, but match a novice up against a skilled Virtua
Fighter veteran, and the difference in their skills will quickly
become apparent. Building on the simple three-button interface of
the groundbreaking VF2, part three adds a dodge button to the mix
as well as two new characters, Aoi and Takai.
With the established VF fighting engine already in place, the
dodge button adds a whole new slate of moves to the labyrinthine
arsenal of attacks and defensive strikes. Unfortunately, since
games like Soul Calibur have used the benefit of hind to
further the genre in a more refined manner, VF3's dodge function
could have, admittedly, been implemented in a more intuitive
manner (see Tobal 2 for a good example) than simply having you
thwack an extra button. After all, Virtua Fighter 2 had
practically perfected 3D gameplay on a 2D plane, offering such an
array of offensive possibilities that Tekken 2 could never
seriously approach. By adding a fourth button to what was
basically a perfect configuration, something was simultaneously
gained and lost.
Aside from all that, how does the Dreamcast version of Virtua
Fighter 3 Team Battle compare with the arcade version? It
compares very well, especially when you consider the newly
released American version over the rushed-to-production Japanese
port. While the American version adds little else aside from a
versus mode, which was somehow omitted from the Japanese debut,
it's not so much that the features that have been improved, but
that little glitches found elsewhere in the game have been
removed. Gone is the slowdown when the camera zooms into certain
arenas. The shadows that were found to be so imperfect have also
been patched up a bit, so that the breakup found on uneven
surfaces (such as stairs) is not nearly as problematic as it had
been. However, even in the original import version, these
problems were merely superficial and never actually interfered
with gameplay.
Graphically, the character models in the game suffer from a lower
polygon count than the models found in the arcade version,
resulting in some odd blockiness at times. Keep in mind that the
occasional blockiness doesn't stop VF3 from looking better than
99 percent of the other fighting games out there. Other touches
like the loose, fabric-like qualities of Jacky's jacket have been
lost, along with a couple other minute inconsistencies with the
arcade version. However, all in all, developer Genki did an
admirable job with AM2's techno-baby, and almost all this is
nitpicking. Certain stages have lost a couple bits of polish
along the way, like Aoi's stage, where the water and snow aren't
arcade-perfect, or the desert stage, where you no longer leave
footprints in the sand. For the most part, the stages look
absolutely amazing: Pai's rooftop level and Sarah's subway arena
are practically pixel-perfect, and they offer unique strategic
possibilities that no other fighter (until the approaching Dead
or Alive 2 is released, anyway) has. --James Mielke
--Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. GameSpot and the GameSpot
logo are trademarks of GameSpot Inc. -- GameSpot Review
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