TGS 2006: Virtua Fighter 5 Hands-On
Sega's arcade masterpiece comes home
by Andrew Alfonso
September 21, 2006 - Today at the Tokyo Game Show we were able to get our lovely hands on Sega's Virtua Fighter 5. I've personally been playing the game since its launch back in July, and I was eager to see how the game would turn out on the PS3. Fortunately, it seems that everything is progressing well! The demo that is being shown today featured Arcade Mode and Versus mode, with the former only going up to stage 4 (Jeffry) before ending.
All of the characters from the arcade rev are present and playable at the show, including the new entrants, Eileen and El Blaze. What wasn't present at the show was the much hyped VF.net elements, including rankings, customized costumes and all of that snazzy extra stuff that was also present in Virtua Fighter 4. It's disappointing that Sega didn't take the time to create pre-customized characters for the show, or at least have some of the extra costumes unlocked. In the arcade version, there are a total of four base costumes that you can choose from after you meet certain requirements, but in the TGS demo, you can only choose from the first two costumes.
If you're a hardcore VF fan, you'll be happy to know that the game is arcade perfect, and actually uses the latest version of the game, which is Revision A. We were able to test this out by performing moves that had key changes from the first version to the newest one. The game still plays really well, and the new movement system (called Offensive and Defensive move) is still easy to pull off. The demo can only be played with Sega's new Virtua Stick, which is an insanely well-made piece of hardware. The joystick itself works well although the buttons seem a little bit higher than your standard arcade buttons.
One noticeable difference between the PS3 and arcade revs is that the loading times are a little bit longer on the console. The average load time in the arcade is usually four seconds, but we had to wait up to seven or eight seconds on the PS3. It's not a big difference if you've never played the game in the arcade, but to veterans it's a noticeable difference.
From the couple of rounds that we were able to play, everything save for the loading times are identical to the arcade version. It's just too bad that we haven't run into any decent VF players yet! Since it's press day most of the matches were absolute slaughters, so hopefully we can report back on any changes tomorrow when more people are expected to show up.