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Playing through the US version (haven't had this version since I bought it at retail a year or so after release back in the day, was bitterly disappointed by the graphics, and returned it to the store ; D) of Virtua Fighter 3tb for Dreamcast as Akira Yuki, on NORMAL difficulty, in the emulator Flycast in Windows!
Forgot I played through on EASY last time! NORMAL didn't seem particularly harder, actually. Eh hm well hopefully HARD and HARDER DO get harder--in case I ever get any better. ; )
Actually reading the manual that came with the used copy I got off eBay, I noticed Akira DOES have a K+G move (and this US version lets you set--but doesn't save :p--combination input buttons, ie multiple buttons activating on a single button press, whereas the earlier Japanese version DOESN'T have that feature): down-forward K+G with him does a weird-looking simultaneous punch and kick animation. ; D I got a little paranoid that it might be spammable and exploit this game's AI's general inability to defend properly against sweep kicks, but no, it doesn't--in fact, oddly enough I found I couldn't really repeat the move: if you hold DF and press the buttons again, when he attacks again he does what's actually his down-Kick move! Weird!
Sega games had such screwy standards for save files sometimes--I particularly ran into this with PS3 games of theirs but even here on their own console (and developed by Genki rather than Sega AM2), the only thing apparently saved--manually--are stats on the outcomes of Vs matches; it DOESN'T save, for instance, your button mappings, or the ENDING video you unlock when you beat the game--in fact--and it warns you to save beforehand ; D--when you play that video, at the end of it, it soft-resets the game, apparently clearing even your Vs matchup data! (And that's another difference vs the JP version, because in that earlier version, they maybe weren't sure about doing the soft reset, and just let the video loop until the player like did their own reset or turned off the Dreamcast or something. ; D)
So to work around that I'm trying to keep a save state, set to auto-load in the emulator when I run the game, that has my controls set and the ENDING video available. : P
In Flycast, you've got to have the "Full Framebuffer Emulation" video option on when viewing the videos, otherwise they flicker horribly. I turn it off after viewing them because the option's info text says it's "very slow"--and it disables the emulator's Widescreen function while it's active.
Forgot how long the HISTORY video is! And how it's got sorta individual intro videos for a lot of the characters.
The dates were messed up in my head, 'cause the DC came out in '98 in Japan--so while 3tb came out in the US a year after Japan had it, it was 10/18/99, still pretty near US system launch (9/9/99). I didn't get a Dreamcast until well after launch, so it probably WAS 2000, and I guess I had only just then realized there WAS a VF game for DC, when I hustled excitedly into the ol' Fred Meyer in Eastlake in Seattle...er oh well "South Lake Union" is the proper name of that specific area I guess. What's there now? Aside from Amazon... Google maps says... Oh neat just rows of massive generic glass box buildings : P, maybe a Bartell Drugs in one near where the FM was. |
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The AI in 3tb IS more fun to play against than the other VF AIs (except maybe 1, I dunno, don't have that one). ^ _^ Maybe the physics and weird stages helps but 3tb feels like more of a back and forth thing rather than just a question of whether the AI decided to block or not. ; D
Programmer Kota Matsumoto has the only CPU/AI credits I can find for the entire VF series, and they're for VF2--which has kind of terrible AI unless you're feeling quite masochistic--and VF3/3tb https://www.mobygames.com/person/69404/kota-matsumoto/credits/ . He's also credited as a general programmer in 5, and Program Leader for 5FS--which may explain why FS's AI is a bit more playable than 4-through-5-vanilla? No credit for him on 4 or 4E. |
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