Virtual-On.

Just today I found out Virtual-On was available on X-Box live. For those of you that aren’t squealing with joy, Virtual-On was a series of games by Sega where you drove a giant robot and battled against another robot in an arena. Think Street Fighter with guns and jet-packs and you’re half there.

I first found Virtual-On about seven years ago, it was in a charity shop for two pounds. They are the best two pounds I ever spent. The controls were awkward as hell, the graphics were primitive and I was playing it on a PC keyboard, which is one step above playing a game by slamming your head against the desk. But by god that game was fun, once you realised how to use your jets to zip around the arena and over the top of your opponents, laying death from above or worked out the strategy for avoiding the enemy shots while firing your own at break neck speed. I played the game with my friend for hours on end, each of us with controls on one side of the keyboard and a portion of the screen about twelve centimetres across to squint at.

So not only was I getting one of the sequels that sank with the Deamcast back in the day, but I would be able to play it on a proper controller! I almost couldn’t hand my Microsoft monopoly money over quickly enough.

It was almost everything I had hoped for. Slightly improved graphics that still had that 90’s look that made me misty eyed, and an obvious improvement in controls over my old version. I had no idea the Viper 2 robot could turn into a jet fighter, but I’m glad I do now!

The single player game was as lacklustre as before. You fight each robot one after the other in a different arena until you reach the final boss. But it’s a fighting game, it only really comes alive when you’re playing with your friends side by side on the sofa…

Wait…

Where is it?

There’s online and system link… System link? The one where you have to wire two consoles together to play it? You’re joking right?

You mean if I want to play this game with someone in the room with me I have to do it with two consoles? The game that ran perfectly on a PC with 256Mb of ram? (if that confuses you, your computer will have at least eight times that much as standard.)

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

This game cost me about a tenner to buy, and it lacks the most important part that was available in my two pound version!

This is just plain insulting! If they tried to pull this kind of stunt with any other fighting game like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter the developers would get lynched!

It’s an obvious ploy to get people to buy more copies and get more money, but it just doesn’t work like that. None of my friends are going to buy this game purely so they can play against me online. If we imbibed a crate of beer playing it, giggling like schoolboys over the action replays as his robot swung a massive drill into my robots face, then he might well have to buy it himself then. And then he would play it with his friends, and so on and so forth.

Whatever I recommend, I am literally damned if I do and damned if I don’t. As it is, the game is a waste of your money, but if it doesn’t sell you know Sega are going to be stupid enough to think it’s just because nobody wants games with giant robots.

So I’m gonna be damned if I don’t. Save your money until they either release a new version or patch this one into proper shape. If neither happens you still haven’t spent any money.

‘Virtual-On’ is available on Xbox Live-Arcade.

Tags: sega, virtual on, virtual on oratorio tangram

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