While it’s not surprising that Sega is now testing out the latest upgrade to the Virtua Fighter 5 in Japan, it is slightly surprising that the popular blog Wired covered it. It’s not the first arcade news they have covered as they have been taking a look at Street Fighter IV and with the VF5R coverage they now have a bunch of pictures from the location test in Akihabara. So I’m happy to see more attention given to arcades but I have noticed that a lot of the attention is still focusing on Japan and not elsewhere. It’s fine for them to do that but I just like to throw out there that there are coin-op developments happening in other parts of the world too, be it other areas of Asia, Europe and the US and those developments deserve a fair shake too.
But getting back to VF5R – we knew from AOU08 that it was a major upgrade to the game, adding in new
characters, gameplay modes and stages which help set it apart from the console version in it’s own way which is smart although nothing stops them from adding the same upgrades to the console version thus minimizing the impact of the arcade. Still I have high hopes for this as while I was looking into new games for my arcade they actually said that Virtua Fighter 5 was available for a ‘low price’ which was unexpected as I thought that they had given up on the notion of the game after it was released on the consoles but it looks like Sega doesn’t want to be outdone by Capcom so I imagine that the 5R upgrade will be making the rounds outside of Japan.
[VF5R test @ Wired Blog (Photo credit: Jean Snow)] [Discuss on the Forum]
