I saw this on a few sites this morning and there is just a tiny correction that needs to be made to what is being said. First off, Sega is getting into the social networking game with their new Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown update in Japan, by adding Twitter update support to the game. Players will need a VF.Net account that they link to their Twitter account. The updates will occur as you play the game although you can manage what will be tweeted so it doesn’t clutter up your feed with too much stuff. Players will also be able to easily find other people who are linked in the same manner so they can follow each other and compete in that manner if they wish.
Overall it’s a great idea, as it helps spread the word of people playing an arcade title, promotes some friendly competition and has a little bit of that “fame” aspect as it tweets the accomplishments you make in the game.It will be great to see more arcade titles making use of such online features although there is the question of complexity – ask too many questions or put too much text on an arcade screen and your average player will not pay any attention to what it is doing and end up confused.
Onto the thing I think needs to be corrected in the coverage out there about this. Another arcade game allowed players to update their Facebook and Twitter accounts already (the claim being thrown around is that this new VF is the first game to do this) and that is Golden Tee 2010. The feature is primarily focused on Facebook but where you can link your Facebook feed to automatically post to your Twitter feed as well, that would technically make GT2010 the first game to do this. It is the first time a fighter has used such features though.
Here is the game in action in case you haven’t seen it yet. I have mentioned previously that Sega did release the original VF5 to US arcades and it’s a shame they haven’t released the updates here since the original also made it to consoles.
[Via Kotaku and Versus City]
