Firstly, and this is a bit slack, I'm reviewing the two as a pair... I'm sure gaming purists will be horrified by this but its just a general guide. I'll be happy to be corrected by any Saturn purists out there....
As readers of the
Dreamcast Junkyard will know, I
love guns. Light-weight plastic guns that is, that fire beams of light at your telly, not real ones that fire metal bullets at innocent individuals. (You know, the type the Metropolitan Police use on the tube...)
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The first
Light Gun game I ever played was
Virtua Cop for the
Saturn. I didn't play it until relatively recently, however, using the Light Gun. No, for years I enjoyed the game using the ordinary
Saturn pads. The Gun, however takes the game into a whole new dimension. I now have three
Saturn Light Guns. One of them is in the Lovely themed 'game and gun ' package pictured in the last post...
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
"What is the premise of these games dear Father? Tell us about the
gameplay... How did the franchise develop? Has it ever appeared on another console?" I hear you cry...
To you I say "
Calm down my friends... It'll all become clear presently..."
Originally an arcade game, lucky
Saturn owners were given a port of
Virtua Cop for home gaming, that was virtually an exact copy of the arcade system. Connect your Light Gun to your system, press start and the action gets started straight away.
In the game you play as one of
Virtua City's Finest. Arriving at a bank robbery as it is taking place, your job is to use your marksmanship to take out a plethora of robbers, gang bangers and terrorists who are causing mayhem, taking hostages and making a general bloody nuisance of themselves.
All the action takes place in the first person view. You don't need to see the barrel of your gun, because if you are playing it as it was intended to be played, you'll be holding one in your hand.
To hep you suss out the immediacy of the impending threat of one of the hoods shooting you, they
each have a large green target which appears around them when they are about to 'lock and load'. If you don't take them out quickly, this target turns, to yellow, then red... the nearer you are to getting 'capped'.
You can shoot your adversaries dead, but as you represent the forces of light over dark, there is always the
"Justice Shot". the Justice Shot allows you to shoot the weapon from your opponents hand, thus allowing him to be arrested. You'll score more points for this...
Various weapon upgrades are hidden in crates dotted around the level environments. a rifle for example allows you more bullets than the standard pistol, so you don't have to reload as often. (you re-load by shooting outside of the screen.)
The graphics are superb for the time. A variety of environments are presented through out the games. Bank, docks, building sites,
onboard a ship, in the subway. Objects within these environments can be shot at and will be caused to swing, fall or shatter...and
that's fun in itself!
At the end of each level, there is a suitable car chase to take you to the next place of action and fresh batch of villains. These necessitate you firing at moving vehicles, shattering windscreens, bursting tyres and causing the cars or vans to flip out or explode.
Level bosses are brilliant to take out. In
Virtua Cop One the bosses include a hysterical laughing behemoth, who throws barrels, grenades and even a
van at you. You need to shoot them before you get hit by them. otherwise your lives will disappear. Beat him before he beats you and your onto the next level...
Fairly straight forward then!!
The options allow you to play on the usual easy, normal or hard levels, so you can comeback to the game once you have completed it, and challenge your reflexes with increasingly harder reaction times, faster shooting etc.
at various point's you'll be given the option to choose you route through the game by shooting one of two sign posts
e.g. Docks or
Subway. again this lends variety to the game as different environments throw up different challenges.
The games definitely stand the test of time. After the demise of the
Saturn, the games were ported to 'next gen consoles'. They appeared in slightly enhanced form on the
Dreamcast as part of the wonderful
'Sega Smash Pack' and on the
Ps2 as
'Virtua Cop Elite Edition'.
Virtua Cop 3 made an appearance on the
XBox. The franchise would seem to have a rosy future!
Overall Score for this particular pair of titles... 9/10. For a frankly better review you can visit
here.
