Tuesday 11 December 2007

Virtua Fighter 3 Saturn Screenshots!





elend's quite stunning first post has got me salivating! So much amazing Saturn information! That's quite an amazing piece of history there - amazing!!!!! I loved it so much, I'm going to blatantly nick a large chunk of it, to accompany these rather lovely Beta screenshots of the never released Virtua Fighter 3 Saturn game that was never released... Remember, the text is from Kamikaze Console and as usual is in the usual quotation crimson text. The pictures were scammed from the most excellent Videogames Of The Damned...

"Virtua Fighter 3

Virtua Fighter 3, the third incarnation of Yu Suzuki's groundbreaking 3D fighting game, first hit Japanese arcades on 10 September 1996. It immediately became the standard by which all comers were measured - partly due to the depth of its gameplay, and partly because the game's graphics (generated by the new Sega Model 3 board) shattered all previous records for polygon counts in a videogame. Sega brought over some cabinets for display at that year's Electronics Consumer Trade Show in the U.S., and both vendors and gamers alike were wowed by what they saw. VF3, as it is commonly abbreviated, soon became the topic of much speculation among Saturn owners. A port was inevitable - they just knew it - and rumors were already flying that such a port was well underway. Officially, Sega kept mum, but the hype continued to build through the rest of the year and into 1997. On 28 November, Yu Suzuki himself said in a public interview, "AM2 and myself will take full responsibility for the translation." It was now official - VF3 was coming to a Saturn near you. Or was it? Sega kept promising a Saturn port ... and it kept getting delayed ... and delayed ... and delayed ... until it dropped off the radarscope altogether. Sega of Japan had already started to hint that the port might be canned in early 1997, and its absence in the Saturn software section at E3 1997 seemed only to confirm this. Sega of America did a lot of back-pedalling on these and other reports, but they (as we know) were not the ones running the show by that point. Actually, and this was unknown to everybody until the following year, Yu Suzuki and his staff at AM2 had finished a considerably scaled-down Saturn port of VF3 by 03 July 1998, but by time Sega of Japan was dead set against releasing it. Why? As it was later revealed, Sega of Japan executives felt that a port of VF3 for the dying Saturn might hurt the superior port already in development for Sega's newest console - the Dreamcast. Instead, they just kept on tweaking the game and refused to release it. VF3 for Saturn was officially cancelled on 17 September 1998 even though Sega of Japan had the completed game ready to send to the pressing plants. In the meantime, however, gamers got tired of Sega putting them on hold yet again and went to PlayStation for Tekken 3 instead."

Interesting stuff huh? Oh and BTW, be sure to nip off to our big brother, the Dreamcast Junkyard to have a look at another superlative work of art by our newest contributor elend... I'm not going to tell you what it is, you'll have to click on the link!

14 comments:

elend said...

Wow, those Screenshots. Simply amazing. So the game WAS finished and actually ready to send to the pressing plants? How amazing is that. I'd love to get ahold of that copy. Oh my.. I am getting wet over here.

fatherkrishna said...

LOL! Yep! The Saturn'll do that to you!

Ross said...

I've only played it in the arcades here. Honestly I didn't enjoy it that much... the art style was cool but the game play didn't sit right with me for some reason... Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution is the shit though.

NebachadnezzaR said...

OMFG!!! It was finished??? I always thought it was cancelled while still in development.

I so want one copy of the final product...

...or not. Didn't they say that it would need some kind of extra power, like a special ram card, for it to play on a regular Saturn?

BTW, talking about unreleased games, Elend, did you know that we here in the yard (or me, at least) have a copy of the Sonic X-Treme unreleased beta? Hell yeah!

Okay, I know it's freely available around the webz, but I'm proud of it, nonetheless...

hexidecimalhack said...

Want!!!

Anonymous said...

In fact these are pictures of the first version (only 500000 polygones). A second one has been completed for the Saturn with real 3D environment, transparencies, and... 750000 polygones.
This port was superior to the awful Dreamcast one.

More info on that here:
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15427&page=3

Anonymous said...

These are just pictures of the emulated model 3 version complete with emulation glitches (ie. screwed up shadows and textures, no gouroud shading).

Anonymous said...

Yeah, not real at all. The whole story reeks of BS.

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