Month: March 2017

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Yasuyuki Oda talks Real Bout Fatal Fury series’ behind-the-scenes development with PlayStation blog

Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 2 releases on the PlayStation 4 tomorrow, March 28th, 2017, and includes Real Bout Fatal Fury, Real Bout Fatal Fury Special and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 – The Newcomers. Just ahead of it’s launch, game director Yasuyuki Oda sat down with PlayStation Blog to reveal some of the problems and challenges the series had during development.

There’s a lot of great trivia and insight into what went on during game design back in the mid ’90s: cartridge recalls because of missing hitboxes on attacks, accidental inclusion of a debug command for supers, and the real reason why Geese Howard wouldn’t stay dead in Real Bout. The cartridge recall seems the most harrowing to me–patches are hard enough for companies these days, doing an actual product recall must have been a nightmare! Quoting Oda himself:

“In those days patches were obviously not possible like they are now and we actually discovered after release of the first lot of MVS cartridges that Billy Kane’s short hop A had no hitbox!” Oda has a bitter smile on his face as he remembers the incident. “We were forced to recall the cartridges already out in the wild to fix this mistake, which was quite an undertaking.”

You can read the full interview here.

Source: PlayStation Blog

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Project Genom – The World & Its Lore Continue to Grow

The latest Project Genom weekly update has been published on the official forums. It is packed with screenshots of an ever-growing world and one that is filled with more “life”, both natural and “man-made”. In addition, a new armor concept is unveiled, NPC animations, improvements to the male character models, a pass has been made over the story.

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Sega announced a new Virtual-On–and it’s an anime crossover game

Here’s some surprising news: Sega recently announced that it would be releasing a brand-new Virtual-On game for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. However, that’s not all that makes it surprising–the game, called A Certain Magical Virtual-On, is a crossover between the series and Dengeki Bunko’s Toaru Majutsu no Index (“A Certain Magical Index”) light novel and anime series.

Released in 1996, Cyber Troopers Virtual-On represented a break from the 3D fighting games of the time, featuring unique twin analog stick controls and an over-the-shoulder perspective. Despite this–or maybe because of it–the series has gained a dedicated following, while garnering high praise; Evo co-founder Seth Killian has stated that it was the “best example” of a 3D game that implemented the values that fireballs bring to traditional 2D fighters.

As for how all this relates to A Certain Magical Index, well it seems that the game’s story (written by A Certain Magical Index author Kazuma Kamachi) sets up Virtual-On as a actual sport in that series’ world. Characters from the series such as Touma Kamijou and Mikoto Misaka will be piloting Virtuaroids around Academy City. As part of this, the special abilities of these characters in the series will now be a part of the arsenal these Virtuaroids can use.

As for how the game actually plays: sadly Sega has yet to release any gameplay footage. However, they do state that the they intend to make use of all the experience they’ve gained working on the series to maintain the “high speed battle action” that it is known for.

A Certain Magical Virtual-On is set to release on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita sometime in 2018. In the meantime, here’s Sega’s announcement trailer for the game.

Source: Sega via Gematsu