SEGA has just celebrated its 60th anniversary - happy birthday you mad, beautiful bastards - which seems as good a time as any to reflect on the company's finest. Maybe it's OutRun, in all its iconic glory, Super Monkey Ball with its minimalist brilliance or perhaps you could even look a little closer to the modern day and put Yakuza 0 forward as the best of the bunch. For reasons entirely my own, it's Virtua Fighter 3 that's my personal pick.
It's not the best in AM2's series - Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown easily takes that crown, providing a crisp take on the no-frills pugilism that's as close to perfection as we'll get while we endure the indefinite wait for a follow-up - nor is it the most groundbreaking. The original takes that title, shaking up the industry as it did with its military-spec hardware and the move into muscular 3D. You could argue that Virtua Fighter 2 was the series at its most iconic, too, capturing the series at the height of its mainstream appeal.
Why Virtua Fighter 3, then? Partly it's because it captures a moment in time, when SEGA was still at the peak of its power, and when its power was plain to see. This was the debut of the Model 3 board, breaking cover in spectacular fashion at Tokyo's AOU show in the early months of 1996 - one of those moments, of which the 90s had many, when we all asked ourselves whether game graphics could get much better - asserting that SEGA was at the cutting edge of technology. It's ground they'd give up over time - by the time Virtua Fighter 4 came around on the NAOMI 2, those battlegrounds had seemingly moved elsewhere.
from Eurogamer.net https://ift.tt/30mQ5LX
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