Initially, the game is free with PlayStation Plus, although even if you buy it separately, with the £7.99 DLC pack, it’s still only £24.99.Ĭlearly this isn’t a big budget release but for once Sega’s lack of faith in its legacy franchises is understandable. In that sense it’s no surprise to find there’s no dedicated single-player mode, as there was with the 2007 console versions, since the primary emphasis here is on esports. Even by the time Virtua Fighter 3 came around the series’ popularity was in freefall, and all because of the arrival of Tekken and its much more exciting pantheon of characters. There were no distinctive designs (nominal main character Akira looks almost exactly the same as Ryu from Street Fighter) and no hint of personality to any of them. An almost comically generic collection of nobodies. Virtua Fighter had a problem though and that’s that its characters were dull as dishwater. Virtua Fighter 2 was released a year later and was not only an even bigger hit but to this day remains one of the best 3D fighters ever made, with an extraordinarily complex and nuanced fighting system. Using the same technology as Virtua Racing – one of the first coin-ops to feature modern 3D polygon graphics – it may look amusingly old-fashioned today but at the time was the most realistic portrayal of a human being video games had ever seen.

The original Virtua Fighter was released in arcades in 1993 and was a technical milestone for the whole industry.

Virtua fighter arcade