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With almost every development team in the world devoted to saturating the games market with sequels, often rehashes of old software with seemingly little new content or innovation, you'll have to forgive me if I groan at the sight of the latest release schedules. However, Sega is one of the few companies where the announcement of a sequel is often more than welcome. Having spent nearly all their funds developing new franchises over their Saturn and Dreamcast years, the Japanese giant has now realised that there's some merit in running with winning formulas, and the latest franchise to be reborn is their original arcade shooting series, Virtua Cop.
Fans of the series will probably be rejoicing already at the prospect of a next-generation update, but celebration may be a little premature. Not only has this title only just hit the arcades, but an official console conversion is still yet to be announced! With such a prestigious series, though, we can't see the businessmen at Sega letting this one slip through the console-conversion net, so expect to see some kind of port announced for release next year. However, with the game already propagating through to European arcades, we managed to get a quick playtest of Sega's new shooter, and can reveal whether or not it's going to be worth the wait.
The first thing that hit me when I first caught a glimpse of this game was the quality of the graphics; not only are the environments and characters now a lot more detailed than before (which you kinda expect with the eight-year gap), but also everything is much more cinematic and a fair bit darker. All kinds of camera effects are used to give this title a film-like quality and at many points in the game you'd be forgiven for thinking you were watching pre-rendered video. Fortunately, this hasn't arrived at the sacrifice of gameplay, and fans will find themselves quickly reacquainted with the fast-paced action of the older games.
Right from the start, VC3 gives you the same three-level option as its predecessors. You can take on the easy, medium and hard levels in any order, and each also contains multiple routes to provide some replay value. When in-game, the usual circular targets will surround enemies, along with a timer which even tells you when they'll shoot you. Of course, you'll want to take them out before that happens, and hitting them in different body regions will cause them to respond in different ways, making their deaths look suitably realistic for the more sadistic gamer.
Going back to a winning formula is all well and good, but to make a game stand out you really need to add something new and hopefully innovative to the mix. VC3 kinda fulfils this by introducing a few new concepts to the series, albeit not new to the genre as a whole. Quick-fire events were seen in the likes of Confidential Mission, where you'd have to hit a series of targets inside a strict time limit to decide which path you would take, and these now occur occasionally in the latest Virtua Cop. In the easy level of the game, you enter a building with an ice-like sculpture hanging from the ceiling; a couple of minutes later, and a hoard of enemies burst into the building and position themselves directly below it. This cues a quick-fire event where you have to shoot the supports of the sculpture; succeed and the enemies meet an untimely death, whereas failure will mean having to pick them off one-by-one.
Possibly the biggest innovation of the game, though, is the weirdly-named 'Exceeding Sense' (or E.S.) mode. In all honesty, it's name simply tries to cover up the fact that it triggers a bullet-time style effect, but it's still a particularly nifty addition for an arcade shooter. In the machine cabinet, a pedal could be used to trigger this special mode at any time in the game, as long as the E.S. bar wasn't empty. Pressing it would cause all the action to slow down, and familiar distortion trails to appear on the bullets; this slow-motion effect would then allow you to pick off the enemies with ease and even shoot their projectiles in mid-flight.
Other new features include some very nice squad-type play in the medium-difficultly level, where you storm through a building with the aid of the police and have to help them out in firefights. The reloading has also been changed slightly, although thankfully not fully automated as in House of the Dead 3; instead of having to shoot outside the screen to refill your gun barrel you now have to simply aim off-screen. Finally, while you can acquire new weapons by shooting them as in the previous titles, they can now also be switched between, so that you can hang on to a particularly meaty gun for use later on.
Overall, Virtua Cop 3 is a pretty stunning arcade game, with all the action of the previous two games plus some incredibly detailed and well-animated graphics. However, whether it will make the transition to home consoles unscathed remains to be seen. With the arcade game looking the way it does, we assume that the Xbox will be the likely target for any sort of conversion, especially with House of the Dead 3 already having made an impact, however we've had no confirmation that the port exists yet. We'll let you know the minute we hear more news on the subject, but until then start scouring your local arcades to get a quick glimpse of this beauty!
Marc Hull
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