Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from Virtua Fighter 3: Team Battle, slumped (as it is) with a bottle of meths in a shop doorway. "Love me!" shrieks VF3, as the fowl strides away, a copy of Soul Calibur clasped lovingly to its breast...
James Price

VF3 is virtually, but not actually, great.

An explanation is in order. One of the Dreamcast's launch titles in Japan, Virtua Fighter 3: Team Battle is a conversion of the highly regarded Sega coin-op. However, when Sega announced that it was to be crafted by external developer Genki, and not one of their prestigious AM divisions, expectations and eyebrows were lowered and raised respectively. The Dreamcast made its world debut and loads of VF3TB units were shifted.

VF3TB offers every gameplay element that its arcade counterpart boasted. From the smallest kick to the most convoluted special attack, it's naught but authentic. Visually, too, it's a perfectly respectable performer, if a few pixels and frames short of its original Model 3 board majesty. And, okay, its soundtrack is pure, lamentably unadulterated Jap-pop - surely the real reason for their national penchant for suicide - but that stops the moment you begin a bout. So there's no real issue to be made of that, either.

Can you feel a 'but...' brewing?

The Japanese version of VF3TB was lambasted for its lack of DC-specific features. It didn't even have a dedicated two-player mode so you had to continually 'join in' with the basic Arcade mode. Despite a few more reservations, and a nagging, near-universal suspicion that it wasn't quite as good as it should have been, everyone pretty much agreed that VF3TB was playable, and worth the dough. Noting this criticism of their first release, Sega promised to add features and tweak this and that for the Western release. "Brilliant," we thought. But...