Virtua Fighter 4 on Dreamcast...

[Original_Name]

I know it was planned to be released on the system before Sega ran out of money; has anyone ever seen screens or footage of Virtua Fighter 4 running on the Dreamcast, or have any idea how far the game was into development? Could it have looked comparable to the PlayStation 2 version?

[SNYPE]

I believe Virtua Fighter for used Naomi hardware. So I'd assume the port would look just about the same as the arcade version. Naomi had more RAM but all that means is that i would probably use lower resolution textures. But Dreamcast always had better textures than PS2 anyway due to having double the dedicated V-RAM.

Everyone knows Dreamcast was capable of pushing out a bit more on the graphical side of things. The Naomi hardware showed a lot as well as some last minute Xbox ports. I may be wrong but i believe Sega GT 2002/Jet Set Radio Future were finished before they were ported to Xbox, meaning that they'd be very close in appearance to the Dreamcast version. Once again Dreamcast might have needed lower quality textures but i doubt they remodeled all the levels at the last second. So Dreamcast should be able to handle the geometry at the very least.

Another good source to tell what it could have looked like were screens of the unreleased games on Unseen64. Some of the games were going to use things such as bumpmapping which would have boosted the level of detail a lot. Dreamcast always supported hardware bumpmapping but it was never used in any game that saw a release as far as I know.

Okay long story short, I think Virtua Fighter 4 would look just as good or better than the PS2 version and almost as good as the arcade version. Play it over VGA and then you'd have a MUCH better experience over 480i.

[Original_Name]

Okay, cool! I've just always been curious about all those Dreamcast-to-Multi-Platform conversions which didn't see Dreamcast counterparts. NFL 2K2 for instance got a Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 release, and the games look practically identical, so I'd wondered if it would be the same for a game as graphically intense as Virtua Fighter 4... I really wish that one could have have gotten released on the Dreamcast as well... I mean, if Rez was released in January, 2002 for the Dreamcast why not Virtua Fighter 4 and Super Monkey Ball (discluding Jet Set Radio Future and Shenmue II, since Sega was getting paid extra for them for exclusivity) near the same time on multi-platform releases? Oh well, I'm just a poor, defeated Sega fanboy.

Also, while I'm at it, though: was Panzer Dragoon Orta ever actually in development for the Dreamcast, or was that started by the time Sega discontinued first-party development?

[SNYPE]

there were rumors for years that a panzer dragoon was in development it just never came.
so maybe it was in development for dreamcast, but i'm not sure.

the few games released elsewhere that i wanted to see on the dreamcast were jet set radio future and a somewhat unknown game, gunvalkyrie. it was planned to use a light gun and a controller in a wiimote-nunchaku-like configuration. i think that could have been awesome and apparently the dreamcast screens looked better than the final game on the xbox. which i find somewhat funny. and what do you know both are made by smilebit :3

[Original_Name]

Oh yeah, I was stoked for GunValkyrie back in the day. Only reason I didn't mention it was because I was trying to just list games that didn't have restrictions on them to be multi-platform releases. GunValkyrie, Jet Set Radio Future, Sega GT 2002, The House of the Dead III, ToeJam & Earl III, Shenmue II, and I guess Panzer Dragoon Orta were all Dreamcast-developed titles which Microsoft bought the rights to be put on Xbox exclusively. No idea why they didn't snap up the rights to Virtua Fighter 4... hell, I don't know why they didn't snap up the rights to_SEGA_once CSK put them up for auction. Microsoft is such a third-party friendly publisher (and was in such dire need of big-name Eastern developers) that Sega might have stayed almost completely intact, instead of being ripped to shreds like Sammy did.

Why didn't GunValkyrie have that configuration on the Xbox, by the way? I mean, The House of the Dead III used the lightgun, obviously. Why not GunValkyrie? Why omit the Metroid Prime 3 control scheme? I mean, surely that would have caught on, or at least been enough of a novelty to sell!

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Why didn't GunValkyrie have that configuration on the Xbox, by the way? I mean, The House of the Dead III used the lightgun, obviously. Why not GunValkyrie? Why omit the Metroid Prime 3 control scheme? I mean, surely that would have caught on, or at least been enough of a novelty to sell!

When it came out the Xbox's lightgun hadn't been released yet so the double handed control scheme had to be scrapped.

[Megaman00001]

Does anybody know if the DC version of VF4 was ever leaked to bittorrent?

[Pulsar_t]

AFAIK no prototypes of VF4 are out there. I wish I could figure out how the PS2's polygonal prowess overcame its texture memory limitations. It's true the DC outputs a 'cleaner' image but the PS2 pips it in raw rendering power. Is the PS2 even capable of bumpmapping or is it faked? (e.g. the overview of the stages in Soul Calibur 3 shows bumpmapped arenas)