Classic of the Month - VirtuaStriker

Manufacturer:	Sega
Genre:	Sports
Board:	Model 2
Year:	1994

Tonight is the final of the UEFA Euro 2012 football championships. After a month of tense competition, only Spain and Italy are left. There's been highs, there's been lows (not least England going out to Italy on penalties), but in the end it's come down to these two. As such when it came to choosing a new Classic of the Month I thought it only appropriate to do a football game and the first one that sprang to mind was Sega's Virtua Striker.

In the mid-90s 3D, polygonal graphics suddenly exploded in the arcade, with Sega releasing the lion's share of 3D games. They gave this series of games a name: Virtua. There was Virtua Cop, Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Virtual-On and of course Virtua Striker. Powered by the Sega Model 2, the Virtua games looked incredible when they were first released and in the case of Virtua Fighter and Virtua Striker, they were the first of their kind (Virtua Tennis did not come along until the Naomi boards were released in '98). 

The animation was smooth and authentic and the sense of being on the pitch and in the action was greater than any other football game at that time. You only played a two minute match (with no half time and without swapping ends), but the matches were perfectly paced for an arcade game. Like any other arcade game progress required success; there were no long-running leagues or cups here, if you lost your match, your game was over. This gave each match a sense or desperate urgency to score that later football games on home consoles never really had. Played with a friend, that sense of urgency and the need to triumph was even greater. 

Virtua Striker may have been surpassed in later years by Konami's Pro Evolutional Soccer series and EA's FIFA series, but at the time it gave arcade gamers a football experience unlike any other. 

Right, I'm off, the kick off is in 10 mins and I need to get a drink.

MTW