FIGHTERS MEGAMiX

Review by: JAMMA

Basically you take a whole bunch of AM2's greatest games and combine them all into one fighter, and that's the idea behind Fighters Megamix. If for nothing but the novelty of being able to play Fighting Vipers characters against Virtua Fighter characters, or the chance to do VF3 moves right now in the comfort of your very own home, Fighters Megamix is a great buy. But apart from just the novelty, this is actually a fighter worth playing. Sega's AM2 has put together what is unarguably the greatest home fighting game ever created.

When you pop in the CD, it starts out with the obligatory FMV sequence. It's okay, nothing to write home about. It's actually a copy off of Namco's style of intros, where brief sequences introduce each character of the game. And in that respect, the intro is almost embarrassing because the quality of animation and the fluidity of movement isn't even close to as good as Namco's. The characters animate unhumanly, almost as if they're robots. But enough of the intro, that's irrelevent to that actual game.

I've played Fighters Megamix for about 3 hours now, and so far I haven't found all of the secrets in the game yet. The actual game itself is divided into a few different modes. You have a 1-player mode which replaces the usual arcade mode, survival mode, vs. mode, team battle mode, and training mode. The training mode is a lot like Fighting Vipers, where your character is in a ring and you just practice your moves against a non-moving opponent. This time around, though, there's a special opponent who you train against. There are only 2 opponents, though, and the one picked is dependent upon whether your character has 1st or 2nd player colors. One's a character made out of circles (would've been cooler if Sega had used real ellipsoids, or at least approximated them a bit better...) and the other is Deku (one of the secret characters). The options are pretty sparse, too. I don't see anything letting you set how your opponent reacts. There is a system to teach you the moves, though. Imagine my surprise when I found out that all this time I've been doing the SPoD incorrectly. That's why I could never get it out 100% of the time on the 2-player side. Anyways, the training is just like Fighting Vipers. It's actually better than Fighting Vipers in one respect because when you clear a certain move, automatically the next move is loaded for you to try. At least I don't remember Fighting Vipers doing that. I suppose that after you master a certain number of characters, you open up some secrets. Also, none of the moves for the secret characters are shown. You probably have to do something before the moves are shown in training mode. The other modes, Survival mode and team battle mode I have yet to play. However, I think that their names make it quite obvious as to what they are.

In 1-player mode, the game is set up in stages. There are nine stages in all, entitled "Novice Trial", "Virtua Fighter", "Vipers", "Girls", "Muscle", "Smart Guys", "Dirty Fighters", "Bosses", and "Secrets". The name of each stage is simply the theme for that stage. Each stage has 6 fighters and a secret end-boss. If you complete all 9 stages, you will recieve all of the secret characters. If you've played either or both of Fighting Vipers or Virtua Fighter, you should be able to beat all 9 stages of this game quite easily on the regular difficulty setting.

Overall, the game just looks great. Some of the characters are a little hurt by the decreased resolution, but the added lighting effects more than make up for it. Dural's metal skin looks great, the only problem is that there is some serious aliasing going on, she would have looked a lot better if AM2 was a bit better at smoothing out her "jaggies". Then again, of course the VF characters are going to suffer more than the FV characters in this med-res environment. I even feel safe in sticking out my neck and unknowingly saying that the reason for that is because the polygon count for the VF characters is significantly lower than (at least) the FV characters. It certainly looks so just by comparing them, but the dead ringer is that fact that the FV characters usually mean slow-down. Yup, FM is guilty of breaking one of the 10 video game commandments -- thou shalt not slow-down. But then again FV slowed down too, and I don't think that the makers of FM were too worried about cleaning up even the simplest of bugs or deficiencies in the FV engine. For example on Raxels stage, it's possible to knock someone out of the ring, and by the camera angle, the character should become obstructed by the floor of the ring. However, in FV a test is never made to check if the character should be obstructed by the floor of the ring, and thus the character is always drawn on top of the floor, even when they should be under it. This bug is still present in FM. But I digress, sorry about that. Slowdown is the single thing which really plagues FM. In my book, that's a pretty huge deficiency, but to tell the truth the slowdown isn't all that bad, and FM is so awesome everything else in the game more than makes up for it. And to tell you the truth, it could be that my Saturn was getting overheated from begin used over an extended period of time.

The stages in FM for the most part offer something new, as well. For one, all of the rings in the VF stages have been removed. In their stead, a never ending Tekken style floor has been added, and not only do I think it does this game very good, it also looks really cool. The floor scrolls so smoothly I honestly cannot define the parallex layers with my eyes. There actually may be no parallax going on, I can't really tell. But it looks real enough. The one difference is that Wolf's stage doesn't go never-ending. He has the cage that was missing in the Saturn version of VF2. Some of the FV stages are different as well. Of course the one of note is Tokio's stage, where the airplane actually takes off. No, it's no feat of programming going on here, just a little bit of thought. The plane takes off before the match starts. On Picky's stage, owners of the Japanese Fighting Vipers will notice that the Pepsi stuff has been removed, replaced with the "Megamint" logo.

The sound is decent, certainly better than Virtua Fighter 2's. The music is really nothing different from what you'd expect, though. It was kind of annoying at first because the music restarts after each round, but if you think about it, the reason for that is because there are 32-stages. Therefore Sega needed to make 32 tracks. Each track is probably only a little bit over a minute long at most.

There are some major differences between Fighters Megamix and the two bases upon which it was built, Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers. For one, there are no ring outs in this game. Thank goodness Sega did not put ring outs in this game, that is just one thing I can never learn to like. Anyways, the first Virtua Fighter 2 stage I went to was Pai's, and I lost that match because I kept looking at the background. The floors for the Virtua Fighter 2 stages seem to parallax never-endlessly into the background. For the Virtua Fighter characters, tons of elements from Virtua Fighter 3 have been added. I knew that AM2 was adding some VF3 stuff, but I really didn't think they'd go overboard like this. I'm really glad that they had the guts to go ahead and do this considering VF3 hasn't yet appeared on the Saturn, and it is still very hot in the arcades over here (there ain't even anything close to one-hour long lines to play it, though), but then again nothing short of damnation by God himself would slow down sales of Virtua Figher 3 in Japan.

Well, I recommend FM to anyone who calls themself a Saturn owner. If you don't have a Saturn yet, this is reason enough to run out and get one, let alone the fact that Virtual On! and VCop 2 have just been released. If you do have a Saturn along with any of Virtua Fighter, Virtua Fighter 2, and Fighting Vipers, you should unhesitatingly go out and buy Fighters Megamix, this game is as different as it is similar to all of the games above. If you have all of Virtua Fighter, Virtua Fighter 2, and Fighting Vipers, well you're probably a Sega and/or AM2 fanatic, so you'll buy this game no matter what.

Some cool stuff --

*Basically win the game on all stages to get the secret characters.

*After you win the game, you get to select the additional options screen

*I assume that once you master a few characters, more secret options will become available

*To pick 2nd player color, use the C button (or maybe whatever button is assigned to "E")

Some secret options include:

*Turn off BGM

*Listen to select BGM tracks (there is different ending music for each course)

*View the portraits

*Look at the book keeping records

The book keeping is an excellent feature. It keeps track of the total hours you've logged on the game, the total number of matches ever played, how many times you've turned the power on, the courses you've cleared and the number of characters you've mastered. Then it goes on to show you the number of moves that you've mastered for each character. Apart from that, there are still 5 more ????? marked secret options.

I have not given the names of the secret characters away on purpose. It's kind of cool to find them out on your own. The very last boss will surely trip you out.