We'll make this quick, like our time with Virtua Fighter 5 for the 360 was at this year's Games Convention. In the "Business Hall," one of the buildings set aside for important business meetings and us bottom-feeding journalists, we managed to get a few minutes of Virtua Fighter time at the Sega booth. Other games had their own rooms, with team members giving carefully on-point presentations; Virtua Fighter 5 had a few machines in the lobby of Sega's booth with a crowd of journalists waiting to play, all but putting quarters up and calling next. It was a pretty sweet presentation, bringing back memories of arcade glory days, but it meant we didn't get a whole lot of time to dig in and nitpick the build.
The controller on offer was Hori's custom fighting stick, a huge improvement over the Sixaxis and the 360's own joypad. Hopefully, we'll see other 360 games support the stick as well. While arcade experts will doubtlessly need to cobble together their own custom piece, for the majority of players the Hori will be perfect, and worth the cost.
The game itself features more customization options, as well as some of the AI adjustments that have been tested in the arcades. Most importantly, playing on a Live test server against an Italian journalist (who was very polite about savaging our Jackie), there was very, very little lag. We had one definite hiccup, but the majority of the gameplay was solid as a rock. Other journalists we've spoken to have all reported the same thing, leaving us hopeful that the actual network code is up to snuff even when it's not on whatever ridiculously fat bandwidth Sega had at its booth.
As we mentioned in our last VF5 preview, some character models still seem a bit more plastic than in the Playstation 3 version. We'll be sure to do some testing and put up the results once we have a build of the game in the GameSpy offices, but for now we're more than willing to forgive a shiny Brad in exchange for online play and not having to import a stick. And if the character models clean up for release, all the better.
