![]() There’s no talk of Virtua Cop without mentioning its distinctive lock-on sight, that initial green “tunnel” naturally leading your eyes and your attention to the next target, the arrows moving around the edge as well as the green/yellow/red warning system giving you all the time-to-ouchies information you need without this screen-sized icon ever getting in the way. Lobbies you had just fought through became the background for tense shootouts on glass-sided balconies, distant machinery an upcoming battleground, not an idle background feature. Light gun scenarios were no longer restricted to scrolling shooting galleries and endless sprite-scaled corridors – Virtua Cop’s stages were places, somewhere with an upstairs, inside, outside, and rooms beyond closed doors you might actually end up seeing for yourself. ![]() The environmental damage that accompanied these context-sensitive shootouts – sometimes as small as a broken TV or a shattered window pane, sometimes explosions so devastating they would topple large structures and kick up enormous clouds of dust – created a wonderful veneer of interactivity, every player-generated dint and ding reinforcing the illusion that each stage’s fixed route was more than a passive firearm-based theme park ride that had exhausted all its spectacle on the very first run through. And when your own shot hit its mark? No longer did you have to watch an endless parade of palette-swapped sprites all fall over in the exact same way before flashing out of existence the employees of Virtua Cop’s EVL Corporation (yes, really) might hold their arm in pain, tumble forward over railings (sometimes – and you can’t help but feel sorry for them when it happens – straight onto an explosive barrel), or be blown backwards straight through a stack of wooden crates, sending splinters flying everywhere – it all depended on where you shot them and where they were standing at the time. 3D meant more than being able to charge a premium for each credit, more than advertising flyers filled trendy buzzwords like “texture mapping” and “polygons per second”: For the first time ever enemies were no longer forced to stand in place behind a convenient piece of scenery or repeat a short run cycle along perfectly flat horizontal/vertical planes targets could now turn up inside vehicles, aim at you from behind a pane of glass, stand on a nearby table, or travel down a conveyor belt at an angle – anywhere you could look at, in, or around could potentially be brimming with sunglass-wearing baddies itching to send a bullet your way. It may sound a touch over-enthusiastic to place such a high level of historical importance on a game that for all its cutting-edge technology and classic status can still broadly be reduced down to the exact same core mechanics as almost any earlier example – shoot bad guys, shoot items to pick them up, don’t hit anything friendly – but Virtua Cop’s innovations were so inextricably linked to this three-dimensional graphical overhaul it became a watershed moment in gaming, definitively splitting the genre forever into “Light gun games before Virtua Cop” and “Light gun games after Virtua Cop”. Looking for something in particular? Search for: Click here to be taken to a random article! Archives ArchivesĪnd just as AM2‘s Virtua Fighter had shown the world how 3D technology could change the way fighting games not only looked but also played, so too did their future-focused philosophy coupled with the raw power of Sega’s Model 2 arcade hardware breathe new life into a genre whose history can be traced all the way back to the mechanical games of the 1930’s.
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