Over at Hobby Stock there is some nice photo coverage of the current Wonder Festival. Apart from cool stuff like an SD White Glint kit, Kotobukiya also announced their intent to make a kit of SAV-07-D Belgdor from the original Virtual On. Belgdor is an interesting design both functionally and aesthetically, as it was the most real robot VR in the game (as it used solid ammunition amongst other things). It was also one of the weaker units too but that didn’t stop the versus community from coming up with a variety of techniques to keep Belgdor competitive, with the usage of rowing being notable. Belgdor also received various updates in both Oratan and Force; from Grys-vok, to Stein-vok and finally the Vox series. No word on a release date or pricing as yet but like the other Kotobukiya kits it probably won’t be that expensive.

Watch Video »

A chap by the name of “Aaron C.” has made a custom pair of TwinSticks for the Saturn port of Virtual On out of some cookingware and old joysticks. It’s a good piece of modding but the question remains; why the Saturn version? After all, Sega over produced the original TwinSticks and they are consequently readily available. Still, hats off for his initiative and he also states that he might come up with a Saturn/360 controller adapter, so he can use it on the recent XBLA port of Oratan. If you’re at all curious about the Virtual On games, we a have a very thorough feature about the series here on the site. Thanks to Persona for the heads up.

Courtesy of our good friends at HobbyLink Japan, we’ve been sent a kit from the original Virtual On to review. Specifically, Kotobukiya’s 1/100 scale Viper II. This was a lightly armored and mostly airborne focused virtuaroid, that also sported a very powerful secret attack – in the form of its “SLC” (or “She’s Lost Control”) dive. Like the other VR’s in the Virtual On series, Viper II was designed by mecha design magnate Hajime Katoki.

Our review covers the kit in its out of the box and unpainted form but we have also included painted photos towards the end. In addition, to give the kit some context, we’ve also captured some gameplay footage of the design in action from the recent SEGA AGES PlayStation 2 port.

As a developer GameArts are known most for their work on the wondrous Grandia games as well as their input to the Silpheed series, but they’ve also produced a rather well wrought selection of mecha games too.

Specifically, the four Gungriffon games that have graced multiple consoles over the years. These games pre-date From Software’s perennial Armored Core series but due to a number of factors, both cultural and financial, the games have never quite garnered the appreciation they so sorely deserved.

This is not to say that the Gungriffon games haven’t been critically lauded over the years but they haven’t reached the broader appeal that something like Heavy Gear did for instance, despite both series sharing similar base rulesets for the mecha. Amusingly, the design of mecha themselves has often been mistakenly attributed to be Western in origin, despite the obvious linkages to Ryosuke Takahashi’s VOTOMS series, something that again Heavy Gear shares. As such, we’ll delve into the series as a whole and examine what has made these games remain such a cult hit.

One of the lesser known Virtual On releases was the Seganet version that shipped at literally the end of 1996 for the Saturn. This utilised the then hugely cutting edge technology of dial up modems, to connect peer-to-peer with other similarly equipped Saturn gamers. This meant you could actually play online matches on the Saturn port of Virtual On. Pretty heady stuff. A few years later, in 1998, the Sega Netlink service was started up in the US and the Saturn port of Virtual On followed along with it.

Matt Schulz managed to capture his online matches from way back when and has uploaded them to his YouTube channel for all to see. For fans of the Saturn port and even Virtual On in general, these videos are definitely worth a gander.

Watch Video »