Share your VO experience or history

Discuss the Virtual-On series.
Henshin01
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by Henshin01 »

Long Shadow wrote:Yeah, I remember some sort of sign like that in front.

And Welcome Henshin01, fellow VO lover, and fellow local.
Thanks champ,
I hope we get to play some games together :D It's great to know there are other players local to myself aswell :)
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MentholMoose
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by MentholMoose »

somepunk wrote:*proceeds to strap bombs to VO setup, begins twitching on floor*

I have never seen anything like that before!! Ugh what I'd do for one of those posters.
There appears to be a similar poster on Yahoo! Japan Auctions...
http://page13.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/r49273072
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by RVR - 42 »

Hhaha somepunk is going mad! XD! But wow...this place is just oozing with members now. This is wonderful! Welcome all, welcome! Hope you feel right at home...because all of us here share a love for VO, so fitting in isn't even a question. :D
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somepunk
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by somepunk »

haha yes I am going mad, it's great finally having a community behind this again. But man, those where some sights to behold!
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by RVR - 42 »

somepunk wrote:haha yes I am going mad, it's great finally having a community behind this again. But man, those where some sights to behold!
*nods head* I agree, I agree. If only I had known about this way back when. I would've totally been here and began collecting VO items/merchandise/etc. I feel so...lost. =(

*jumps into Cypher's cockpit and SLCs every OT Vr*

^_^
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mechazoidal
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by mechazoidal »

oh right, I forgot to list mine.

I seem to recall hearing about VOOM when it was in development stage, from C+VG or somewhere, mentioning "fight as the classical Japanese giant robots". I do remember the first time I laid eyes on a VOOM machine, in early high school or so down at Southcenter Mall , and I instinctively knew this was the same game. Inserting a credit, I chose Viper 2 as he "looked the coolest". It was some fairly generic single-player(and I lost at Dorkas), but I have it ingrained in my memory for discovering CC by complete accident: finishing off Temjin with an RW.

Unfortunately, the number of times I saw a VOOM machine in my youth could be counted on one hand. The few times I played, I just tried to use Viper's SLC dive all the time(another "secret" move I'd learned from C+VG), but I never got anywhere.

Fast-forward to midway through college, and when Sakura-Con had just changed its name. A close friend was the video-game room director that year, and he'd managed to invite the Auburn Virtual-On Crew to run a VOOT tournament. Being on staff, I got to have close access to everyone setting up, and it was a welcome experience to find out that VOOM had gotten a sequel.

Then the tournament started, and I got to witness the Gehr brothers' AphB in action. This completely blew my mind that CC was capable of such amazing finesse and skill, which I hopefully carried across in my twin-stick article. This also introduced me to Scott Robinson and the rest of the AVC gang, and we kept in touch. After that summer, both my friend and I tracked down copies of VOOT and DCs to play link battles, and use the video projectors in the English building while the anime club we ran was going on. It helped a great deal that I'd already been collecting Saturn import games, and another close friend had sent me a copy of VOOM w/ Twin Sticks before I heard about VOOT. Scott(quad, slant) and Sam(samfoo) eventually ended up attending WSU just as we were leaving, and beating a few more stick-shaped lessons into our skulls.

In the summers between, not to mention after I graduated and started looking for a job, I was attending as many of the AVC gatherings as I could. Many an evening-a-week was spent in the brothers' Capitol Hill apartment, with around ten of us stuffed into it and taking turns and discussing other nerd stuff in the meantime. VOOT is the one game I've found that draws players from outside typical nerd kingdoms: Scott had never been a gamer before VOOM, and Brett(friction), our ace Dordray player and professional composer/musician, had no interest in any other games save possibly Mr. Driller (another addiction shared in the group).

I would regularly pick Scott's brain about technical details of the VOOT engine; he was hacking Dreamcast assembly while I was struggling through File Systems and Operating System classes, and he explained the 5.60 hack pretty clearly when he came up with it(although it annoyed him that people passed the Netplay Extension project over in favor of playing as Bradtos or AphC). Concepts I gained from our discussions and gatherings led me to propose an Unreal Tournament mod that was basically a cheap VO clone; since none of us(especially me) had good project skills this produced a simple design document and not much else.

Once we started gaining access to bigger venues, it got even better. Gameworks in Seattle had a VOOT 5.2 machine, but Illusionz in Tacoma had a JP VOOT 5.4 machine, and we loved setting up big tournaments. Except for the staff in both venues being complete tools and failing to take care of the machines, which led to Menthol getting pretty pissed.

..Yes, the one time I've met Kirk was when we set up a big area tournament which he flew out to attend. And ended up winning the thing, but he was pretty gracious about it, and the higher-level matches were a thing of beauty.

Sadly, like the other stories, it eventually came to an end. Many of us were leaving(or had left college) for stable jobs, and one of the last gatherings was an in-depth examination of Marz' fighting engine. Which we all immediately panned as complete crap, and that was the end of our next-gen hopes. Eventually, I visited Japan to see both a friend and a former member of AVC who led me to a Force machine--which also sucked. Illusionz eventually closed down, and their machine was used once at another Sakura-Con gaming room: with the left-turbo and trigger busted(there's a entertaining story I have about that, but that's for another time). Gameworks still kept their 5.2 machine, but lack of maintenance meant you were pretty much wasting a credit.

The gathering last month took me by surprise, and I was ready to put it down as the last gasp of AVC. But the enthusiasm of the younger people there, plus the news of VOOT 360, gave me new hope that Force and Marz didn't kill off the VO spirit.

I kept in contact with many of AVC as friends, and I'm grateful to know them all.
Though it got fairly silly at Scott's going-away party last month: many of his other friends asked how we knew him, and our answers always started out as "well, there's this giant robot fighting game.."
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somepunk
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by somepunk »

Great Story! I was at the gathering last month as well, I piloted the Raiden (and the DC-controller Temjin) I envy you, to have been in the Washington scene from beginning to the end, all while I was sitting in my bedroom for years, practicing nonstop on the DC pad...

Force and Marz could never kill the VO spirit, in my opinion, the original two are eternal to me. I think, with this new release, we're going to not only find new players, but more like myself, who're just in hibernation, and had no idea anybody even loved this game. Have any idea how hard it is to bring the average newcomer in on it? ("why can't I rotate?" or "This camera system sucks!") There are so many memories for me with the VOOM and VOOT, how players can evolve such unique styles (Gehr's CC, Chaos Bal, Music's awesome Raiden!) and watching them clash in what appears to be game-breaking scenarios.

I'll quit this game once I've seen it all. Which, from how long I've been playing and what I've watched, doesn't seen to be coming anytime soon. The intensity of the fights at the last meet was enough to prove that. :shock:
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by RVR - 42 »

"well, there's this giant robot fighting game.."
Hahaha that was the best ending to a story ever. XD! Welcome to the boards man. Virtual On...such a classic. I've got to say out of all the message boards ive joined for other games[Sonic, Street Fighter, Armored Core...etc] this one...I love the most. My most cherished game is just as important to all of you guys as it is to me. It's almost a magical feeling. Truly magical. :D
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by MentholMoose »

mechazoidal wrote:Fast-forward to midway through college, and when Sakura-Con had just changed its name. A close friend was the video-game room director that year, and he'd managed to invite the Auburn Virtual-On Crew to run a VOOT tournament. Being on staff, I got to have close access to everyone setting up, and it was a welcome experience to find out that VOOM had gotten a sequel.

Then the tournament started, and I got to witness the Gehr brothers' AphB in action. This completely blew my mind that CC was capable of such amazing finesse and skill, which I hopefully carried across in my twin-stick article. This also introduced me to Scott Robinson and the rest of the AVC gang, and we kept in touch.
Was that the Sakura-con in 2001? If so, I was there (I'll try to track down some photos later). That was a fun event.
mechazoidal wrote:In the summers between, not to mention after I graduated and started looking for a job, I was attending as many of the AVC gatherings as I could. Many an evening-a-week was spent in the brothers' Capitol Hill apartment, with around ten of us stuffed into it and taking turns and discussing other nerd stuff in the meantime.
I missed out on that, although I experienced a week of it when I stayed with Matt for the Illusionz tournament. Definitely fun times!! The Socal scene was never that active when I was playing, basically only meeting once weekly at SHGL, although I did set up some smaller gatherings for cable versus action.
mechazoidal wrote:Once we started gaining access to bigger venues, it got even better. Gameworks in Seattle had a VOOT 5.2 machine, but Illusionz in Tacoma had a JP VOOT 5.4 machine, and we loved setting up big tournaments. Except for the staff in both venues being complete tools and failing to take care of the machines, which led to Menthol getting pretty pissed.
Yeah that guy was annoying, refusing to put lubricant on the sticks for some reason.
mechazoidal wrote:..Yes, the one time I've met Kirk was when we set up a big area tournament which he flew out to attend. And ended up winning the thing, but he was pretty gracious about it, and the higher-level matches were a thing of beauty.
Be glad the tournament predated the word "pwn". :D
mechazoidal wrote:Sadly, like the other stories, it eventually came to an end. Many of us were leaving(or had left college) for stable jobs, and one of the last gatherings was an in-depth examination of Marz' fighting engine. Which we all immediately panned as complete crap, and that was the end of our next-gen hopes. Eventually, I visited Japan to see both a friend and a former member of AVC who led me to a Force machine--which also sucked. Illusionz eventually closed down, and their machine was used once at another Sakura-Con gaming room: with the left-turbo and trigger busted(there's a entertaining story I have about that, but that's for another time). Gameworks still kept their 5.2 machine, but lack of maintenance meant you were pretty much wasting a credit.

The gathering last month took me by surprise, and I was ready to put it down as the last gasp of AVC. But the enthusiasm of the younger people there, plus the news of VOOT 360, gave me new hope that Force and Marz didn't kill off the VO spirit.
Too bad Sega never released VOOT to US arcades, so there never was a level of competition similar to the Japanese scene. Hopefully the online mode will be good and can enable a VOOT renaissance!
mechazoidal wrote:Though it got fairly silly at Scott's going-away party last month: many of his other friends asked how we knew him, and our answers always started out as "well, there's this giant robot fighting game.."
That's what I had to say at my wedding when people asked how I knew Scott (the best man). It was worse since I met him online! :lol:
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by mechazoidal »

MentholMoose wrote:Was that the Sakura-con in 2001? If so, I was there (I'll try to track down some photos later). That was a fun event.
Yup, although I don't know how I missed you there. I chalk it up to lack of face/name coordination, much like when I'm pretty sure I saw Scott at the Gameworks machine in 2000 or so but didn't have the guts to challenge him.
Here's the few photos I have of it.
MentholMoose wrote:That's what I had to say at my wedding when people asked how I knew Scott (the best man). It was worse since I met him online! :lol:
Hah! :lol:
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by MentholMoose »

mechazoidal wrote:Yup, although I don't know how I missed you there. I chalk it up to lack of face/name coordination, much like when I'm pretty sure I saw Scott at the Gameworks machine in 2000 or so but didn't have the guts to challenge him.
Here's the few photos I have of it.
My pics must be on a CD somewhere, I'll have to look. I'm in voot4 playing against Mark. Also I noticed voot6 has two cans of lithium grease... that is a lot :lol: , considering I still have the can I bought back in 2000!!! I even used it a few weeks ago when I built the Xbox 360 Twin Sticks.
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DarK-SuN
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by DarK-SuN »

Hey everyone, this is my first post, so I figured this would be a good thread to introduce myself. :)

I'm an Apharmd and Raiden player (in any VO game, from VOOM, to VOOT and even in that strange one called VO:MARZ), which is interesting considering both VRs are completely different.
I'm from Portugal, so unfortunately the VO scene is quite limited around here.

I played Virtual ON for the first time when I was around 16 years old on a local arcade and the first VR I used was Raiden. I loved the twin stick controls, at the time it really felt like you were in a big mecha-simulator causing everything to explode and firing massive lasers all over the place. Of course, technique wise, while I was playing it on the arcades, I was pretty poor, since my only opponents were the AI controlled VRs.

Some time later, VOOM was released for the Saturn, so I was overjoyed; I RAN to buy it the moment my local store called saying it had arrived. :)
I started experimenting with different VRs there, realising that I really liked Apharmd (curiously enough, a VR I never used when playing in the arcades), it was then that I started to try and learn the game's techniques with some friends of mine who were also VO fans (the very few people I knew that also had the game and even knew what it was about).

Time passed, I heard VOOT was released for the arcades, but it unfortunately never made it here to Portugal.
Enter the Dreamcast and news of its release as an upgraded version compared to the arcade revisions; I was overjoyed, but that joy didn't last long, it was announced the game would NOT be released in Portugal. I felt like hitting someone, really hard, with tonfas. :P
But I didn't give up, I started checking online stores and quickly imported the US version, along with a disc so that I could boot a different region game in my European DC.
Bliss, pure, bliss, that's what VOOT was for me. :D

Extremely tight controls, very responsive VRs, unprecedented complexity for a "mecha game", I just started playing the game non-stop, once again going through all the VRs, but realising that, just like before, my favorites were Apharmd-B and Raiden once again.
Fortunately I had some friends who also liked the game, so I didn't have to be limited to the AI VRs for opponents.
My friends, however, played it mostly for fun and not really to go "deep" in the game, unlike me. I tended to be the victor very very often, specially when using Apharmd-B.

I started practicing against the AI in training mode, but with inverted screens. As in, the screen I was seeing was the AI, not mine, I was "blind fighting", and I used only Apharmd-B to practice this blind fighting method.
Eventually I started playing with my friends like that, we'd set the "training dummy" to be controlled by Player 2 and I'd use that.
It may sound silly, but they didn't mind, they knew I wanted to try and improve, and didn't mind helping with that.
Eventually, it didn't matter, I kept winning anyway, going for infighting, circling them, then moving away, it probably helped that we used the same stage often, so I sort of started to know the entire arena without trully seeing it, so I knew where to dash to hide behind something, where to jump, etc, was pretty fun. :)
Eventually, I stopped having someone to play the game with, I kept practicing against the AI, but it wasn't the same.
I later bought the Japanese version of VOOT because I wanted to have the extras that were included, as well as for a collector's purpose thing.

VO:Force was never released outside of Japan, so that was a VO game I completely missed, like most of us here did most likely.

Along came VO:MARZ, no European release, so, once again, import was the way to go.
I got it, started playing it... ack... I'm stuck as TEMJIN? Oh well... why does it feel like I'm moving the VR through jello? Anyway... ok, where's the left turbo functions? :shock:
I made a REALLY big effort to like the game though, I played it quite a lot, started to enjoy it a little bit more the moment I unlocked Apharmd-J, the spiritual successor of Apharmd-B... but it felt like I was playing with an Apharmd with a big prison ball attached to its ankles AND one arm tied behind its back... suddenly I started to like VO:MARZ less and less. While I found the 2 VS 2 thing interesting, specially the moments in story mode where it was me VS 3 or 4 other VRs, it wasn't enough.

I stopped playing VO:MARZ due to pure frustration and went to several online sites, looking for a Naomi Board to purchase, and found one, with the goal of getting VOOT 5.66 with all the extras and tweaks that were included that were never brought to any home version of VOOT.
So, I got the Naomi, but never, EVER, managed to find a VOOT 5.66 for sale.

Along came the news of VOOT 5.66 for the 360, at the same time I managed to get my hands on the Japanese only VOOT Customization Disc 5.66 for the Dreamcast.
And the rest, is history, so here I am. :)

If some people wish to have a closer look at the extra VRs included in VOOT 5.66, I can take some screenshots of them (since they're in the VOOT Customization Disc 5.66) and posting here for all to see.

Edit: Jesus Christ, just saw how BIG my post was, sorry about that! XD
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by RVR - 42 »

Dark-Sun...welcome! And yes...that was a hellishly long post!


That's what we like to see! Good to see your enthusiam and history with VO. :) Portugal, huh? That is awesome man! I've always wanted to go there. They're my FIFA team. :P Anywho...hope you feel at home, dude...because you're one of us...a man in love with the Virtual On series. What greatness SEGA has created. :D
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by MentholMoose »

DarK-SuN, welcome! That is a long story, I can tell you're a big fan. :)
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by circuscommando »

yeah, it's true i never heard of Force, by reviews though, looks like i didn't miss much.
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by MentholMoose »

circuscommando wrote:yeah, it's true i never heard of Force, by reviews though, looks like i didn't miss much.
I wish they didn't make a 4-player game, since it virtually guaranteed it would never come to US arcades. Most dedicated VO fans in the US never had a chance to see it, let alone play it. Even worse, VO died with Force, no new VO for eight years!! What the heck happened!?
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DarK-SuN
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by DarK-SuN »

Thanks for the warm welcome. :)

And yeah, 8 years with no VO since VO:Force, it's completely bizarre. :cry:
I really hope VOOT 5.66 is successful on XBLA and they actually consider working on a NEW VO game, that'd really rock hard.
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by Testament/Seven7 »

I think in order for that to happen, they need to gather the original AM R&D 3 team that worked on VOOT, which i would think would be a challenge in of itself.

And on that subject, oi, Sega, give us some substantial story this time man, stop shafting the rest of the world loyal to you...
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by RVR - 42 »

Testament/Seven7 wrote:I think in order for that to happen, they need to gather the original AM R&D 3 team that worked on VOOT, which i would think would be a challenge in of itself.

And on that subject, oi, Sega, give us some substantial story this time man, stop shafting the rest of the world loyal to you...
I agree with every single word in that post. XD! Original team is an absolute must. Storyline...yea...the rest of the world would like to know it as well, SEGA. Hahaha!
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Re: Share your VO experience or history

Post by Knoxximus »

Wow, DarK-SuN...playing in mirror mode like that?!? That's pretty damn hardcore, my man! :shock:
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