Virtua Cop

Sega took shooters into the polygonal world with the '94 arcade game, Virtua Cop. We don't mean shooting games like Tetsujin, we're talkin' light gun games like Nintendo's classic Gumshoe. Taking the genre away from sprites and towards triangles was a clever way to help gun games evolve. Apparently, the formula worked; Sega is up to its third Virtua Cop game--the latest running on beefed-up Xbox hardware.

The story is the same it was ten years ago, "One month ago, a veteran detective in the Virtua City Police Department uncovered an illegal gun-running operation in the heart of the city's roughest neighborhood. Unfortunately, the only trace left of him is the shred of evidence that made it back to HQ. A task force is taking over his work and guess who's leading it?" Gee, would that be you?

So, your job is to clear Virtua City of the scum that is the criminal underworld. Levels from the arcade game are recreated the best they can be on the N-Gage. For the most part each stage looks like the original, albeit in minimal form. There are still a few destructibles strewn throughout the levels, mainly to conceal power-ups and health icons. Levels are pretty barren otherwise.

It is possible that our preview build still has a few things that need some polishing. For instance, we're not sure if this is set in stone, but the game has no end-level bosses. Once again, maybe memory is limited with the N-Gage and the design team at Sega opted to leave that aspect out. Or maybe the bosses still have to be tuned and implemented.

Bosses or not, you'll have to shoot your way through Virtua City sans a light gun or speedy frame rate. VC has us doing what most light gun-players don't like to do: play a gun game without a firearm. That leaves us to blast enemies and blow up stuff with nothing but the use of the D-pad and a cursor with the "5" and "7" buttons firing and reloading.

It's highly unreasonable to think we'd see a miniature light gun for the N-Gage. A cursor and button setup wouldn't be so bad, many games have done it--and would be awesome for precise Justice Shots--if this build didn't suffer from an unstable frame rate. The chunkiness isn't so unbearable at times when the camera remains almost still. But as soon as the scene shifts in any direction, it's tough to keep up.

In its current form Virtua Cop is a passable recreation of the ten-year-old game. The visuals aren't bad, sound is okay, but the title needs some tweaking in gameplay. If it plans to keep true to Virtua Cop then the team better do something about the framerate.

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