Retro Friday #1: Fighting Vipers

Welcome to the new DashFight series, Retro Friday! We always have plenty of news and discussions about the modern fighting games. Tekken 8, Mortal Kombat 1, Street Fighter 6, and so on. Those are all very important games, but it's also a bit of a shame that as more new games come out, many of the older ones fade into obscurity.

Being a fan of history, I wanted to go back and highlight a random older title to give them a little bit of extra attention, so that's what you can expect to see every Friday going forward, for as long as I can do it. So, without further ado, let's celebrate older fighting games, and take a look at Fighting Vipers!

These days, whenever someone talks about a SEGA fighting game, they probably talk about Virtua Fighter. I honestly can't blame them because most of the fighting games made by SEGA were made more than 2 decades ago and never got sequels after Virtua Fighter took off.

However, going back to 1995, a team made up largely of VF2 developers, has released the original Fighting Vipers. Get it? Fighting Vipers? FV instead of VF? Very sneaky, SEGA.

Anyway, the game was made in about a year, and it was a big departure from the more grounded and realistic VF series. The first thing you'll notice is that the roster is a lot more colorful and distinct. This game didn't really care about trying to put you in the shoes of a believable martial artist, this time you get to be an eccentric action hero or any other form of cool.

The other changes shine through in the gameplay. Exaggeration was a big theme for the Vipers series, so at every opportunity they tried to make things over the top. Despite using the same layout of punch, kick, and guard, it felt like a totally different game.

Some players complained about the ring outs in Virtua Fighter, so in Fighting Vipers, every stage is now surrounded by a fence, as if to say "the fight doesn't stop until one of you is completely out!". What I really like is that if you actually KO the opponent by knocking them into the fence, you get this spectacular effect of them blowing through it and the whole thing breaking apart, it's super satisfying.

The graphical flex didn't end there, as you could also destroy the clothes or armor of your opponents by repeatedly targeting their upper or lower body. Outside just looking cool, it carries the additional benefit of lowering their defense and allowing you to deal more damage by hitting the exposed parts.

The result was a game that felt more dynamic and action packed than Virtua Fighter. It wasn't quite up to snuff in terms of depth, but as a fun diversion from the similar source, it was more than fine, resulting in two sequels that did a lot of work on building up the strength. Most notably, the characters were fleshed out a lot more in following games, giving their fighting styles more flair and personality. Perhaps we will feature them in one of the future episodes!

Before leaving, I want you to share with you a pretty funny nugget of information. Do you remember that Life Call commercial that got memed to death?

I have no idea how they came up with this, but they actually mixed "I've fallen, and I can't get up" line into one of the tracks, right at 1:21, if the timecode doesn't work.

That's all I have for you today, and hope to see you next week!