sleepmode!

I talk about the alleged Virtua Fighter leaks, what the supposed “eSports mechanics and concepts” could be, and what I think a new VF game could do to be more visually arresting!

Watch it here!

A follow-up thread from Midori, the Sega/Atlus leaker who recently spoke about Sega’s plans to reboot a bunch of legacy franchises has made another thread talking about the specifics of the remake/reboot plans specifically as it pertains to Crazy Taxi. Read it here.

There, they talk about how there are plans to both “remake” and “reboot” Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio, and they clarify that “remake” means a more traditional retail game, while “reboot” refers to a “games as a service” free to play release, citing Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto Online as primary inspirations for the model.

This is important as it pertains to Virtua Fighter, as when asked, they stated that ”a Virtua Fighter reboot is in development.” So I guess this means the next Virtua Fighter is likely to be a free-to-play title - which might actually be a pretty sensible move. The initial PS+ release of VF5 Ultimate Showdown worked really well for Sega, and the free-to-play model has shown promise thanks to releases like Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising.

Back in the arcade heyday of OutRun 2SP, players could submit times and high scores to an official online leaderboard. Because the cabinets weren’t directly connected to the internet back then, the way this worked was that every completed credit would produce a password that players could submit to the now long-defunct outrun.jp website alongside other details like a custom handle and user ID number to update improved scores.

Obviously, this website is no longer in action. SEGA lost the rights to use Ferrari cars in their video games by I think around 2010 (don’t quote me on that), and it’s only thanks to the Wayback machine that any of these old scores are preserved at all because SEGA nuked it all alongside access to the game itself when the licensing fell through.

There are ways to keep track of scores now -- there’s a speedrun.com leaderboard and Teknoparrot has its own leaderboard built in, but I’m left wanting with these solutions in some ways:

• SRC is naturally only focused on speedrunning, which leaves no space for Heart Attack Mode or even score-focused Outrun Mode records
• Frankly, I don’t want Teknoparrot to have anything cool and the only reason I’m using it to play OutRun 2SP is because there’s no way to play it with JConfig

But most importantly to me: there’s just a magic to punching a password into an old-ass web page and getting your high score on the internet. That just seems cool to me.

So I suppose the big question is how the passwords fundamentally work. It’s a 16-character string composed of English letters, Arabic numerals and various symbols, generated upon completing a credit and entering your details onto the local leaderboard. This string holds the following information:

• Player name/initials
• Player score (not for Time Attack
• Player time
• Run type (Outrun, Heart Attack, Time Attack)
• Goal and Route (ie which goal point the run ended at and the route that was taken, not applicable to 15-course)

I’m sure how it’s able to contain and convert all this information into and out of this 16-character string isn’t overly complicated, but I’d be very interested in finding out how, if only so I can satisfy my own curiosity, though creating a fan-made recreation of the official OutRun 2SP leaderboards would be kind of awesome, imo.