Virtua Cop
“I’m getting too old for this shit”
Darran’s being playing through his Saturn collection and has become stumped by Sega’s lightgun shooter
» Saturn » 1995 » Sega am2
Some of you may remember from last month that I’ve started getting back into the Sega Saturn. As is customary for my collecting binges, I have been buying games in bulk, because they typically offer the best overall value, and I’m all about the value. One of my recent purchases included Japanese copies of Virtua Cop, Virtua Cop 2, Decathlete, Sega Rally and The House Of The Dead – the latter alone sells for around £25.
Putting on Virtua Cop, it suddenly dawned on me that I’ve never actually completed it. “No problem,” I said to myself, “I’ll get it completed now and that’s another game I’ve knocked off my list for the year (I’ve currently finished ten games so far, in case you’re interested). So I went up into my loft, grabbed my lone lightgun and proceeded to play… and lost all my credits within the first level. Virtua Cop might move at a relatively sedate pace, but the attacks from enemies are fast and furious, and they immediately caught me off-guard. I went back to the menus and adjusted the credits to nine and my hits to the same number, effectively giving me 81 lives to complete the game’s three stages. Easy peasy.
And I still couldn’t do it. I would play every night, and with each attempt I would make slightly better progress and could usually reach the beginning of the third stage, which appears to be a Die Hard tribute as it largely takes place in a large corporate tower. Slowly, but surely, over the course of a week I managed to get to the final closing moments, only to die when I encountered the last boss. I immediately restarted, around 1am in the morning, knowing that this time I would do it. This time I was ready.
I was ready, and I killed that sucker with two health bars left. Elated, I reached for my phone to text my retro gaming cousin that I’d finally completed the game, only to see an even bigger boss turn up in a fighter jet. Completely unprepared and outgunned, I died within a few seconds of him turning up. Needless to say I have still not completed Sega’s outstanding shooter.