Fun With Virtua Fighter on Fightcade (Virtua Fighter Month)

Ah, Fightcade. My go-to for online play with poverty fighting games.

For those that don’t know what Fightcade is, it’s a freeware app for playing retro games online, bundled with various emulators from FinalBurn Neo, SNES9x, and more. It’s a successor to the GGPO client, which was the original way to play classic retro games online at the time. As of now, the current version is Fightcade 2.

I’ve dabbled in Fightcade 2 a couple times and I’ve been entertained by it a lot. I’ve had my fair share of playing games such as Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, The Last Blade 2, and Fatal Fury Special with friends and sometimes randoms. Fightcade 2 is a wonderful time, and it’s quite easy to set up. 

And then came the Flycast integration.

For those unfamiliar with Flycast, it’s an multi-emulator that supports Dreamcast, Atomiswave, SEGA NAOMI, and SEGA NAOMI 2 hardware. One of the games that it brought to Fightcade 2 was Virtua Fighter 3tb, complete with rollback netcode. Let me just say for the record that playing VF3tb on rollback is like BUTTER. When I first played this on Fightcade, let me just say that playing a 3D fighter on rollback actually feels natural.. It may have some slight hiccups here and there, but playing VF3tb online feels amazing. 

Months later, Fightcade added more Flycast support, this time with the rest of the NAOMI 2 games. That meant that all three versions of Virtua Fighter 4 became playable: VF4, VF4 Evolution, and VF4 Final Tuned. If you all remember back in 2017, I mentioned that I played VF4 Final Tuned on arcade hardware and it felt amazing. When Final Tuned was brought over to Fightcade complete with rollback, I was madly in love with the game all over again. The online ran decent for the most part, so I can’t argue with that.

Now I did have some issues with VF4 Final Tuned in terms of online play: certain stages didn’t work properly. I remember when I was playing Harpooneer in Final Tuned, I accidentally picked Kage’s stage and it was one of the stages that wasn’t fully optimized properly since it was stuttering a lot. The following stages that were also affected by this were Lion’s stage, Akira’s stage, Jeffry’s stage, and Lau’s stage. I’m not sure what other stages were affected by it, but I’m sure the comments sections would let me know. Thankfully, there will be a future update that will fix all of those issues and I hope it comes out soon.

One thing about the VF games on Fightcade is that Flycast gives you the option to have the tools for you to learn the game, such as a direct link to VFDC on looking up move lists, frame data, input display, and more. Also, Flycast has a widescreen option, which I’ve used for the most part when I’m streaming. The widescreen feature is actually not bad at all.

If you’re curious about trying out the following VF games on Fightcade, by all means give it a shot! I recommend looking up online for guides on setting up.

VF Month continues to go strong. Join me next time as we talk about Virtua Quest.

Until then… Train Up, Fighters!