Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown is one of the last great SEGA fighting games and luckily has been included in Yakuza 6, and Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Modder @__silent_ has managed to hack the code of the arcade game to unlock a fully playable version of Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown complete with Character Creator, training mode, challenge mode, arcade mode settings. The version included seems to be the Xbox 360 version released originally in 2006 (which is actually still available to buy separately on the Xbox store)
Now an absolute banger – Virtua Fighter 5 in Yakuza 6 and Yakuza LAD appears to be FULL CONSOLE VERSION 😱 By default, it can only boot to Arcade Mode or VS Mode directly, but boot it to mode 0 and this happens. Netplay/leaderboards/achievements obviously don't work… (1/2) pic.twitter.com/vB6aKBqKlr
— Silent (@__silent_) April 18, 2021
All it took to unlock the change was a single variable being changed from 1 to 0. __silent_ goes over this in more detail on their blog but I’ll include a few findings and caveats below.
- The game appears to be based upon the Xbox 360 port, with references to Xbox LIVE left in the menus.
- Unlike the console ports, this version of the game has a fully functional Exit Game option.
- The game does not contain any DLC data, attempting to force unlock them softlocks the game.
- Saving doesn’t work
- To start the game, coins must be inserted twice (Y/Triangle on the gamepad)
- English texts are cut off, as this build of VF5FS seems to be a Japanese SKU with English texts
- Pause menu is tricky to access and resuming the game does not unfreeze gameplay
All up great work so happy to see a piece of SEGA history persist!
[source]