Vatlva (Saturn)
This is a really neat game! I'm sure that most people here already know of it, as it tends to get alot of high praise just due to the fact that its characters were designed by Hitoshi Ariga, the #1 most popular Mega Man manga artist. He also designed the characters for Beyond Oasis, AKA, The Story of Thor. So that automatically qualifies this game for greatness, at least graphically so. You may also know of it as the prequel for the GBA game Car Battler Joe.
Basically, you choose a car and travel from arena to arena, blowing up your opponents. That's the whole point of the game, vehicular arena combat. There are 6 vehicles to choose from, and there can be up to 6 players in one arena at a time. So obviously this is another reason why it's a popular game, it's one of the few multiplayer imports available, and it's one of the better ones. Sort of like Bomberman, but while driving in various vehicles.
The vehicles are extremely varied also. There's a buggy, a rally car, a hover craft, a 4-footed gun, a road roller, a battle tank, and a hidden vehicle that I've yet to unlock, so I don't know what it is. Each one is outfitted with their own special weapons for offense and protective shields for defense.
There are 12 different arenas to fight in, each with terrain as varied as the vehicles themselves. Each one has various obstacles that can aid in your defense, and throughout the battle new weapons and upgrades will appear in the arena for whoever gets to them first. So you're not just fighting for survival, you're fighting for new enhancements too, as well as a high score.
The game is also compatible with the Saturn MPEG decoder, which was never released here in the US. I assume that means that you'd have to have a Japanese system to be able to use it, but if anyone has information to the contrary, I'd love to know about it. If there's a way that I can get one of those MPEG decoders to work with my American Saturn, then I just might have to get one for this game. It already looks gorgeous, so if it can possibly look even better, then I really wanna see just how much better it can look!
Overall it's a very fun game that should've been released here in the states for sure, but for some strange reason it never made it. I suspect that it's probably only because of it's MPEG decoder compatibility. Since Sega chose not to release the MPEG decoder here, I guess they figured there was no point in releasing any of the MPEG decoder compatible games here either. It's no wonder that the sequel did manage to make it to US shores though!
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Originally Posted by Iron Draggon
