Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. isn't just a PC port of a 19-year-old game: it's the reason a diehard fighting game community can 'finally reach out and play with each other across the world' - Related to 19-year-old, outside, 5, out, against

Disco Elysium writer was told "people covet these items more than they care" when pushing back against ridiculous merch

Earlier this week, a plastic bag blowing in the wind made me question all I knew about the world, but in whatever way the opposite of life-affirming is. Less blowing, actually. More taunting me from my screen maddeningly like a middle finger salute from a man with no hands. It was a baffling piece of licensed merch from Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM and Atelier, who I assume are three hyenas in a board room sniffing each other's crotches for eternity.

I couldn't tell you exactly where I first saw the bag - which has actually been on sale for a few months now - but I soon realised why it had likely entered the zeitgeist again: an extensive set of a documentary podcasts by YouTube creator The 41st Precinct, the latest of which interviews writers Dora Klindžić and Argo Tuulik for more time than I have ever spent on anything. Here's a clip on Atelier and that fucking bag.

"I have in the past received threats from management when I had tried to push back against some items, because this is an incredibly successful business for them," says Klindžić. "The darkest thing I ever heard was - I don't remember who it was from that circle - but they told me that it doesn't matter at all what people are saying on Twitter, because you see those same names who say they're never going to buy…they're the ones ordering these expensive items from ZA/UM. That this loud minority doesn't matter because people covet these items more than they care about this."

If you haven't been following the mess since Disco Elysium's release, it began when setting creator and lead ideasman Robert Kurvitz got booted from the studio, with a web of allegations of fraud and misconduct coming from either side. More lately, Tuulik has been fundraising for legal fees for himself and Klindžić to get back the IP, as well as cover living expenses.

Again, this is just one short clip from the writers talking about their experience with the firm. The 41st Precinct describes the podcasts as a "huge interview which covers every major event in the timeline of [Klindžić and Tuulik]'s working lives at ZA/UM" in the two year period between "Winter 2021 to their own dismissal in early 2024"

"I messaged Dora just as herself and Argo were considering their options for going public," he tells me. "Although they speak very fondly about the work People Make Games had done to expose the inner workings of ZA/UM, they felt that the level of corruption and conspiracy they had experienced was so vast and complicated that they needed to speak on a platform that was raw and allowed for every word of their story to be heard."

"Starting with the dismissal of Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere in 2021 right through to as in the recent past as early 2024 when news of the mass redundancies broke. In between all of that is an organisation which is compared to that of a cult, Argo and Dora talk extensively about how a group of higher ups - Tonis Haavel, Phil Davidson and Ed Tomaszewski - used power and influence to control the flow of information within ZA/UM, ensuring a handful of hand picked 'Lead Writers' were kept happy enough to do their bidding amongst the workers."

Klindžić, Tuulik and the host cover stories involving "corruption, workplace bullying, outright law breaking, union action, projects being meddled with to the point of suffocation, and a very real guerilla fight back inside ZA/UM from all of the workers who didn’t qualify as a puppet for the executives."

"This is not the only story like this in the industry," The 41st Precinct tells me. "people making games are being stamped on regularly in support of millionaire interests. Gaming is becoming another play thing for the super rich". He hopes the videos will play their part in the fight against that.

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Eight months into the brave new world of Windows on ARM, and this is the state of play for PC gaming outside of the x86 arena

For years, we PC gamers have had it easy. No, really. Not quite as easy as console clients, perhaps, but we could be reasonably sure that any software we tried to run was written for the processor architecture inside our box. And that's because there was only one: x86, as championed by Intel and AMD. Companies like Cyrix, VIA and even Fujitsu have produced x86 chips too, but when it comes down to home-use gaming PCs in the 21st century, there have only been two horses in this town.

Then Qualcomm came along and ruined everything. Or possibly changed everything, potentially for the improved. The ARM-based Snapdragon chips were released in June last year and have sparked a debate over whether x86 is dead, but there's a more pressing question fizzing in the brains of those for whom a controller is a more pressing concern than a spreadsheet: are Snapdragon chips any good for gaming?

And the answer is a thumping 'well, maybe one day'. Prior to launch, Qualcomm had been bizarrely bullish about the platforms PC gaming performance, with indicates that native Windows games would "just work" on the Snapdragon setup. Now we're eight months down the line post-launch, how do those indicates look at the start of 2025?

For a start, the Snapdragon chips that started to appear in Copilot+ PCs aren't boasting the sort of pixel-pushing prowess we've come to expect from GPUs, and no one has yet produced a PC that marries one with a separate graphics card.

Though that should be coming… eventually. Qualcomm's CEO, Cristiano Amon, has stated that he wants "Qualcomm in every PC form factor: From desktop to mini PCs, to tablets," and we've also seen Snapdragon firmware that supports Resizable BAR, a feature only used when paired with a discrete GPU.

But right now, we've only seen Snapdragon CPUs being used in laptops, and most definitely not gaming laptops. This means we're stuck with integrated graphics, and we all know how well that usually works—don't go expecting 4K or high frame rates from complex 3D games.

But that's not to say chips with integrated graphics are a complete loss. As we saw when we tried gaming on an M3-equipped MacBook Air last year, the new generation of ARM-based processors are perfectly capable of running games, in the same way that your smartphone or tablet is.

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What matters is that these are not dedicated gaming platforms, especially in the GPU department and, when it comes to the ARM-based chips, many games still don't have executables optimised for the new platform, relying on software translation layers to run.

With Qualcomm, however, we do have Microsoft support in the shape of Windows-on-ARM (WoA). That means we can run the Snapdragon silicon in an entirely familiar Windows environment; one that uses a compatibility layer, called Prism, to ensure wide support of applications for even those programs (and games) without native ARM support.

So, taking up a couple of recent mobile processors, we thought we'd give it a try and see what results we could get.

In one corner, we have a 14-core Core i9 13900H, which offers 96 execution units of Iris Xe graphics, backed by 32 GB of RAM. It's a common Intel integrated graphics unit for laptops, though ours is actually inside a mini desktop PC. In the other corner, a laptop featuring a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 with 12 Oryon cores, 16 GB of RAM, and a Qualcomm Adreno GPU that can pump out [website] TFLOPS if asked nicely, which theoretically should put it in the same rough performance envelope as the Xbox Series S or maybe a GTX 1060.

We're not looking at enormous rendering capabilities, but the Steam Deck does okay with less. Both machines are running Windows 11 24H2, the latest version at the time of writing.

It should be noted that every CPU core on the Snapdragon chip is the ARM equivalent of a 'P' core—the mix of P and E cores used by Intel, Apple and smartphone manufacturers hasn't made it to Snapdragon PCs yet (it probably will), so you're getting 12 full cores of processing potency at [website] This won't matter too much for games, which have been slow to embrace multithreading, but stands out against the i9, which has more cores but a 6:8 P-to-E core ratio.

To begin with, here's a synthetic benchmark. 3DMark's Night Raid is a graphics test aimed at integrated chipsets, and so should give us an initial idea of how the two CPUs align. It spits out a combined score that's less useful than an average frame rate figure, and while the two machines' results are a bit different—with about 6,000 points between them—it does show we're operating in a broadly similar performance envelope, and they both beat a GTX 1050 Ti dedicated laptop GPU.

On to the games. It would be wrong to expect these integrated GPUs to run Cyberpunk with full ray-tracing, so to get an idea of what they're capable of we'll stick to games that we know play well with portable machines. Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition is a pillar of the PC Gamer testing suite, and is fully verified for the Steam Deck.

Yes, the Snapdragon's integrated GPU supports AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), and while Qualcomm has its own upscaling solution—Snapdragon Game Super Resolution—it's yet to be spotted in the wild, and we also haven't been able to find a list of games that support it. FSR makes a difference, though, pushing the frame rate into 'playable' territory on both CPUs, with the Core i9 coming off best.

It's known as quite a CPU-limited title, so hopefully Intel can put some of those extra cores to work, but even at its Original graphics setting it's not a bad looking game, and indeed ran on the PS4 at a low enough frame rate that our test subjects' efforts could be called a tribute act. Connect a DualShock up to your PC, and you could easily imagine you were in 2017 again.

Hitman 3, from 2021, is also Steam Deck verified and fares pretty well on low-powered graphics hardware, and so it proves here under its Medium preset. Both chips put out respectable 1080p performance, and you could probably push it to high settings and not lose much except a bit of smoothness.

What is odd, however, are the extremely low minimum frame rates that suggest some sort of glitching or stuttering. As an additional test of the hardware and the Qualcomm chip's compatibility, the Hitman test was run in both DirectX 11 and 12. The change here negatively affects the Core i9 much more than the Snapdragon, which manages a remarkably consistent performance between the two APIs, presumably because it's running a compatibility layer over the top of both.

These titles look pretty good, with Qualcomm and Intel swapping leads, and that makes it feel like things are pretty level even if the ARM-based chip is only emulating the x86 chip. But we've also run through other games in our test suite, with the latest Intel and AMD platforms as well as the most powerful of Qualcomm's processors. In games, such as Black Myth Wukong, and Metro Exodus, where Intel and AMD iGPUs can give decent low-end performance, the Snapdragon chip is completely unable to even run the game.

Both Qualcomm and Intel chips fall over in F1 24 for some reason, however, proving that even Intel cannot be entirely relied upon in the world of integrated graphics performance any more.

The kicker is that AMD's latest iGPU, the Radeon 890M in the latest APUs, is an excellent chip. It will generally outperform the latest Arc GPUs in the Intel Lunar Lake platform, and always beats Snapdragon, even in the most powerful [website] TFLOP chip that we're testing in the benchmarks above.

This is where things fall down for the Qualcomm chips, then. As good as the Prism emulation is, it's not fool-proof, and will not run absolutely every game or app you throw at it. We've had a great experience running a Qualcomm laptop as a daily driver for the past six months, and had no issue running various productivity and work apps on it. But when it comes to gaming, the story is a lot more hit and miss.

When it works, it's usually fine, and a lot quieter than an equivalent Intel, or even AMD setup. But when it doesn't, you're simply not going to get to play the games you might want to.

Steam is usually pretty good at giving you a heads up on how well a particular game will run on your rig, but what it doesn't tell you is whether games are natively compiled for ARM64 or running the x86 version through Microsoft's emulation engine. There are sites you can turn to in order to check Windows on ARM compatibility, and the lists are good, but not exhaustive.

As there's no native version of the Steam client app yet, the chances are that every game you're playing at the moment is x86-only. Some Mac games have versions compiled for the new M-series processors, which are ARM-based designs just like the Snapdragon, but Apple is similarly opaque about which codebase you're using as its Rosetta 2 software translation layer handles the conversion from x86.

The Snapdragon and Apple M chips also both have accommodations built into the hardware by designers who knew they were going to be asked to run x86 code. The way x86 handles memory storage is baked into the Snapdragon hardware, as is the way the Intel and AMD chips work with floating point numbers (which means anything with a decimal point in it).

ARM-based chips do things differently, but allowing them to fall back to the x86 method when asked to can take some of the workload off the emulator. As a result, Prism provides a very fast x86 emulation, though there must be some kind of processing overhead, and the Snapdragon chip won't be operating at its peak performance in our tests as a result. If you want to know more about this, there's an unnecessarily detailed deep dive into the Snapdragon architecture over at our sister site Anandtech.

ARM-native versions of games (and the Steam client) are a necessity, as eventually Prism is going to go away. Either ARM chips will become as ubiquitous as x86 is today, with Intel and AMD churning out their own designs and x86 relegated to servers or workstations that run Linux, or the two instruction sets will diverge so much that emulation becomes more difficult. The precedent for this is the way Apple ditched Rosetta 1 (which translated between the old IBM Power chips in Macs to the newfangled Intel ones) after only two revisions of its operating system. Once everything crucial was updated to native binaries, it was ditched from the OS.

That's far in the future for now, though—what's significant to us is that Prism is completely transparent, even when launching a game from Steam, the processing overhead isn't particularly noticeable when it works, and the new chips' GPUs don't lag behind the kinds of integrated graphics we've become used to from Intel and AMD.

The issue remains, however, that you can be confident that a new game will work out of the box on Intel (mostly) and AMD-based laptops—however poorly in terms of frame rates on the low-end silicon—but the same cannot be revealed for ARM-based machines. The compatibility is pretty robust, but not all-pervasive.

Still, the performance is relatively impressive when it does work, and impressively quiet, too. And that compatibility is only going to improve—as are the numbers of native apps—so we still think the future for ARM-based PCs is bright, even if right now it's a tough call for a PC gamer. But, if other players get in the game alongside Qualcomm, things could start to look very different. I mean, Nvidia's surely going to release its own ARM-y CPU at some point, right?

So, all we need now are ARM-native Nvidia and AMD drivers for graphics cards, a desktop platform from Qualcomm and/or Nvidia, and PC gaming on ARM can really begin in earnest.

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What is a legacy? I've struggled with that question as I've tried to write about Virtua Fighter 5 [website], the latest entry in the series that invent......

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Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. isn't just a PC port of a 19-year-old game: it's the reason a diehard fighting game community can 'finally reach out and play with each other across the world'

What is a legacy? I've struggled with that question as I've tried to write about Virtua Fighter 5 [website], the latest entry in the series that invented 3D fighting games before eventually fading from the public consciousness. [website], a new version that just hit Steam last week, is a chance to reset that, for one of the most beloved fighting games ever made to find a new worldwide audience.

But the first thing you have to understand about Virtua Fighter 5 is that it's old. The original game released in Japanese arcades in 2006. To put that into perspective, that's a year after the Xbox 360 launched; Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were still a year away, Street Fighter 4 was two years out, and Apple's App Store didn't yet exist. I've been asking fighting game players why a port of a 19-year-old game matters in 2025—and why Virtua Fighter matters in general, despite collecting dust for longer than it was active as a popular series, at least in the West.

The answer runs deeper than Virtua Fighter pioneering 3D fighting.

"It's like you're watching a kung fu movie unfold in front of you. I think why it's survived this long is because its fluid fighting system hooked its players, never letting go. It's a fighting game that's truly unique; no other fighting game 'feels' like Virtua Fighter."

The Art of Competitive Virtua Fighter - YouTube Watch On.

You feel that when you play it. Unlike Tekken, Virtua Fighter has a block button and simpler inputs: instead of mapping a limb to each button you have a punch, kick, and block button, and that's it. Virtua Fighter seems very easy to pick up and play, but it's as deep as an ocean, and matches happen faster than you can spit.

Commentator Lawrence "WingedRegent" Maldonado described it this way: "Virtua Fighter is a lot more grounded … if a game like Tekken or Soul Calibur or even Dead or Alive is your favorite shonen anime, then I would say Virtua Fighter is your favorite martial arts movie … It's a lot more reined in in terms of what the characters can do ... When you see two VF players at a top level do what they do, you get to see that beautiful flow of combat."

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Having spent a lot of time in various versions of Virtua Fighter 5 over the years and [website] itself, it's hard to disagree. Virtua Fighter is a game of move and countermove. It's pure and focused, and in a genre where games are increasingly fantastical and characters more and more powerful, it feels increasingly rare. Nobody is transforming into a devil and shooting eyebeams or conjuring energy from thin air.

Cory "Virtua Kazama" Mewborn reminded me that Virtua Fighter's reputation for cutting-edge tech isn't just down to pioneering the 3D fighter in 1993. "Virtua Fighter has always been the blueprint for the 3D fighting game because it always makes itself into something brand new," he stated. Mewborn has been active in the scene since 2010 and organizes tournaments in addition to competing and commentating. Considering how long it's been since the series has seen a new entry, its diehard players have had plenty of time to brush up on their history.

"Virtua Fighter 2 gave us motion capture for the very first time," he noted. "3 gave us environments [with stairs and slopes] and eye tracking. Virtua Fighter 4 gave us sabakis, which is basically an attack with reflective properties."

If being cutting edge is Virtua Fighter's legacy, though, [website] isn't that. It's still, at its heart, a revision of a game that is nearly 20 years old. But [website] is the first time the series has appeared on PC since some ancient Windows 95 ports; it also marks the first time the series will have rollback netcode, a now-genre staple that has made playing with other players around the world possible without major drawbacks. While [website]'s rollback can have lag issues if one player's connection is bad, I've only ever had excellent matches on it.

But this is about more than a netcode solution: It means that a community that has previously been somewhat segregated by regions and different game versions can finally play together.

"Even with Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown, when that came out, there was… the global version of the game, and then there was Virtua Fighter eSports, which was the Japanese version of the game that was on arcade and PS4, and those two player bases could not interact," Maldonado explained. "With VF5 [website], that last remaining sort of border has eroded, and now players can just finally reach out and play with each other across the world."

It's a huge win for a community that has survived, in many ways, on sheer love and force of will. And that's saying something for a corner of the already fiercely loyal and protective FGC.

"The community has welcomed everyone, trying to get as many new players as possible through community tournaments, locals, Discord servers, and overall positive attitudes," domaug told me. "I know many of the long-standing members of the North American and European VF communities have done everything they could to get Sega's attention as the game's focus has almost exclusively been on Japan. They wanted to show Sega that Virtua Fighter is beloved outside of Japan, and they eventually noticed and rewarded that loyalty in a huge way."

Mewborn puts it more simply. "We try to bring it all together. We try to level each other up."

It's been a tall ask, but [website]'s release has shown that Sega is listening, and I've rarely seen a community more deserving to have their work rewarded. [website] isn't just a port of Ultimate Showdown with new netcode (itself a prettier version of Final Showdown, a game from 2012). It's also bringing balance changes to Virtua Fighter 5 for the first time in 13 years. Imagine if Capcom hadn't touched Street Fighter at all for more than a decade, and suddenly brought Street Fighter 4 to modern platforms, prettied it up, and even rebalanced it and added in some favorite moves from earlier games in the series.

"The gameplay is still Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, but the balance patch was what made a difference because there were moves that we never thought we would see again," mentioned Mewborn. "There's some moves, some throws, that were taken out. It really made us rethink how to play our characters that we know and love."

Rediscovering how things work is now a new experience, even for series veterans. "It's a trippy experience," mentioned Maldonado. "Even people who've been playing since VF5: FS in 2010, even in the arcades, they're now learning new things about their characters after not having had a new thing to discover for 14 years."

And Sega is clearly listening to fan feedback. The community discovered, for instance, that a change to one of Eileen's moves could produce a pseudo-infinite because of an added stagger effect on normal hits, but Sega quickly fixed it. It's hard to overstate how much goodwill a quick response like that builds.

Virtua Fighter 5 [website] is resurrection. Rebirth. A chance for one of the greatest, longest-enduring fighting games and its community to finally get their chance in the sun again, revitalizing them before the release of Virtua Fighter 6 from the same team that develops Like a Dragon.

If you're part of the FGC, you have that fighting game that defines you; that, to quote Mewborn, "will stick with you no matter what." Those players believed in Virtua Fighter when even Sega didn't seem to. That faith has been rewarded, and they're excited to see new people play Virtua Fighter for the first time. If that community has a message, it's this, from domaug: "I really hope you enjoy Virtua Fighter going forward and I want it to make you as happy as it's made me over the years."

What's a legacy? Maybe it's as simple as that.

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