Virtua Cop is an arcade lightgun shooter developed by Sega AM2, directed by Katsunori Itai and supervised by Yu Suzuki. It was first released into arcades by Sega in 1994.

As the title implies: both players assume the role of cops – either Michael Hardy, or his partner, James Cools. The aim is to shoot criminals, before they shoot you, and to advance through the game. If a player is shot by an enemy, or shoots an innocent bystander, they lose a life. Occasional power-ups, when shot, grant players either a special weapon or extra lives, but if you’re shot while using a special weapon you’ll lose it and revert back to your default gun.

Virtua Cop was notable for its use of real-time 3D graphics, with Sega advertising it as “the world’s first texture mapped, polygon action game”. Like many lightgun shooters of the time, it could be played by two players simultaneously, or just one player alone. It did have a number of innovative features, though.

Firstly: enemies react differently, depending on where you shoot them. Extra points can be scored for “Justice Shots” (by shooting their weapon out of their hands), and for “Bullseyes” (by shooting the very centre of the target that circles around them). Virtua Cop was one of the first games (if not the very first game) where you could shoot at enemies through glass; smashing the glass, then hitting them.

If you make it to the end of a scene you’ll get an accuracy rating, and reaching the end of a stage will mean a boss battle.

There are three different stages and you can play them in any order. As you blast your way through a stage the camera moves around ‘on-rails’ (meaning that you have no control over it and it’s the same every time you play), and it will zoom in on targets for you. A distinctive circle also pinpoints enemies for you, which is very useful for knowing where the danger is coming from as soon as possible – especially later in a stage when enemies tend to shoot quicker – and the smaller the circle becomes, the closer an enemy is to firing at you (it also changes colour, from green, to yellow, to red to indicate this).

Virtua Cop was a hit in arcades and an enhanced version (with an extra training mode) was released for the Sega Saturn in 1995. A PC Windows version was later released in 1997.

Playing the arcade version of Virtua Cop now, two things are worth bearing in mind: firstly, the game (at the time of writing) still doesn’t run properly in MAME (it stutters a lot, and the graphics are somewhat broken – for example the gun barrel showing your ammo count, which should be visible in the left-hand corner of the screen, is hidden by the foreground scenery), and secondly: only the Japanese version of the game seems to have been dumped. I couldn’t find a Western release of Virtua Cop and anything out there claiming to be one was fake. So if you want to play a non-broken, full English version, you might want to consider the Saturn version instead.

More: Virtua Cop on Wikipedia