Virtua Fighter: now with pirates

Virtua Fighter 5 may not have set the charts on fire over here, but it's still big business in Japan and particularly Japanese arcades - so much so that SEGA has issued Version D with special pirate levels. Obviously.

According to Famitsu.com, as spotted by Kotaku, Version D introduces the pirate-fighting Knockout Trial 2 mode for single players.

There are also new costumes, and "Official Open Battles" for Japanese arcade-goers. We asked a VF5-loving friend what that meant, and he said it sounded like the tournament system where you can get a few of your friends around the same machine, play through, and then have the results fed to the main server. Amazing.

VF5-lover also explained that some of the piratey items are actually already out in Japanese arcades, so it's not the most exciting news ever. We, and particularly this screenshot, disagree.

Version D will probably never be something we experience, but it doesn't have any major balance changes anyway so PS3 and 360-owning VFers mustn't get too upset.

For more on VF5 including PS3 and 360 reviews, check out our Virtua Fighter 5 PS3 and 360 gamepages.