4gamer has some new screenhots of the upcoming 360 port of Virtual On Force. What’s interesting about these is that they clearly show a 4 player splitscreen multiplayer option (along with the already documented online setup). This is a nice concession to the fanbase, as the Virtual On scene (in Japan at least) are pretty closely knit and prefer the more social arcade-esque gatherings.

Separately, a few people have been asking me about the VR pictured above. Well, its name is Kagekiyo and he was a new unit introduced in Force. This was an experimental VR made by Dr. Yzerman of the Sixth plant “Satchel Mouth.” Yzerman attempted to pluck the soul of the fugitive warrior Kagekiyo, a retainer to the house of Hei, from the dead and trap it within the V-converter (something similar to how Specineff’s V-converter was created in case you’re wondering). Over time he managed to control Kagekiyo’s spirit, which allowed the VR to be relatively mass produced. The VR resembles a samurai warrior of the sixteenth century and is often armed with giant versions of basic samurai weaponry, notably that of a katana. Due to the use of Kagekiyo’s spirit, some pilots have claimed that their Kagekiyo VR often goes berzerk. Specineff was an earlier Dr. Yzerman creation and Kagekiyo was a partial spin-off from that line. This is yet another mecha design that also ties into my theory that contemporary mecha are heavily influenced from the cultural effects of the samurai.