on the giant floating balloon mascot seen in the Old Armstone Town stage. It uses Sanman's fighting style, and its 2nd player counterpart is called Pandachan. Even though it can fight, its 3D model never moves. Pepsiman: the Japanese mascot of Pepsi who only appears in the Japanese Sega Saturn version of the game as an unlockable character. He was removed from the US and PAL releases. Development Fighting Vipers was developed using the same game engine which was first used for Virtua Fighter 2, and uses a nearly identical arcade board, though with slightly faster processing speed. Unlike Virtua Fighter 2, there are no ring-outs; producer Yu Suzuki stated, "We received comments about the ring-outs in VF and so for FV the fighting can continue mercilessly." The character Mahler was created by reducing the power specifications of the boss, B.M., so that he would be appropriately balanced for player vs. player matches. A demo of the game was displayed at the 1995 JAMMA show with all eight characters playable, though they did not yet have all their moves available. The Saturn conversion, like the arcade original, was developed by Sega AM2. The programming team consisted of 15 people, most of whom had worked on the Saturn version of Virtua Fighter 2, and some of whom had worked on the arcade version of Fighting Vipers. Work on the conversion began in the first quarter of 1996 and took eight months. After converting the Virtua Fighter 2 engine, the team focused first on recreating the barriers, as they anticipated this would be the most difficult part to accomplish on the Saturn hardware. Because armor and walls can be broken in the game, there was no easy way of reducing the number of polygons in those elements. In part to compensate for the lower polygon counts on the characters, a new form of dynamic lighting incorporating Gouraud shading was added to the Saturn version. In order to make this effect possible, and have the game run at a speed comparable to the arcade version, the team decided at the beginning of development that they would not use the Saturn's high-resolution mode. Regional differences The original Japanese version had a large amount of advertising for Pepsi, due to product placement agreements with Sega at the time. This licensing was removed in the US and PAL versions. In the US and PAL versions, Honey