The mid-1990s was a very transitional time for gaming. The 16-bit hardware was starting to show its age, and 3D gaming was just entering the home and, consequentially, the mainstream. By the time Vectorman launched, the Sega Saturn had been languishing on shelves for nearly half a year, and Sony's Playstation just hit stores the month prior. Vectorman was, if anything, a game that people could point to and say "yo, you see what they're doing on the Genesis???" A graphical powerhouse, certainly, but ultimately lacking in substance.

It's still a nice looking game, and the bob and sway of Vectorman's animations is always a joy to watch, but there's little to sink your teeth into past that superficial shine. Rare are the moments where the gameplay comes together quite as nicely as its aesthetics, though a few showpieces do impress, such as sending the first boss crashing to the ground or (much later) the final boss, Twist and Shout, which takes place in a tornado. It's a jarring fight mechanically, but still a great climax to an otherwise middling game.

Vectorman is ripe with that mid-90s attitude. The soundtrack is appropriately grungy, and the sound effects have a good gravely texture. It's all well suited to the sort of junkyard jungle gym that Vectorman inhabits. But you'll no doubt get your fill of it well before the last level, and after a certain point I felt I needed to finish the game for the sake of it, rather than being compelled by the games merits. As a run-and-gunner it's just a little bit too dull, with excitement coming in fits and spurts. Worth checking out to see what late Genesis games were capable of, but I wouldn't fault you if you bailed before the end.

A mid-nineties video game franchise taking place in a future where sentient robots rebel against their human creators, and a tough but lovable robot hero still loyal to humanity defends the planet against the leader of this robotic revolt. A series known for its distinct artistic style, fluid animation, and the huge arsenal of powerful blasts available to the hero’s distinct arm cannon as well as upgrades to his own personal body tech, as he traverses a variety of distinct worlds to hunt down the robot leader of each one before taking down the mastermind of the whole robot revolt himself in the end.

I am, of course, referring to Vectorman.

Recently I played through Jurassic Park Rampage Edition and Spider-Man: Web of Fire, also by Blue Sky. They're honestly pretty bad, mostly due to screen crunch and bad level design mixed together. When I thought about it though, I remembered that being an issue in these two games as well despite liking them before. Figured I would revisit them to see if my opinion has changed significantly.

Well, it didn't grow off as much as I expected it to. It has the same problems as the aforementioned two games but a big difference is it's actually decently fun at its core. Presentation also bumps this up a good amount, there's lots of really incredible lighting going on all throughout, most notably in Arctic Ridge and Nightscape. It reuses the first level's assets a lot of times for some reason, which is kind of weird, but with new and exciting backgrounds to mostly make up for it. I really like looking at this game, and I'm quite glad replaying it wasn't as bad as I expected it to be.

One thing I really don't care for though is these very brief stages such as Metalhead and Rock 'n Roller, which despite being really simple once you know what you're doing are at first very unintuitive and weird. It would be nicer probably to have them go on a bit longer but starting with some new smaller enemies or something to ease you in a bit, instead of throwing you right into a big menacing guy who plows through your health.

Also, Warhead is way too easy of a final boss? I kind of just fiddled about this time and he was dead before I had lost any lives. The boss two stages prior is a lot more difficult and frustrating. I'm not sure which of these two is a bigger issue, maybe they're both just not very good bosses.

Solid run and gunner. Feels smooth to control. Very nice aesthetics for the sega mega drive/genesis, particularly the stage art.

The graphics can make some enemies quite hard to see coming though, especially the little bug-like robots that swarm all over.

The TV system is a really nice way to give identity for the game. Breaking the various TVs throughout the stage can reward you with various things like points, health, lives, a permanent extra hit point, temporary gun power-ups, or even transformations. Finding a TV and blasting it to see what you'll get out of it is always fun. Even though 90% of the time it's just something useless.

Some cool bosses too, my personal favourite being the group of vector-people who transform into various objects like a spring, or a bigger vector-man.

One of my least favourite parts was that each level is timed, despite the fact the aforementioned TV-hunting system seems to encourage players to explore as much of the level as possible. It feels weird to have half the game telling you to take your time and explore, and another half telling you to hurry the fuck up.

It also suffers from some problems that many games from this era did, like enemy placements that just fuck you over before you can really see them (though far less than many others of its type), or the lack of continues (God bless save states).

But it's a generally positive experience overall. Feels good to play, feels fun to explore and find the secrets as long as you don't watch that timer too much.

Whenever I think of the Genesis' iconic edge, Vectorman is a prime game that comes to mind. It's radical gritty style is the perfect embodiment of what the Genesis stands for, and man does it go HARD. I don't think I can properly express how much I adore this game's aesthetic, it has the perfect mixture of edge and lightheartedness that I can only describe as "brilliantly radical." I should also mention just how technologically impressive it is for the time only adding on to just how cool it is. It's gameplay is really cool too being a fast paced and high energy run and gun, although it is a bit odd at first with how it has a strange initial learning curve and a less than stellar first impression with the first 2 stages when you're confused on what to do and making things feel rather unfair at first. It's very worth sticking through the iffy start as the game most certainly picks up in the later levels where you've likely figured out how the gameplay works. If you want to know some essential things before you start though, the game has a handy info page in the options menu where you can check out some things you'll want to know, like the TVs that you'll want to break as much of as you can to get those multipliers, extra lives, occasional transformations, and even health upgrades. You won't really need to remember how each transformation mode works though, as they're mostly for context sensitive usage for optional paths that are rather clear for where to be used whenever you get one. It still has some odd bits like the overall screen size, the usage of time limits being detrimental to the whole exploration for goodies incentive, those real awkward gimmick fight stages (that first one is a particular road block for newcomers) and a rather frustratingly difficult final boss but they're not present enough to prove to be extreme issues. In fact, they're mostly solved after you can get over the learning curve. Those gimmick fights in particular are quite literally not present enough to be major issues, they all have only one minute on their time limits because you can easily take them down in less than a minute if you know what you're doing.

Before I wrap this up, did I elaborate how cool this game's aesthetic is enough yet? Because god DAMN how do you make a game this rad

Well the whole game is cool, but the style dude, it's another level

After a pretty standard side-scrolling run-n-gun first level, Vectorman turns into a train and fights a boss while evading drones that fire at him from both sides in a challenging back-view 3D sequence that is a pure technical marvel.

It's also really annoying. See, the game throws you right into combat against the boss and the drones without giving you any time to get used to the new perspective, and the camera randomly pans left and right, which is technically impressive but makes getting your bearings needlessly confusing. This battle is kind of a microcosm of the whole game; whether it's too much graphical detail leading to confusing onscreen clutter or simply annoying graphical gimmick levels, the devs tried to show off Vectorman's incredible fancy graphics in ways that made the game irritating to actually play.

I also wish Vectorman did more to differentiate itself from other shooters gameplay-wise. The power-ups and transformations are a very underexplored design space - they look really cool, but seem almost tacked on as an afterthought. While some of the transformations can be used to unlock secrets, the weapon power-ups could be excised entirely and not much of the gameplay experience would change!

It's still a very solid if unspectacular run-n-gun, and its decent gameplay plus the smooth animations and cool graphics mean it would have been a great experience in 1995. I do think that if its strong visual personality had been married with an equally strong mechanical heart, it would still be a fantastic experience today!

I had the random urge to replay Vectorman when Jenny started binging through a couple other Blue Sky Studios games, and I'm pretty glad I did. I have a soft spot for both games and always like seeing how my thoughts waver as I play them.

Vectorman 1 not my fav but it's pretty cool.

Earth got fucked over by capitalism and global warming, so humans escape earth Wall-E style and use the worst capitalist trick in the bag to fix it: AI Robots. Exactly what you think would happen, happens; one of them - Raster, - gets shit-faced, turns evil, brainwashes all the others to be evil, and now you gotta kick their asses. A fun setup that the gameplay manages to piggy-back onto the game's otherwise contra-esque gameplay; throwing quarterly encounters against Raster at you, with special mechanics to each fight and uniquely-stunning graphics-processing tricks.

That's kind of VM's bag; visual wizardry. Its defining characteristic above all is its animation and technical prowess. Vector and the majority of the game's baddies are animated with positional tweening - dubbed 'Vector Piece Animation'. While certainly not new at the time of release, it's utilized so extensively and effectively across its runtime. Where other games typically used interpolation to animate basic bosses or machines with multiple rugged parts to save on animation frames, VM uses it to justify giving its characters hundreds of delightfully smooth animation shots and poses. Vector himself is the shining star, expressing so much flexibility and personality through all his enormous suite of animations. The kickback and tweening isn't a second-rate slapjob, either: It serves each the game's feeling of responsiveness and impact extremely well, with a lasting dose of intricacy, vibrancy and elasticity. If nothing else, VM is worth a play for just how meaty and impactful its gamefeel is.

Controls are another factor that makes Vectorman extremely fun. VM has a good feel to running and shooting, though he feels slippery at first. 60 FPS is generally well maintained through the game despite all the moving parts. And I swear to God, this dude has THE best double-jump in gaming. The air you get off of it is insane, you can chain downward shots to reduce your downward momentum, AND the jump doubles as a hitbox. By mastering the timing, you can use double-jump jets to absolutely eviscerate most bosses. And speaking of, boss fights are generally good in this game compared to most western games from then. Nothing too monotonous - just shoot the dudes and don't let them shoot you. They have fun designs, and attack patterns that are basic but easy to vibe to.

Once you step outside the aesthetic trimmings though, VM isn't admittedly much more than another run-of-the-mill mid platformer. Stages do that 'linear-but-also-open-ended' thing that everyone poorly mimicked from Sonic. Platforming challenges aren't very prevalent, with movement just being your way of getting from point A to point B. But it's also not very combat focused, either - the enemy variety is incredibly sparse, and their patterns usually boil down to 'stand in a safe spot and shoot me until I die.' It doesn't help that once you get further, the enemy variety doesn't really expand as you progress, nor do they make you feel adequately intimidated. The OVERWHELMING majority of foes are these annoying-ass stretchy grey turrets that snipe you as soon as they pop on screen. Also there's copious amounts of screen crunch, so you best be taking it slow through these levels until you memorize the enemy spawn points.

But I think the worst thing going for the game overall is pacing: The front half of the game has some scattered weak points, and the back half is just really boring. After stage 1, you get an overly-fast train boss that's guaranteed to kill you multiple times until you figure out what the hell's going on. Stage 3 is a dreadful water stage that has you impishly wading through tides in a straight line for several minutes, followed by stage 4's slow upwards ascent through MORE water. Things pick up from there, until stage 8, when you get thrown a palette swap of stage 1, and then stages 10 and 12 throw the same shtick at you. The levels between and after those are fine, but there are so few new ideas during them. You really start to feel fatigue and that second half, and you just want the game to end already. It's clear that all the passion poured into designing the animation tools came at the cost of level design and pacing. This weird polish distribution also affects the game's difficulty, as most of the game's challenging beats are frontloaded in that first half. You also gotta collect health powerups to make it through most levels, so like, you're inherently forced to take fewer risks in those early levels.

VM is a really cool product of its time that became oddly prophetic when bad indie devs aped interpolation as a cheap way to animate 2D characters with cardboard-ass cutout limbs. I wouldn't really recommend it or call it a 16-bit highlight, but I come back to it extremely often.

Vector man is a cleaning robot left on earth to help clean up all the pollution while the humans are gone. An AI fuses with a nuclear Bomb and becomes the villain Warhead. Warhead causes a robot uprising and its up to Vectorman to stop it. Go through sixteen levels destroying robots collection points, power up, and cool transformations. The graphics look really cool with this 3d sort of look. This game was an instant hit in the 90s and is still very fun. Cool bosses and great music. Check it out.

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