Eventually I will review a game or two that I do not enjoy, today shall not be that day though as I review one of the most unsung heroes to ever be on any console. Vectorman was a side scroller/shoot em up, released back in October 24th 1995, and was developed by Blue Sky Software. Before I go any farther I am sure you are asking yourself….who in the fuck is Blue Sky Software? Well I would be lying if I said this is the only game that they made because they actually kicked alot of ass for the Sega Genesis back in its hay-day. They made the Sega adaptation of Dick Tracy, The Little Mermaid, Jurassic Park (I am still awaiting for Skizzard to do a review for that.) and they even made the Ren & Stimpy Show: Stimpy’s Invention which will be featured on the Genocide in the future. Blue Sky also did not get alot of credit for the games they made due to them not putting their names on the “Starting” screens, they were vigilantes for the industry…when other companies had to make a big deal about the games they made, Blue Sky was like “Well we made a game….it’s not that big of a deal.” It is sad to admit that the only good games they really made were on the Sega and have since folded but dammit its the fact that they did what they did which is fantastic.
This man is made of green balls of steel, oh by the way read the bottom left of the case. If you were a bad enough dude to beat this game in 1995 you could have won 25 thousand dollars, which I assume would be used to purchase a bunch of trash bags and save the world like Vectorman would have wanted.
Alright back story for our hero Vectorman. In 2049 earth was full of so much random ass trash because of us humans that we decided to try and go to other planets to live their permanently. While doing so we we left a bunch of “orbots” to clean up our mess that we had created stemming from humans being massive dicks and not caring what we pollute. Now for the villain…there was a big orbot that took care of the operation by watching over everything and his name was Raster. Raster somehow through another orbot, got connected to a nuclear warhead and slowly drove himself insane, and tries to become a dictator kinda like Castro, and changes his name to the more appropriate Warhead. Mind you he does this while the humans are gone, so he plans on committing genocide on all of them when they decide to return back…so technically Warhead is more Adolf Hitler, than Fidel Castro. Vectorman being away during all of this while taking sludge to the Sun, comes back and realizes that every orbot is now being controlled by Warhead and he does not want to comply. Vectorman takes it upon himself to tell Warhead to shove it up his ass and save the earth…while still apparently doing menial orbot slave clean up duties.
Pictured the robotic equivilent of Adolf Hitler.
I will give them credit, they came up with something original which I applaud them for and it’s not some cute bullshit story either. It equates to the fact that the world is full of people that trash whatever they want, and then it punches you in the face with robotic genocide. As far as this game is concerned its best thing by far is the graphics. The graphics were done in a pre-rendered style which was capable of making the games look like they were going far past the limits of the system, Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct also did this for their games. Every single thing in this game is pretty, yes graphics at the time were not so great at the time this game was released, think about it Starfox’s graphics were said to have been top notch when they came out so compared to that game this game is nothing short of beautiful. The animation with the characters is perfect, the way they react is the way they should and looks just like how the reaction would actually be if somehow this were to have actually happened. Throughout the entire experience this game maintains a steady 60 frames per second I shit you not.The backgrounds are very artistic and look post apocalyptic and yes I know technically the apocalypse has not happened in the story, but when robots are willing to kill everyone/thing on earth I am pretty sure this is how shit would go down as far as looks are concerned.
This game controls amazingly, and Blue Sky really tried to test the limits of the Genesis and they did a damn good job. I rarely have a review where I will not go into controls too much, but honestly the game is damn near perfect for the kind of game it is so I have nothing more to add to it. The difficulty on this game is legendary. If you know anyone who has played this you will have no trouble hearing a good lashing out about how this game tries to tear your soul apart. Each stage has a crazy ass amount of enemies that you must mow down to get to the bosses and even when you manage to do that the bosses don’t fuck around either. If you get the chance I suggest looking up the random bosses due to the sweet names and design they have, such as Clockwork a robot with gears that spits random shit at you. They do have three different type of difficulty levels which are “Lame, Wicked, and Insane”. If you play on lame you will get alot of lives and a shit ton more health, compared to the other two and honestly you might as well play on Lame so you can enjoy the game even more because odds are you will still have your ass handed to you on a silver platter. This is one of the harder games for the Genesis and after a minute of playing you will completely understand what I mean by that statement. If you do find it too difficult then just pause the game and hit “C, A, Left, Left, A, C, A, B” which spells out “Call A Cab” and you can zip right to the boss of a stage. The one gripe I have with the game is the soundtrack which most of it sucks if your going to do a techno soundtrack you better hire Yuzo Koshiro of Streets of Rage fame. To this day this game is one of my personal favorites for the Genesis.
Who would have thought that Sega would try to make a sequel to this for the Playstation 2 a few years after Blue Sky shutdown, only to pull the product because the fans were super pissed that it was a third person shooter instead of the standard game they were used to from Vectorman 1 and 2. They also changed his looks to be more appealing…so they made him Master Chief. I swear if Sega had allowed that to be made I probably would not be writing about how badass the Genesis is constantly due to the amount of hatred I would have boiling in my blood.
Honestly Sega…what the fuck.
If you like games that have a different feel and story to them then this one is for you, to me its what would happen if you combined 1984 and a robotic apocalypse together. If you have never played this game then you need to get the rom from here because you will not be disappointed in the least. This game has a 91 percent rating of approval across the Internet, and if the Internet likes it can it really be that bad?
