Vectorman 2

vectorman is an interesting note in sega's short lived, sort of one-sided 90s feud with nintendo. perhaps on the same level of alex kidd being the designated reactionary mascot to what nintendo was doing, being the center piece of mostly mediocre to bad games in response to genre defining software on the NES, but there's not a lot of people talking about vectorman as a rival to donkey kong country, as it's commonly posited.

despite this, vectorman 1 (and 2 to a bit lesser extent) has received a better accessibility treatment than a lot of other run-and-guns on the console since sega has the rights, with several re-releases across the dreamcast, gamecube, 2000s PCs, xbox 360 / PS3, smartphones, steam, and the genesis mini 1. it's got some interesting ideas as a run-and-gun, primarily with a mix of bosses that use entirely different modes of play that are only used once and then never seen again, alongside a double jump that deals waaaaaay more damage than your gun, if you're brave enough to put the enemy right underneath your feet without actually touching them and getting damaged. it's also quite a looker, and one of the few games that use the GEMS sound driver that not only avoids the stereotypical genesis TWANG but sounds pretty damn good!

so on the surface, vectorman 2 is more of the same thing, which makes sense considering it was released only about 12 months after the original. that's not a lot of time for the same team to cook up new ideas that would rock the genesis and the gaming public that didn't already play the first one, even if they started IMMEDIATELY after the launch of the first game, which they probably didn't. especially since the competition in the united states was the playstation 1 that had already been on the market for a year, and the nintendo 64 which had just released with the critically acclaimed super mario 64 pilotwings 64. vectorman 2 is pretty much part of the swan song for the genesis, really. only four games released after it that were not an update to a sports game or a compilation cart (pinocchio, virtua fighter 2 MD, the lost world: jurassic park, frogger), and it's the last sequel game to anything wholly original to the genesis. i also think that the timing of this whole thing is part of the problem, but i'll get to that. lemme show why there is a problem in the first place.

bad level, or bad player?

don't get me wrong, it's not like this game is terrible unsalvagable trash, it's definitely not sword of sodan 2. it just has a lot of little things (or... medium sized things that irritate the hell out of me) that lead me to believe there was a huuuge time crunch.

take a look at the map for level 3 (i'm not gonna embed it because it's really tall). it's a level that takes place in a swamp at night where you have to climb upwards using the branches of five very tall trees, and as the screenshot above shows, it's super dark! and also requires leaps of faith to traverse between trees 3 / 4, or 4 / 5! even with a double jump, this sort of platforming isn't really in vectorman's wheelhouse. it may have been why in the first game, two of the three vertical levels are about falling from the top to the bottom, and the only climbing level is more generous with its distribution of platforms, and also takes place underwater, which is helpful rather than harmful since it makes vectorman fall much slower without impacting his horizontal movement.

so, a harder climbing level in the pretty much exact same spot in the level order as the first game. but it's not just harder because of the level design. you're often stuck jumping from branch to branch and hoping there aren't any enemies on the platform you want to land on (if you can even see it before you start the jump), because GOD HELP YOU if there is! if you touch an enemy while airborne, you'll get sent flying in any direction other than the one you want to go, often threading the needle between trees right back to the ground floor! and if the structure of the level wasn't bad enough, not doing satisfactory exploration of the vertical climbing level where one wrong move can send you all the way back to the beginning can make the rest of the game much more difficult for you!

the reason why, is this thing. that's a max health pickup. they were also in the first game, and both entries usually put them in out-of-the-way places to incentivize exploration, and these powerups are 1000% worth finding. you pick it up and your health gets refilled and extended by one extra hit point. you start at 4, and the max is 10. in the first game, each level would only have one of these, if there was one at all. it's also the only thing that can constitute as a permanent upgrade, a rather helpful thing to make the player feel "more powerful" as they appropriately go through the game.

JUST the tree level in vectorman 2 has THREE max health pick-ups! and two of them are close together! and despite all of this, it can still be really easy to just want to get the fuck out of this annoying level and miss all of them!!! cause that's what happened to me when i was an idiot kid attempting to play this game several times on sonic mega collection! and idiot kid me didn't get much farther than that, i only sat down and fully attempted at completing it this year lmao. it helps to go into the rest of the game with 7 max health instead of 4, because there's not a lot of space on the screen as you're running forward until you run face-first into an enemy and get knocked backwards like a chump. but it's just one level! there's a whole 80% of the game left, right?

upwards from here?

yeah, i guess the rest of the game is "better" than the tree level, it is up from here. you have the direction correct, but if you don't have enough magnitude you're not gonna make vectorman 2 a fun experience. there isn't another level that's "bad" enough that it deserves a micro-level analysis like the tree level, and you may think that's a bit unfair of me to front load this discussion of the game with one massive complaint, but that's exactly what my experience with the game was, just one bad level at the very beginning that tanked the entire experience until it was over.

it doesn't help that there were a bunch of little things that made me question why the team decided to do things certain ways, mostly related to the level design. let's jump from level 3 to level 6 real quick.

this is the exit to level 6, which you fall into by shooting the ground out from underneath the white glowy thingies (photons, the equivalent of rings / coins / etc.). once you fall in there, you can't leave, so the only things left to do are grab the power up, and / or leave the stage. the powerup is a time bonus, which add 2 minutes to the stage timer. so, like. why? why purposefully put a 2 minute time bonus right next to the exit? is it just to give you an extra 2000 points on your time bonus? was there supposed to be more level after this? it's not the only time it happens, there are a few other levels that put time bonuses right next to the exit (to it's credit, there are some diverging paths that go away from the exit, but they usually don't go very far until dead-ending), the example in the penultimate non-boss level is almost just as bad because it's a completely flat track where you're most likely gonna reach the exit about 5-10 seconds after the 2 minute time bonus!

it's not like the levels are that long, either. in general, this game gives you waaaay more time than is seemingly necessary to complete a stage. level 17 sticks out the most, considering it's the only level with a boss in the entire game that doesn't stick you directly in front of the boss at the very beginning. you have a very small climbing section to do involving destructible terrain, which you're already familiar with cause you had to do 2 levels of it prior to this point. but you get TWENTY MINUTES to climb up and kill the boss? why??? it took me less than 60 seconds taking my time liberally to get to the top, and then about another 80 seconds to kill the boss. i would find it incredibly hard to believe any first time player, or play tester, or anyone would have taken even half the time limit to finish the level. it's obviously not a game breaking thing to happen, but it comes off as unpolished when stacked on top of weird powerup placement and lackluster bosses and level design, in my humble onion.

the bosses in general are a big downgrade from the first game. gone are the short boss levels with alternate control modes like day 2: metalhead, day 7: rock 'n' roller and day 11: stayin' alive, and their replacements are bosses that come in two flavors:

• airborne bosses that launch projectiles at you while moving around slowly (except the final boss, which is completely stationary but is invulnerable from the bottom half of it's sprite)
• ground bosses that dive into the ground, reappear somewhere else, and launch projectiles at you. one of them even walks towards you before diving into the ground!

the latter type of boss is easily cheesable, since you get just enough i-frames when hit that you can repeatedly walk into the boss and reset your i-frame counter without taking extra damage while still getting opportunities to shoot.

the alternate control modes aren't completely gone in vectorman 2, but none of them have bosses. the first one is the very first level, where the intro cutscene shows vectorman piloting his barge on his way to throw excess trash into the sun when it gets shot out of the sky by a missile ([CinemaSins voice] "the main villain is a bunch of mutated insects, so the insects have access to ICBMS, i guess? -ding-). the game starts with you controlling vectorman as he falls slowly out of the sky in his helicopter morph, which is an auto-scroller that ends in about 45 seconds unless you hit the brakes and stall in mid-air, where the only thing to do is shoot one of nine bugs and collect coins rings photons as you fall. it's not terribly exciting, but you land in the dark swamp that sets the stage for levels 2 through 4, so it gives off the first impression that the levels will have some sonic 3-style transitions and coherency. pretty ambitious! too bad it doesn't actually do that ever again and all the other levels just sort of crash into each other! right after the dark forested area, you go right into a volcano-filled lava hellscape! which is fine, i'm not trying to say it shatters my suspension of disbelief, but it looked like the team wanted to try to do something that they didn't get the chance to fully put a bow on.

the only other alternate gameplay modes are levels 19 and 20 with the tank morph (which is... meh, it's fun to blow up bugs with mortar shells but that's all there is to do), and in levels 8 / 10 / 12 which puts vectorman on rollerskates that make him move faster horizontally, and that's about it. also each of the three levels look and operate the same, to the point where it could have been one long, uninterrupted level that would have been slightly less uninteresting. they're even the same length, so i can superimpose all three on top of each other with minimal effort! and even if you've played the game before, i bet you can't tell which level is which! unless you're some sort of sicko speedrunner for this game, in which case i still have my doubts.

"more" vs. "better"

features that were in the original that were not implemented well (or, at all) in the sequel, level design that is either repetitive or poor, and bosses that divorce themselves from the actual cool mechanics that this game has to offer. sounds like a stereotypical sequel that lost track of the plot, huh?

actually, one more thing about the bosses. the game gives you several alternate guns to use from powerups, and they're mostly pretty satisfying to kill shit with, since they're either full-auto fire hoses, or huge projectiles that pierce enemies or bounce around when they hit walls. it's probably the most satisfying the games gunning ever gets, outside of stomping on enemies with your double jump successfully and OHKOing them. BUT! they have very limited ammunition, and spraying-and-praying will usually make each weapon last only about 10 seconds before you run out of ammo and go back to the default gun. and to cap it off, each boss is in it's own separate level that has no powerups, and even if you finish the previous level with an alternate gun, it takes it away when you go to the next level! you're never going to fight a boss with anything other than your default gun! and that sucks! and that didn't happen in the first game, because levels that had actual... level, to them ended in bosses! the bosses weren't relegated to their own special level for no reason!

i lied, it probably was done for a reason.

i'm not exactly sure how long it took to develop the first vectorman, the earliest available prototype with a date is 5 months before release, which is in what i would call a convincing beta phase. there is an interview with a staff member credited with working on the concept of vectorman (and credited level designer of the second game), Jason Weesner, celebrating the first game's 25th anniversary where he recounts how sega was impressed with an amiga tech demo from 1989 showing off vector ball graphics and thought it would be a good method to compete against the "recently released donkey kong country" (1994-08-21, in the U.S.), so let's be generous and call it about 14 months. and it only has 16 levels (plus one bonus level), so when compared to vectorman 2's 25 levels, there's about 150% more game that got developed in about 85% (in the absolute best case scenario, remember, in reality it was probably about ~50%) of the time. even if you have a percentage of the game that's reusable like the general jump-n-shoot movement engine and the sound driver, that's still like making the same game again, making sure not to copy too much homework from your past self.

except that there isn't "really" 25 levels in the same sense that a level from the first game can be defined as. time for me to pull out graphs and charts!

to explain this thoroughly, this graph i masterfully created over the span of 300 billable hours plots out what each kind of level is in both vectorman games.

• a red circle is a "normal level", defined by me as a level where there is a beginning and an end without a boss to fight in it, simple enough
• a green square is a "normal level" that has a boss at the end of it. vectorman 2 arguably does not have any of these, but i will count level 17 as one even though it is very short to traverse, because you spawn in about 100 feet away from the boss arena, rather than directly in front of the boss
• a blue triangle is a level where you spawn directly in front of the boss, regardless of whether or not there is a special gimmick attached to the method of play. in vectorman 1, all levels that spawn you directly in front of the boss have these special gimmicks except for the final boss, which is big enough that you spawn in front of him and need to climb up lawn chairs and roof shingles spinning around in a tornado that constitutes his entire lower body

first things first, there are only 22 levels in vectorman 2, not 25. there are three bonus levels that you enter by collecting enough photons in particular levels (i think it's about 80% of the total in a level?), i wouldn't really count those as "levels", so there's 22. not a huge deal, though. what is a deal is how it achieves this higher number of levels. notice how many more "normal levels" there are in the sequel from the original, especially the giant uninterrupted chain of them smack dab in the middle? notice how there are fewer bosses, 5 compared to the first games 9? let me "correct" the flow of the game if i wanted to make it more like vectorman 1 with bosses at the end of levels instead of in sequestered areas.

the number of levels drops from 22 to 15. that's more or less what the first game's length is. i wouldn't even necessarily call this sort of thing padding, but call it whatever you want, segmenting out things like this has a negative impact on the flow of the game, and how core mechanics like the gun powerups can't be used for the parts of a typical jump-n-shoot where you want to be able to pull out the big guns. it also doesn't help that vectorman 1 reuses / palette swaps tilesets much less often than vectorman 2. levels 8, 10, and 12 in vectorman 1 are palette swaps of level 1 but are often structured differently, and level 12 uses a neat palette cycling trick to add a thunderstorm effect, meanwhile levels in vectorman 2 are generally grouped together into same-type environments, leading to only 10 unique environments, a decrease from what i'd argue is probably around 12. it's all symptoms of a giant time crunch. maybe it could be argued that vectorman 2 would have turned out better if it was given more time, but, in my opinion

vectorman 2 was doomed to fail from the beginning

remember how i said that vectorman 2 was part of the swan song for the genesis in the united states? the first game didn't come out in japan until a package of 8 mega drive games to personal computers in 2000 included vectorman 1 (the next attempt would be the wii virtual console in 2007), and all existing evidence points to the fact that vectorman 2 only came out for it's original hardware in the united states and brazil, since sega of japan and sega of europe probably moved on to the saturn by that point. so you're arguably designed a game for solely the U.S. market this time around.

pop quiz! can you name any wholly sega-owned character circa 1996 (no, NFL quarterback joe montana does not count) that would have been part of a cross-brand promotional campaign for sega and some other unrelated company that isn't part of the sonic franchise?

did you answer vectorman?

i SO wish i could see a better resolution, real-life photograph of this stupid ass oscar meyer display that was meant to have "powerful t.v. support [that would] create outstanding consumer awareness", i really do. this is from that leaked sega of america financials document from a while back, by the way. once you sort the forest from the trees, it's somewhat of an interesting read to see just how badly tom kalinske dropped the ball at sega of america in regards to piloting the direction sega took in the united states. lots and lots of unsold merchandise, although in regards to vectorman, there's a few key points.

the first is this bullet point on the same page as the oscar meyer display. $5,000,000 in 1995 money is quite the chunk of change for advertising on just one game. the second is that sega had, to that point in the fiscal year of 1996 (which i believe for them starts in april, so it would have been ~6 months in to vectorman's time on shelves) sold 335,000 units of vectorman 1 above a projected goal of 150,000, a projected goal of 200,000 sold units for vectorman 2 once it's out on the shelf, and even a projected vectorman 3 planned for the genesis and game gear to be released in september 1998! two months before the release of the dreamcast in japan! that'd be like if sony was still making and publishing first-party games for the PS1 when microsoft is launching the xbox 360!

tom kalinske is betting a lot of Sega FunBux on vectorman to be a smash hit, and from what it looks like to me, this is the reason why vectorman 2 even exists at all. all this advertising spend that "potentially" still had momentum months after release. wouldn't it make sense to have the number 1 marketing focus of your video game company get a sequel if the original sold well? but uh. remember the sega saturn? the saturn that was (in the U.S. market) out for 6 months by the time vectorman 1 came out, and 18 months when vectorman 2 came out? tom, why are you putting your top advertising focus on the previous generation of hardware? i like making poor decisions too, but not on business hours!

and remember, blue sky studios only got 12 months MAX (probably like 6 months let's be honest) to do this! 12 months if they got started right after shipping vectorman 1 to live up to the lofty expectations set by your bosses boss that's getting your product aired to millions of kids watching cartoon network or fox kids in 1996 that are potentially also eyeing the sony playstation, or nintendo's ultra 64. it's gotta be bigger, it's gotta be better, it's gotta put up the good fight against sony AND nintendo! all of this on hardware that came out in 1989 in the united states, while newer, fresher hardware was coming out from multiple companies, including sega themselves, sometimes multiple times a year in the mid-90s! and the end result was just sorta... the same game, again. you can throw all the advertising money you want at a game to try to turn it into a franchise, if there's no more blood to squeeze from the stone, you're just gonna hurt yourself.

it's not like vectorman 2 was a huge evolutionary leap forward for the genre of run-n-guns, or for sega. you can put screenshots of the original and the sequel side-by-side, and if someone hadn't played both of them, they probably wouldn't be able to tell they were different games. you can't say that about sonic 1 and sonic 2, mario 1 and mario 2, or likely any other game franchise that would be earmarked as "#1 advertising focus" for someone billing themselves as "the leader in home interactive video games".

the point

even if the game was fantastic, a hidden gem of the end-of-life genesis catalogue, it'd be like another alien soldier. the sega faithful are well aware of alien soldier (it even came out between vectorman 1 and 2 on the sega channel in the united states as a downloadable title), but it's still a relatively niche thing. vectorman 2 doesn't even come close to the amount of polish and care put into alien soldier, not out of the inability of the devs, but because it shouldn't really exist at all. vectorman 1 is a fine enough game for what it is, and if there was only a vectorman 1, i think it'd be remembered just slightly more fondly. there's only so much you can get from a concept, and when you aren't even given enough time to match the scale of a $5 million advertising budget, the cracks show on the final product.

i've heard it asked at least a few times why was there a vectorman 2 and not a ristar 2, or a comix zone 2 (lol). it was partially because of all this advertising money going into making a franchise out of vectorman that definitely would not have been seen as viable by a bunch of b-school pricks trying that with other games, but i think it's mainly because ristar 2 probably doesn't need to exist. comix zone 2 does not need to exist. vectorman 2 did not need to exist, and yet it does. thus is the nature of most unnecessary sequels.

FINAL GRADE: -1

*grades are on a scale from 3 to -3