Vectorman

This is by far the best-looking Sega genesis game as it's a combination of traditional 2d sprites with digitised environments meshed together with a beautiful colour pallet. Thankfully there's a solid game in this presentation as a game like this would normally lack substance and rely heavily on its visual appeal.

The controls and story are rather basic as the former combines platforming with a 2d shooter whilst the latter is basically the first half of Pixar’s wall e if wall e were a murderous robot rather than a lovestruck hopeless romantic. Apart from the visuals, it's the game play that really stands out here as our hero faces a bunch of other robots that have been reprogrammed to destroy the earth rather than heal it (making this a potential prequel to wall e) which include some pretty intense boss battles even for the sixteen-bit era. To add to the tension of these fights, there's a time limit to complete each level before our hero self-destructs, with checkpoints only becoming available by destroying certain TV sets in the levels, these TVs could also carry powerups to assist Vectorman in his quest to save our planet from the evil robot uprising, which evens out the intense difficulty that the areas would otherwise be. As this game takes place on a post-apocalyptic earth, you can expect the environments to be filled with run down industrial waste complete with literal garbage that makes up the bulk of each level. Like I said earlier, this game has a beautiful art direction, which makes the fact that each level consists of literal junk populating the landscape all the more impressive which goes to show how good of a job the developers did in making a literal junk planet and its inhabitants look visually appealing.

It's a basic game all things considered, however it's presentation and just how fun the game play is easily makes it my favourite genesis game in its library.

One of the prettiest Genesis games, clearly Sega being sick of hearing about how pretty DKC was in every magazine for the past year and change. Uncomplicated and linear, but tons of fun, creative within its limited lane, fast moving with great level design and excellent balance of platformer and shooting mechanics. Only real issue is that it's somewhat short and there isn't too much of an incentive system to encourage replay.

Vectorman is another relic of Sega's past, coming near the end of the Genesis' lifespan. Vectorman is a pretty hard as nails platormer/shooter from the mid 90s and was one of those Sega vs Nintendo games, except at this point Genesis was beginning to show signs of wearing down. After Sonic 3 in 94, it was pretty downhill for Sega in terms of quality exclusives. The golden age of Sega from 91-94 was coming to an end and SNES was beginning to show signs of being the clear winner of that generations console wars. I mean sure Sega had some fun games and I never even owned an SNES as a kid, I had a Genesis when I was a little kid growing up until I eventually accidentally broke it and then had it replaced with a PS1 a few months after. But as I got older I realized SNES just had a much wider variety and more innovative mechanics, I mean SNES game us Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Star Fox, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Street Fighter II, Earthbound, Link to the Past, Mega Man X, and I could keep going. All these SNES games innovated different genres and still continue to have influence on game design to this day, where Genesis had Sonic, Earthworm Jim, and Gunstar Heroes, and I guess if you want to include Streets of Rage and Phantasy Star IV. But for the most part Genesis was lacking the quality/quantity of variety of SNES, RPGs were extremely lacking on Genesis and so were adventure games.

But as for Vectorman, its just a pretty generic platformer, it plays pretty basic, you shoot enemies in your way and have to reach the end of each stage but with a timer. There are a couple of bosses which are mostly frustrating and hard to dodge, and the game is very unforgiving. There's one boss stage that only gives you 30 seconds to kill a boss and you have to spin around a room and can only hurt the boss through a small hole in a wall that constantly rotates. Vectorman just has some poor design choices and it pales in comparison to platformers that came before it. Plus its also fairly short and can be beaten in around 1 hour. There's a reason Vectorman has been forgotten and its best left in those Sega Genesis collections for people to be reminded that Sega really had a lot of lackluster games in its heyday.