Obscure Game Review: Bug!

Hello dear readers and welcome back to the game room. Today we'll take a look at an odd yet fun little title for a console that had a distinct lack of just those, at least in America: the Sega Saturn. Ah, the Saturn. It may have received a pretty lukewarm reception here in the USA, but it did have a few quirky games among its mostly lackluster library. Among them was a weird little platformer called Bug!, which was one of the very few Saturn games I played when it was new.

As I mentioned in my review of Knuckles’ Chaotix for the 32X, my good friend always had all the Sega consoles when they were brand new, by virtue of his father working for Sega at the time. As such, I got to play a lot of these games in their heyday way back when, and one such game was Bug!. Though us young, easily distractible children often abandoned games pretty quickly when we couldn’t get very far, Bug! was one of those games that we persistently played despite never being able to reliably advance very deeply into it. Many years later, upon amassing a sizable video game collection and obtaining my very own Saturn, I procured a copy of Bug! and set out to complete a long forgotten game that had been in the back of my mind for years. And I was quite surprised by how even to this day, the game still holds up quite well. It’s certainly no Super Mario 64, but I think it’s a solid adventure-platformer in its own right and is definitely one of the better Saturn-exclusive titles. So that being said, let’s check it out.

The game begins with a pretty simple story- our protagonist Bug is living peacefully with his insect family, when suddenly a giant black widow spider named Queen Cadavra snatches up his entire family and hauls them off to be eaten. Having escaped certain death, Bug quickly sets out to rescue them, and the adventure begins. Er, I mean, the movie begins.Yeah, one kind of weird aspect about this game is that the entire plot is supposed to be…a movie. As in, all the characters are actually actors filming a movie. Transitions between different levels consist of Bug walking between sets, a director yells “Action!” at the beginning of every level, and even some of the powerups are movie-related (i.e. clapper boards are continues, an invulnerability powerup is called the “stuntbug,” etc.). I never really paid attention to this aspect as a kid, but now it just sort of makes me scratch my head. Why did it need to be a movie? Who knows, and honestly, it doesn’t have much bearing on the actual game other than an odd point of interest.

 The entire game is actually a movie, for some reason. Just go with it.

Anyway, as Bug you must traverse large, semi 3-D environments in search of the end goal all while fighting off armies of various insects. Why do I say semi 3-D you ask? Well, because the 3-D aspect is a bit…shallow. Your movement is restricted to the four cardinal directions- up, down, left and right. As you walk along paths you are “fixed” to the floor, only able to move north/south or east/west at any given moment. Some platforms are kind of free-floating, allowing you to jump either up or down to anything above or below you, but for the most part you’ll be on the aforementioned “fixed” paths. Additionally, Bug and all of the enemy insects you encounter are all sprite-based objects. Still, even without being truly 3D the game still manages to be a lot of fun. Each level is laid out like a gigantic hedge maze, with multiple routes to choose from in order to reach the end goal. There are so many different routes, in fact, that you could probably play a single level dozens of times and never take the same one to reach the end of the stage.

 Very often you'll face junctions such as this one with multiple directions to choose from as you traverse levels.

You'll have to make your way through six different "worlds," each with 3 different stages and a boss fight. The "worlds" differ dramatically, from a grassy field to a desert to a frozen tundra. Along the way you'll encounter a wide variety of insect foes that will try to squash you in your tracks. There's a nice variety in the enemies, and they change accordingly through each overarching world- for example, in the grassy "Insectia" you'll be fighting a handful of common bugs like grasshoppers, snails and bumble bees, whereas in the underwater "Quaria" you'll have to take on moray eels, scuba-diving beetles and killer crabs. Enemies also vary in their attack patterns, as some will simply walk back and forth, others dive bomb you, and still others hurl projectiles like fireballs, electricity and even dung (by dung beetles, of course).

Enemies can be dealt with simply by jumping on them, but it's not always that easy.  Some of them are done away with by one jump, while others require 6, 7, even 8 jumps in order to be defeated. Thankfully, you'll be able to collect a few different powerups that aid in taking on the armies of bugs and such. There's zap, which as its name implies, grants you a short-range but powerful electrical attack. The only problem is that it's limited and tends to run out pretty quickly. However, there's also the spit-glob powerups, which do not run out and can be used until a level ends.

 The "zap" powerup is quite useful, but is limited.

These globs come in four different colors; the green glob is the standard one, allowing you to spit one glob at enemies at a longer range than the zap attack. Each glob equals one "jump damage" to an enemy, meaning that you can defeat them from a distance by jumping and then launching spit balls at them. Red globs give you a double shot spit, while rare blue globs give you a triple shot. Finally, there's purple globs that bounce along the ground until they hit something. Spit globs do not appear until the third world but once they do, green ones are pretty much given at the beginning of every stage from there on.

By jumping and spitting at enemies, you'll be able to safely attack from a distance.

 As I mentioned before, there's the "stuntbug" invulnerability powerup, and there's also a plethora of extra lives and continues scattered about in levels, usually in hidden, blocked off or hard to reach areas. In addition to all of that, there are a few large golden coins that are usually hidden throughout levels which can be used when collected to enter bonus stages in each level. These bonus stages will allow you the chance to gain an extra life or two and consist of various challenges like avoiding falling boulders, bouncing along mushrooms, and even racing Sega's very own mascot Sonic the Hedgehog himself! 

I didn't think a bug would be able to go toe to toe with the "world's fastest hedgehog"...

Finally, there's also a multitude of gems to collect in each level. Collecting them won't do anything for you in the levels themselves, but if you manage to grab 100 or more on all three levels of the world, after the boss battle you'll be able to enter a bonus game for a chance to earn an extra continue, which you will most likely need toward the latter stages of the game. Speaking of boss battles, they are pretty intense in scale. You'll have to go up against gigantic monsters ranging from a huge spikey-tounged iguana beast to a massive octopus that tosses fish at you (which, by the way, you'll have to swat back at him with a tennis racket. Give this game points for originality, if nothing else).

Just one of the boss fights in the game. Is it just me or does that thing look like the Pokémon gyrados?

The graphics are fantastic for the time and still hold up well today. As I mentioned both Bug and his enemies are sprites, but they are very nicely detailed and fluently animated. There's also a few short FMV cutscenes every now and then, which might have been impressive back in the day but suffer from that very mid/late-90's 3D animation look that isn't all that appealing these days. Like I said though, these are pretty scant and don't reflect on the actual gameplay. Each world has its own unique color scheme, fitting the scenery well- for instance, the desert levels are all filled with rustic-looking browns and oranges. The music is pretty good too. Nothing spectacular, but it has a few catchy tunes, such as the theme for Reptilia and Splot.

While everything I've described probably sounds pretty straightforward, the game is definitely not a walk in the park as far as difficulty. The early stages are certainly pretty easy, but as you progress the platforming aspect starts getting in your way, big time. The problem here is with the controls, which are also the biggest flaw this game has. It's a little hard to describe unless you've held a Saturn controller and played it for yourself, but basically the major issue is with jumping from platform to platform. Like I said before, your movement is entirely restricted to one of the four cardinal directions, but some platforms will be moving three dimensionally in space. That means that if you aren't very precise with your jumps, you'll miss and end up falling to your death.

There's also parts where some of the jumps you have to make border on absurd. Take this part for example: in certain areas there are a few giant slingshot-looking things where you'll have to press down on the D-pad and let go, allowing yourself to be flung forward. Sounds simple enough, but in other areas you have to slingshot yourself AND bounce on enemies in the air in order to make your mark. Then there's parts like the one pictured below in which you'll have to bounce on TWO enemies moving in different directions than one another. You need to wait until the extremely precise moment in which they both line up in order to safely bounce across and make it to the other side, and this is much easier said than done. This part is pretty late in the game and as far as I remember only occurs once, but it's still a major pain and unless you are absolutely perfect, you'll just die here over and over and over again.

You have to slingshot yourself across the gap, lined up perfectly, and with extremely precise timing land on both these flying bugs to safely cross to the other side. I've never been able to do it myself.

And therein lies another problem. I can't really blame this one on the game itself as much as I can on the Saturn's limited technical capacities, but there isn't much a save feature for this one. It's there, but it only saves automatically when you complete all three stages and the boss fight of a world. This is also assuming that your Saturn's lithium battery is still functioning (which, unless you've replaced it recently, probably isn't) AND that you have enough spare RAM to save the game (unless you have an external memory card for the Saturn, which to my recollection weren't nearly as widely available as those for its rivals the PS1 or N64). A password system probably would've been ideal in this case, but the developers chose this weird save system that doesn't entirely work in your favor, especially due to the aforementioned saving issues. That being said, if you are far along in the game and the jumping part that I mentioned before starts frustrating the hell out of you, you're likely to just give up and not look back; however, more often than not, this would mean that you'd have to start the game all over again if you power off the console.

For this reason, I've never actually completed this game myself. The crazy jump is in the first stage of the penultimate world, and unfortunately I have never been able to make it past there. I would love to one day, but right now this game simply remains an unbeaten and oft-forgotten relic of my childhood. A sequel was made but unfortunately was vastly inferior to the first, both in overall quality and charm. The Saturn died shortly thereafter and with it, Bug! died too. It's a shame because I would've liked to see a true-to-life fully 3D addition to the series, but sadly this was not to pass.

Bug! may have been a weird concept on a third place console that pretty much failed here in the US, but it's still a great game and one of the very few, in my opinion, that might just make the Sega Saturn worth it. It's certainly not a rare game by any stretch of the imagination, so if you've got a Sega Saturn sitting in a box in your attic, you might want to dust it off and plug it in if you get a hold of this game. If you're a fan of classic platforming action, it's got just about everything you'd want and more.