I often touch upon how bad an idea it was for Sega to focus on brand new games for the Sega Saturn instead of giving the fans a full fledged 3D Sonic the Hedgehog title. Don’t get me wrong; new franchises are often a breath of fresh air (especially nowadays) but what Sega really needed was an established platformer to spur interest in their console. Bug! was not what they needed. Because the system was limited in its ability to render polygons Sega had little choice but to make this a 3D game with two dimensional gameplay. Considering the fact that the rival console at the time (which was due in just a few months) was offering significantly more impressive 3D titles with full freedom of movement this was a huge mistake. Despite being released to rave reviews Bug! has been mostly forgotten. There’s a good reason for that; it just isn’t very good to be honest. This was not Sega’s finest hour due to its narrow scope.
In Bug! you play as the title character who is, well, he’s a bug. Somehow he’s also a movie star, and the entire premise of this game is that he’s starring in a brand new feature in which his girlfriend has been kidnapped and it’s up to him to rescue her. If you don’t like the theme then I’m sorry because the developers thought they were significantly more clever with it than they actually were. Most of the enemies here are other insects or arachnids (hey close enough, right?) and the end stage markers are cinema props. To make matters worse this game was released at a time when developers were scrambling to create mascots with zany attitude. Our protagonist here is especially goofy and comes complete with several different catchphrases spoken through voice samples. A lot of it is very juvenile by modern standards, and by the end of the game I dreaded hearing the “buuuuuggggg juuuuuice!” proclamation every time I got the dang power-up. There’s really no clever use of the themes here, but this would be totally forgivable were Bug! a fun game. Unfortunately it’s not and the little things add up.
So, as I mentioned earlier, the hardware was limited and hard to develop for and this game needed to make launch. Therefore this isn’t a fully 3D title. The environments are polygonal but the characters are pre-rendered sprites. Bug! plays more similarly to a classic platformer game because you’re limited to a single tile path. The 3D elements come in to play immediately as sometimes the path leads you into the background or the foreground, and often times there are multiple routes for you to choose from. This sounds good on paper but the execution is super poor. The level design is absolutely archaic. I found myself having to retrace my steps and take another route just to hit a switch to unlock the way forward. It can get very annoying after a while. The worst aspect of the game is the moving platforms. It’s a decent mechanic in most platformers if used sparingly, but almost every single one of the eighteen odd stages feature this element not once but multiple times. It messes with the pacing because it slows the action down to a crawl. Needless to say I don’t want to play a game where I spend half the time waiting for a block to move in to place so that you can move on to the next area. The play mechanics are a bit too sloppy to support intricate jumps. It’s difficult to judge any platforming on the vertical plane because of the weird viewpoint. Furthermore the ‘worlds’ here are based on the same old standards. Bug! is painfully ordinary.
Though Bug is an insect the developers couldn’t think of any interesting new mechanics involving the character himself. Your basic attack is jumping on the enemies’ head for example. I usually don’t have any complaints in regards to this element but it seems like the creative minds behind it could have thought up something a bit more interesting. Well that’s not entirely true because our hero does get a few power-ups. One allows him to shock opponents with his antennae, and another lets him spit at foes. In the entire insect kingdom they apparently couldn’t think of anything better which is very telling. Your health is measured by a ‘bug juice’ meter which makes very little sense if you ask me. You can replenish it by grabbing appropriately named cans found within each stage. I tend to look for the positive, and in this case at least it’s not a one hit kills affair. What’s really annoying is the fact that that the hit detection is a bit wonky. I found myself having a tough time dispatching foes and would often take damage. This is often annoying, and the game is already difficult enough without it. It just goes to show how rushed this title is, and had Sega not done a surprise launch of their console I’m sure the developers could have worked out some of the bugs (pun intended).
Bug! is a mess graphically. I can’t imagine this was impressive even at the time of launch considering the fact that the 3DO console was pushing more intense titles years earlier. Let’s start with the colors. Bug! is a drab looking game with a color palette that harkens back to the days of the Super Nintendo. It’s hardly a showcase for the newer hardware. Secondly the digitized characters are a step below those found in Donkey Kong Country which is a bit sad to be honest. There are less frames of animation and it feels like the resolution is surprisingly low. Everything looks very pixelated. To make matters worse the environments feature some of the most blocky textures of the era. It just doesn’t look good. To make matters worse the framerate racks in at about twenty frames per second. Nothing moves smoothly here which is disappointing considering the fact that this is 32-bit hardware we’re talking about. Bug! was very obviously rushed for launch and it shows in every aspect from the bad graphics engine to the lame art style. The soundtrack doesn’t fare much better to be honest. The music sounds about on par with the midi compositions from the previous era, but it tries too hard to be zany. The soundtrack is just completely forgettable, and while the voice samples are clear these snippets are incredibly annoying after a while. Bug! tries way to hard to be ’90s cool’ and that’s a big reason why this hasn’t aged particularly well. It’s an assault on the senses.
Oh man. The Sega Saturn might be one of my favorite consoles of all time, but even I can’t deny that the launch was a mess. Bug! is a poor excuse of a platformer, and I’m embarrassed for Sega that this was one of their headlining titles. At the time of release this title offered absolutely nothing new and its value was purely related to the showcasing of 3D effects. As it stands Bug! is a relic. It’s not a good one however, and you can do better even if you’re just looking at only the titles that launched with the system.
