GameWTFs.com

As you'll recall, before this month I'd never talked about a SNES game whose title started with the letter I, or the letter Q. But with those two letters down, we're left with only one remaining letter, and my run of the SNES alphabet will be complete:

Sadly, there were only a few SUPER FX SNES games out there, and while Star Fox is the one people remember, the other ones were, well...pretty much forgotten. Let's just say that you know what's coming when a SUPER FX cartridge is amongst the cheapest in the store.

But, what is this Vortex of which you speak? Well, I think I can sum it up in one picture:

Yup, it's a "blocky 3-D robot stomps around, occasionally turning into jet or tank"-em-up. Here's some more pictures, for, well, "zest":

But what about the gameplay itself? Well, it takes a bit of training to figure it out. The "Morph" button-presses are kind of ridiculous -- why hold the "L" elbow buttons and press another key to change mode, when you could just have a pause-menu or "Select" button trigger changes?

Combine that with the fact that Level 1 starts you off with your robot MARCHING THROUGH SPACE...

...and I found it a little hard to get sucked in to the world of Vortex*

...the good mecha people at ElectroBrain Corp and Argonaut Software Ltd know about the game's clunky controls and off-putting level design, and they have hit upon the obvious solution:

Yes, no longer are you limited to the dry introductory story of the game,

Instead, you can enjoy four or five pages of an intensely 1990s comic book to give you an entirely disjointed back story. You might have thought Vortex was about your polygon-bot and anime-radio-lady blasting enemy polygon-bots or polygon-ships, but no! Instead it's about THIS almost Shakespearean clash of ideology and intrigue:

Or at least, it's about having huge hair and being extremely shouty.

Well, as I did at the beginning of the article, I think I can sum up the rest of this thing with one representative picture: