Protector is, in my opinion, the greatest game ever created for the Vectrex. It is a clever, stunning imagining of Defender for a system that maybe had a reputation of poor arcade ports and what my father used to call “flickery shit.” I was considering the other games that you could make an argument for as “best of” for the Vectrex, and one of the first games I thought of was Mine Storm.
I am not going to do a specific write-up for Mine Storm as part of this project, but Mine Storm was burned into the Vectrex. It comes up if you turn your Vectrex on with no cartridge loaded. You are never more than one yank away from playing Mine Storm. ARE there any other systems where the first game made for it ended up being the best game?
You can make an argument that Super Mario 64 – a launch title – was the best Nintendo 64 game. There are two Legend of Zelda games that have an equally stellar reputation. I am not going anywhere with this, other than mentioning that Protector flipped my little personal ranking here. It was released about 20 years after the Vectrex debuted and it is a “homebrew” game, but it’s the greatest Vectrex game I have ever played. This IS Defender, but expertly ported. Protector is doing things that I think raised the reputation of the Vectrex to all who saw it before and after. It is the smoothest game possible and certainly changed minds on what the Vectrex is capable of. I don’t really recall much flicker from homebrew games that were created after Protector.
Flicker. Let’s talk about it. The Vectrex is constantly telling its beam to draw lines with varying intensities at different co-ordinates. I assume that excites the phosphorous coating of its tube, and that once energy has been transferred, it acts the same as a CRT. But now that I write that, I don’t know for certain. Flicker comes into play when there isn’t enough time to refresh the beam that is supposed to be on the screen, to the point where a human can detect it. The light is going to get fainter, of course, after the tube is struck, until it is struck again. The worst offender that I can recall is the “sitting duck shooter” known as Bedlam, which has, honestly, just a few lines being drawn on the screen. Nothing like this.
Controls are such: Vectrex analog stick handles moving up and down. First button is reverse. Second is thrust. Third is fire and fourth is smart bomb. It is not quite as intuitive as a proper Defender cabinet – a game I need to write up – but it’s close. Part of me wonders if one of the important features of a Defender/Stargate game is “complicated” controls. Protector has all of the ship enemies that Defender features, varying intensity in line drawing to make the inevitable “mutants” look like they are shaking with rage at you, and of course humanoids that drop properly when you shoot the lander that tries to suck them up.
My poor photography doesn’t do the game justice; Protector has everything. I once called it one of the 5 most impressive acts in the history of computer science, I am not sure if that still holds up. It’s got to be below the moon landing and GPS, but getting this level of performance out of the Vectrex blows my mind.
I don’t know if cartridges are going to be around forever, so let me say that if you think you are ever going to get a Vectrex – go ahead and snag a copy of Protector.
You can buy a copy of Protector, along with “Y.A.S.I.” (Yet Another Space Invaders) here.