Vortex

Vortex is a 1994 action game for the Super Nintendo, developed by the British studio Argonaut Games and published by Electro Brain. The record lists it as a single-player title with side-on, platform-style framing.

Argonaut is the essential piece of context here. The studio worked with Nintendo on the supplementary graphics chip that shipped inside certain cartridges, and Vortex is one of the small handful of games that used it. That is why a console designed in 1990 is pushing polygonal models around the screen instead of drawn sprites.

The technique came at a price. The frame rate is low, the models carry very little detail and environments are suggested rather than fully described. Vortex consequently still splits opinion between people who read it as a demonstration of what sixteen-bit hardware could manage with chip assistance, and people for whom the hesitant motion simply gets in the way of playing.

Mechanically it is built around transformation. Switching between several forms with different movement rules was an unusual structure in a period when most action games gave you one character with one fixed set of abilities, and it turns each encounter into a question of choosing the right shape for the situation in front of you.

Vortex makes most sense today when read against what surrounded it. In 1994 polygonal graphics were migrating to new consoles while sixteen-bit machines tried to keep pace using extra silicon inside cartridges, a short and inventive dead end this game preserves.

The Vortex listing on OldGame.cz carries the release year, the studio and publisher credits and screenshots that show off that unusual polygonal look.