Hello, brothers (and sisters if there are any)!
Having gotten into gaming fairly much purely on platformers on the NES and SNES, and sucked into the Sega fanbase by the Sega Genesis Model 2 combined with Sonic 3 (which absolutely blew my mind of what a console should look like both in hardware and software alike), I was keeping my eyes open for both companies' next gen offerings. I'd been watching the emergence of pre-rendered material bring sprite work to a whole different level via Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the DKC series, Vectorman, and Super Mario RPG.
While all of the above were insanely cool to me, I still longed to walk into the background and out into the foreground. The BUG! demos on the Saturn trailer loop videos had my eyes glued to the screen. There it was! colorful cartoon-styled pre-rendered platformer that let you do it all! What stands out in my mind from watching those trailers are little things, like watching the simple realistic change of perspective on the level behind him as he rose up to the next platform and (what I mistakenly thought at the time was) the realtime distortion when Bug would jump into a bubble to use for an elevator in the underwater levels.
For whatever inexplicable reason, I've always loved looking at things with a large expanse such as the view from the top of a mountain or an airplane window. Similarly, I've always loved looking at small things as though I were small enough to interact with them - something imprinted in my memory from swimming underwater in the pool, sticking my head up inside the Christmas tree while I decorated it with my family to see what it would be like to live in such a thing, building forts, or playing with G.I. Joes, Mask vs. Venom, Legos, etc. when I was a kid. Anyway - BUG! brought both of those senses of depth together for me in a way that even Sonic 2 or DKC2 had always promised with their parallax backgrounds, but never delivered on with any interactivity.
All of that to say that even though I'd played Daytona USA, Cyber Speedway, Astal, and even Panzer Dragoon Zwei as well as BUG! in Toys 'R' Us | Best Buy and later everything on the Bootleg Sampler many times over (since I had no money left for a game when I could finally afford to buy myself a Saturn - can you say Sega Rally and Virtua Fighter 2 realtime demo loop?), BUG! was the first purchase in my Saturn library and it was money well spent for me.
That first level was just everything that you could have wanted at the time - sun-baked earth, fresh wind-blown grass, cans of Bug Juice met with an unexpected but amusedly welcome yelled endorsement of the same... The level in the background was misted lightly, to give you that impression of looking through a fair bit of atmosphere, and you could see enemies and traps before you walked into them. I was in heaven, my friends. And don't even get me started on the first time you walk up a wall and across a ceiling... just TOO cool. (Yes, you can point out Death Egg Zone in Sonic & Knuckles all you want, but that is cool in a completely different way.)
If, I could go back in time and give the teams at Sega a little advice (that's advise for my Adelaide friends) I think that a little more time spent on achieving a larger draw distance would have been well worth the wait, the ability to jump from lower platform to higher, or vice-versa when it was within jumping distance would be most welcome, some curving paths for that proper 2.5-D experience, and shifting camera angles would have sealed the deal for me. Actually, I suppose I would really recommend all of the above for improvements to BUG TOO!, since the Saturn launch desperately needed BUG! when it got it and not a minute later. (Also, kudos to the people responsible for adding running in BUG TOO!)
I'm rambling now, so I'll wind it down, but one last mention is the wonderful sense of gags that this game had. The bosses were utter madness! I GUARANTEE that was the first time that I had arrived at the first world's boss to be greeted by fans of my protagonist and fans of the boss sitting in bleachers (sic?), both rooting for their favorite to win, or played tennis with an octopus/squid for keeps, etc.. Clever little concepts like Fire Ants made me laugh as well. Oh, and who can forget beating the game to arrive at your own movie premier which was then projected from a CGI Saturn console? Hello! Great times all the way around!
With that, my friends, I bid you a hearty "See ya!"
S