The Games We Never Talk About: Vektor Storm

The Games We Never Talk About (But Should) (TGWNTABS) is back again, and this time we will talk about a rather unknown game.

Vektor Storm by Inova Games is the one I picked for the return of the games that I feel never get talked about. The series has been the most popular article topic here on the blog since I first started it back in March 2019 with Kid Gloves II.

First of all, a little story about how I found out about this game:

I have always been a Tempest fan and for ages, I felt that the Amiga never had a decent version of the Dave Thurer coin-op classic, Well that was until I saw this game at The Gathering 1994’s big screen for a wee bit, I am still trying to remember why it was shown on the big screen but I guess it was a Jeff Minter/Dave Thurer Tribute thing or even a Tempest one.

Long story short, as soon as I saw it on the big screen, I went around and asked if any of my swapper friends had the game, but no one did, as all they spoke of was the then just-released Apocalypse game and that Vektor Storm was an old game.

My search continued at the party premises as I was determined to find the game, boxed or just a pirated version, I eventually met a huge arcade fan (who stood playing Mortal Kombat in the arcade section at TG94) and I told him that I normally play this game with a one-button setup on the Amiga and he then looked at me like if I were insane and replied – WHAT, the Amiga has Mortal Kombat?

He told me he had brought his Amiga and C64 with him to the party, but he wasn’t really into Amiga games much, except for some arcade conversions. What he was really passionate about were scene demos, and he had entries in both the Amiga and C64 compos that year.

Later, he moved over to where I was sitting so we could chat about demos and, of course, a few games. Naturally, I showed him Mortal Kombat on the Amiga.

For context, Mortal Kombat was released on the Amiga in February 1994, and TG’94 happened in early April, so the game was still quite new even among crackers and swappers.

I showed him a few games and some scene demos I loved, but when I pulled up one of my Starfield code examples with a high-res logo and tunnel vector zooms, he exclaimed, “Oh! This reminds me of my favorite Amiga game—Vektor Storm.”

Trying to play it cool (to hide my excitement), I asked if he had a copy with him. Without hesitation, he said yes and pulled out a beautiful Amiga box labelled Vektor Storm from his suitcase. I nearly screamed, “Can I buy it from you?”

He booted up the game, and from that moment on, he became my best friend at the party. He didn’t sell me the game, sadly, but he let me copy it. Honestly, the only things I really remember from TG’94 are the terrible sleeping arrangements, the smell of pizza, beer, smelly kids, Apocalypse, and of course, Vektor Storm. We must have played it for something like 60 hours straight.

We met up several times after TG’94. His name was Tommy (Dexterian), who sadly passed away in a car accident in 1998. And no, he never did sell me his copy of Vektor Storm…

“I Want It And I Want It Now!”

Vektor Storm came out in 1992 and one of the reasons the game is pretty much unknown to most was the price tag of £29.99 (other and much more profiled titles was 19.99 and 25.99) according to Lemon Amiga, I have never seen the game in any shops and I’ve never held one either (other than Tommy’s box), and that annoys me a lot as the game is one of my all-time favorites. 

The advert above is another thing I feel that I’ve never seen in a mag either, but there were reviews in a few mags, and the game got mediocre reviews and very little recognition.

“To be honest, I thought the game was a shareware title with a box release from the developer.”

Vektor Storm got a lot of levels and there are even boss battles, many of them identical to Tempest in terms of what you see but there are enhancements here that ain’t in the original and yes the framerate in Vektor Storm is really good, heck I’d say it is better than the Arcade.

The controls, weapons, and general feel of the game are very good and while it does get hard quick it is never impossible, I have read elsewhere (Lemon, EAB, etc) that there are framerate issues where you get frame skipping every now and then, to be honest, I have never felt that but then again I’ve never analyzed the framerate either and if there are problems this might have been that I had an A1200/030 when I first discovered this game and to be honest I have never played the game on anything lower than an 030 CPU with minimum 4MB Ram.

“Fantastic Game, Great Framerate, Very Optimized and The Best non-ATARI version Of Tempest”

Oddly enough there are only like two games on Amiga that are as fluid as this one, No Second Prize and Vektor Storm which is quite strange as the technology was there for sure (just look at F/A Interceptor and Robocop 3 as examples of an evolving tech, the Demo-scene had loads of impressive Vector demos at from 88 to 94.

A more powerful CPU definitely played a big role in why the PC/MS-DOS platform got more advanced vector-based games early on. With huge CPU and memory setups, PCs were already running impressive flight simulators by 1990. Meanwhile, the Amiga was still stuck in the 68000 era, targeting users with just 512KB of RAM.

When the Amiga 1200 arrived, it brought improvements, but it was still held back by the lack of fast RAM by default. This limited the hardware’s true potential, especially since only a small portion of users had upgraded to hard drives and fast RAM early on. While the AGA platform introduced more advanced games and ideas, it never really took off.

As Commodore’s sales declined, many companies abandoned the Amiga, and when Commodore ultimately folded, it dealt the final blow. Most major developers turned away after completing their last projects, marking the end of an era.

Luckily, we had a few impressive games over the final years, TFX and Tornado were games I loved to bits, even if they had “issues” and was much better on other platforms.

The reviews for Vektor Storm were really unfair if you ask me, the reviews I have found online rate it as 60 out of 100% and most reviews seems like the reviewer just rushed the write-ups to move onto another game, this is very sad as this game is simply just too good to be ignored for people that love the arcade.

The focus of the score in the review on the left is due to the price tag, but at the same time, hypes the game up with

” It’s a great game and no mistake. Addictive and frantic, but to be honest, a second-hand tempest arcade machine can’t cost much more nowadays, can it?”  

No idea who proofread that text but you get the point and it clearly says it is a good game, look at other rubbish games the same year that cost way more but still got more than a 60% rating, or heck look at the horrible and almost unplayable American Gladiators that cost 19.99 and got an 80% rating the very same year… WTF?

It is no secret that this game is one of my most wanted titles ever and that I am rather desperate to have it in my collection but this post will most likely push the prices up a lot, with that said, what is there to bump if no one ever put one up for sale, to begin with. Fantastic game and I give a shit about what it cost back then, a good game is good even if it has a hefty price tag, heck at the same time people bought god damned Nintendo games for 4 times the price. A true gem and I am very happy that they showed it on the big screen at TG’94 so I could start hunting it down and play it so much that I still remember the game and levels almost 30 years later!

Thanks to LemonAmiga, Hall Of Light, and Amiga Magazine Rack for much-needed info (plus screens from Youtube and adverts, etc) as to why the game had such a stealthy release compared to other titles the same year.

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