VectorBlade for Vectrex NEW!
In 2020-2021, Malban (http://vide.malban.de/contact) released "VectorBlade for the Vectrex. Simultaneously, Malban released everything about it into the Public Domain. Now, we know that there are others selling VectorBlade, but we wanted it to be available on demand whenever someone wanted it. As such, we went and found out how to make boxes and overlays. Thankfully, someone had already made inserts and overlay envelopes. You would be surprised how difficult it is to find this information (well, at least for MacRorie it was!). Also, we figured this would be a great start to producing Vectrex games for everyone. Stay tuned for reproduction overlays for all games and cartridges!
We took most of the design Malban provided and stayed true to it. However, we did something a little different with the cartridge shell. Instead of putting a label on it with the VectorBlade ship design (like Malban suggests), we put that logo directly into the cartridge shell! (See the pictures for specifics.
All orders come with the following:
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Factory printed box
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Factory printed overlay
- Now includes the diary! ("Extract of diary entries of Captain V. Tiberius Rex During war times.")
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Professionally done inserts and overlay sleeves
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3D printed shell with VectorBlade ship embossed
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Thoroughly tested and programmed VectorBlade board with version 1.13 (as of 29 March 24)
If you have any questions, let us know!
What follows this is the description from MalBan's webpage to get you familiar with the game.
From Malban's webpage:
Vectorblade is my newest game for the vectrex. Vectorblade is a classic “bottom up shooter”, heavily inspired by “Warblade” from Edgar M. Vigdal.
Warblade or its predecessor “Deluxe Galaga” was originally developed for the Amiga computer, but was later adapated to Windows, OS X and even iOS.
Some sources concering these games:
Warblade homepage (I am not sure this is active anymore, since sadly Edgar passed away some time ago)
EMV-Software
Warblade Wiki
FAQ on Moby games
And finaly about Edgar and his game history: The ‘Golden Age’ game developer you didn’t know you knew.
Since my “Amiga days” I have been a fan of Edgar’s games, starting with Deluxe Pacman – in which’s documentation I am even mentioned for contributing some bug reports :-). After switching over to PC-technology I so “missed” Deluxe Pacman, that I programmed my very own version (see: Pacman).
Now over twenty years in the future – I again take inspriration from one of Edgars programs and do my own bottom up shooter. The name will be “Vectorblade“, which is a tribute to his fantastic Warblade, to Edgar himself – and the video game console I am writing the game for – the Vectrex.
If you ever played Warblade – or took a fleeting glance at the above linked FAQ – you will easily see, that a complete “Warblade” version for the Vectrex will be impossible to do. Nonetheless I tried to catch the Warblade “feeling” and hope I made a similar addictive and involved game.
Right from the onset of my undertaking I had a fairly firm grasp of what I wanted to achieve. If at some stage I had not been able to pull it off on my Vectrex I would have cancelled the project.
At the moment Vectorblade is the largest Vectrex game in existence (for the time being). I set out to do a 64k game, which already is twice as much, as the Vectrex was originally designed for. The final games size is be around 192k.
The game does not use additional hardware and is available on cartridge (which includes a 256k Flash and a quad-NAND chip for bankswitching). Highscores, progress and options are saved to the flash memory. I designed the cartridge especially for Vectorblade and right now it is a “one of its kind”.
