Bug!

Bug! is a 3D platform game which revolves around the player safely progressing through various levels. The game is set on "Bug Island" and consists of six worlds made up of three levels each, with each last level culminating in a mandatory boss fight. Enemies come in the form of insects, mollusks, reptiles, amphibians, and arachnids.

Enemies are defeated by jumping on them, as well as utilizing power-ups which include damage dealing spittle and electrical strikes. Each level ends when the player jumps on a "Bug Stop", which will then make the player proceed to the next level. Every level contains collectable items: 1-UPs supply the player with an extra life, collecting a heart will restore one hit point to the player whereas Bug Juice will fully replenish it, and a coin will allow the player to take part in a bonus round whereby they are given the chance to win more lives. If the player runs out of Bug Juice, they lose a life.

The game's plot centers around the titular character, Bug, who is a Hollywood actor hoping to make his "biggest break". Bug decides to sign up for the lead role in an upcoming action film, in which his family - composed of his pet, Maggot Dog, his younger brother, his girlfriend, his mother and his father - is captured by the villainous spider Queen Cadavra and must set out to rescue them.

After traversing through insect infested grasslands, a reptile ruled desert, a dangerous swamp, the bottom of the sea, a frozen tundra wasteland, and a volcanic mountain; he rescues his family one by one, defeating those Queen Cadarva left to hold them before facing the spider queen herself. Despite it being part of a movie, Cadarva was an actual villain who was aiming to take Bug out for real, even bringing in real monsters to aid her (a cybernetically-enhanced snail, a giant reptile, a deadly sea snake, a monstrous octopus, and an abominable snow-bug). After a fierce fight, Bug manages to defeat her by pushing her into the volcano (revealed to be real) which destroys her. Afterwards, a movie is made of the events (with no one knowing that what happened on it was real) as Bug and his family attend its premiere.

Sega of America contracted Realtime Associates to create a Sonic the Hedgehog game for the Sega Saturn's North American launch. When Sega of Japan rejected the use of Sonic, the Bug character, originally from a shelved Sega Genesis game, was chosen instead. Bug! was conceptualized as one of three candidates for mascots for Sega's upcoming Sega Saturn console in 1994.

5D platformers Clockwork Knight (which came out shortly before Bug! at the Saturn's North American launch) and Astal, which was released later in 1995. Realtime Associates developed the game using Silicon Graphics workstations, which were then used to pre-render the game's characters and then convert them into sprites – in similar vein to the process used in Donkey Kong Country. , we'd meet twice a week to talk about gameplay, just to plow through it and decide what the system could do.

Bug! received positive reviews upon release. The Saturn version holds an average score of 84 percent at GameRankings, based on an aggregate of two reviews, whereas the PC version has an average score of 55%, based on an aggregate of two reviews.

The 3D graphics were praised by critics. The four reviewers of Electronic Gaming Monthly all called them impressive, with Sushi-X elaborating that "The cute, high-tech graphics really show off what the Saturn can do." ". In the same review, Paul Anderson commended the game's pre-rendered bosses and SGI cutscenes.