Images - Vectorman Fan Club

The problem here is that Vectorman is actually composed of several sprites. Vectorman presented an animation breakthrough in which the character sprites appeared to have more fluid motion and animations that lined up better with the world around them. Characters' feet would line up with any slopes they were standing on, no part of a character would clip through a wall they collided with, and Vectorman's death animation was pretty f'n dynamic.

Each unique sphere composing Vectorman (And his enemeies) was a modeled in a 3D program, rendered, and then brought into the game as a sprite. Animations are more or less guidelines, while Vectorman will obey them, there's no saying what will happen to interrupt them. This technique is still alive today and can be seen (to some extent) in games such as Cortex Command, Aquaria, A.R.E.S(?). Although some games use this yet maintain rigid animations for characters, only reaping half the benefits of the system. But it still sounds pretty cool, right?

...Yeah, I actually completely forgot his feet did change angle to the ramp...Wow, Vectorman is more complex then I thought.

About the 3D rendered graphics, I already knew about that.