Gradius’ power-up system also allowed you to customize your power-ups, to an extent, while Abadox works in the more traditional manner, where it simply drops weapons and other items at predetermined points. His human-like figure makes him a larger target than most spaceships, though he’s still kinda squat and isn’t a gigantic target as, say, the heroes of Forgotten Worlds or Natsume’s later S.C.A.T. As with Konami’s games, a single hit will destroy your soldier, and send you back to an earlier checkpoint, losing all of your upgrades. Abadox pulls no punches though – this is one tough as hell game. The arcade versions of Gradius and Salamander were extraordinarily hard, though this was tempered substantially in the home ports. (The princess is naked in the Japanese version, but she got clothes for the US one.)Īnother aspect borrowed from Konami’s shoot-em-ups: the difficulty. The finale is an escape sequence, similar to Life Force but greatly expanded, as you race out (of what is presumably the monster’s final digestive tract) with the princess and out into space. In one area, you have to fight against what seems like a gigantic tapeworm, that’s as long as half of the level. There are still some mechanical enemies, as it seems like someone built a base inside Parasitis, but most of the enemies are organic, with gigantic teeth, faces, eyeballs, and bones, while most of the areas are through various organs. (Which makes sense, considering you’re flying down through the throat and other vessels of the alien.) The rest of the levels aren’t as strongly defined as the mouth in the first area, but there’s plenty of grotesque imagery, the kind that was extremely uncommon on the NES. As with Life Force, the game alternates between horizontal and vertical levels, though in an interesting twist, the vertical levels scroll downwards rather than upwards. There are six levels total, each with a mini-boss halfway through. The level ends with a boss fight against a face and some eye stalks, similar to the one-eyed brain Golem of Konami’s game. You fly through its mouth, dodge its teeth, and in a nice extra detail, zoom over its tongue. The first stage starts off similarly, as you fly through space, you observe the wreckage of previous attempts to enter the monster.
Since Abadox’s premise was established at the outset, the levels and their themes are much more consistent than they ever were in Life Force. It was pretty transparent, especially considering that the NES port, which purportedly had the same concept, went wildly off the rails when you flew through Egyptian-themed ruins (had the gigantic monster swallowed a pyramid along the way?) Asteroids were changed into kidney stones. The flames on the fire planet were colored blue, as if you were flying through the digestive track.
When the game was released outside of Japan, it was renamed Life Force, and the Fantastic Voyage-esque theme was expanded to the entire game, with levels given hasty graphical makeovers (a subsequent re-release in Japan made even more changes). It actually began as a Gradius spin-off called Salamander, where the first level had an organic setting, but the subsequent levels had nothing to do with it. However, the premise of that game was always somewhat undermined due to its history. If that premise sounds familiar, it’s because it’s more or less identical to Konami’s Life Force (minus the damsel-in-distress). As a soldier named Nazal, you are sent into the body of the beast in order to destroy it, as well as rescue the Princess Maria, before she is digested within the belly of the monster. The titular Abadox is a planet that has recently been devoured by an giant intergalactic beast known as Parasitis. Their first Famicom game, Idol Hakkenden, was a Japan-only adventure game, but their second game, Abadox, received an international release and left a stronger mark. Natsume is a Japanese game developer, founded in 1987, eventually became a prolific developer of quality action games, and partnered heavily with Taito on a number of titles. This game is featured in our new NES Cult Classics book! Please check it out!
0 kommentar(er)
