Vertical levels propel you quickly down corridors and you’ll need to dodge left and right. The third level is covered in fire, complete with jumping flares that give you little to no chance to react, but if you memorize where they’ll be, you should be fine.įrom there your speed and a nimble ship become mandatory. Its not exactly a pressing issue in the firs two levels, but it becomes a lot more challenging later on. You’ll also need to shoot your way through walls that in time will regenerate. In the first level, walls will grow and sometimes block you in, so you need to be quick to avoid them or beat them in their race to go. In Gradius there was a big emphasis on you against an entire fleet of space ships, but in Life Force, there’s an equal amount on surviving the terrain. While the original Gradius was bone crushingly difficult for all of the bullets and events with random projectiles like volcanoes, Life Force feels more like level memorization. I’d say Life Force is a different sort of difficult from Gradius. That’s what makes the Gradius and Life Force series so difficult, the fact that you have no upgrades. While it is fully possible to make it through the game with no power ups, I can’t imagine it happening. With that being said, every death takes away your power ups so it feels like you might as well hit reset to start all over again. Its a fair trade off when Gradius didn’t have continues at all. Using up all of your lives means you’ll need to restart the level. When you’ve got full power ups and a lot of enemies, that causes the NES to flicker and in a game where one hit is death, you need to see your ship.Īt least with Life Force, there are continues. Once enough enemies get on screen, things go slow. That’s right you and a friend can now make the game slow down to a crawl by playing at the same time.Įven without a second player, the game will slow down especially on the vertical scrolling levels. This ability to keep going makes the game a lot easier, and it was probably what needed to be done, because of the game’s two player cooperative play. As always, if you take one hit, you’re toast, but at least with Life Force, you respawn right there with temporary invulnerability. If an object hits your tail fin or cockpit, you won’t blow up. The space ship itself has favorable hit detection. I am just thankful to have the one bullet per screen if you hold down the button, because at least then you fire faster the closer you are to an object. If you hold down the fire button, you’ll shoot one bullet per screen at a time, but if you rapidly fire then you can have several bullets. To me, this felt a lot more comfortable on my thumbs, but I know with space shoot’em ups, you’re supposed to use your index finger to rapidly tap the fire button. Gradius had A to shoot and B to buy an upgrade, while Life Force had it B to shoot and A to buy upgrades. ![]() To really throw people off, for the NES version of Life Force, they flipped the buttons. Finally, there’s a force field that lets your ship take some extra hits before it wears off. These spheres shoot when you shoot and take no damage. Then there are options, which have been made famous by Gradius that has spheres shadowing your space ship. I assume its more powerful, since its long and straight. One step over ring laser is the long laser that does what it says. After that, you can upgrade your gun to a ring laser, which is good for those people out there with no aim. These missiles fire in both directions, unlike Gradius which only dropped them, making them feel more like bombs. The first upgrade that you can buy is speed, the next is missiles. This has always been a staple of the Gradius series. ![]() Then using the pods to buy ship upgrades. It had a lot of similarities, such as collecting pods from enemies as a sort of currency. Not even a change in name could fool people, we all knew it was a sequel to Gradius. So they called it Salamander, before renaming it Life Force when it came over here to to North America. ![]() No, in this case, they had to come up with a different name to make this a spin off series, even if both games have the same features. Fans of Gradius would say Gradius doesn’t have vertical levels! Then they’d overturn the machines then light them on fire. Konami knew that people would riot if they included vertical scrolling levels and called the game Gradius 2. Instead of being just a horizontal scrolling space shoot’em up, this one would take that style and include vertical scrolling levels. One year later, Konami went back to space Satan and asked him to forge another game. By smash hit, I mean breaking thumbs and banks feeding all of your quarters into an arcade cabinet. Back in 1985, game giant Konami knew it had a smash hit in the arcades by the name of Gradius.
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