It's getting late on the first Monday of the month, and I didn't feel like trying to plow through a movie review. I finally decided to try something new, which is in fact the one thing I've been avoiding: "retro" video games, which for me personally is the only kind I ever got into. Over the months and years, I've occasionally puzzled over how this got to be such a big thing. It's easy to say it's a cycle everything will go through sooner or later, but I find the analogy breaks down for gaming in particular. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, almost any video games more than about 5 years old was out of sight and out of mind. I personally knew a bit about older games simply because the libraries hadn't thrown out some books about them, but I was still completely incurious about the Atari cartridges that popped up here and there in the record stores and (more often) thrift shops. And if you really adjust for time scale, the only things as old then as vintage Nintendo games are now were pinball machines and the weird electromechanical games, which nobody then or since was getting nostalgic about. (Too bad, because they are really, really awesome!) I'm finally dipping my toe in this stream for just one game, Lifeforce, which I previously mentioned when I reviewed (dear Logos) the movie of the same name.
My experience with the game goes back to the early '90s, when I picked up the game. It quickly became my most played game, even though even the Konami code didn't get me past stage 2. My solution was to use the Game Genie infinite lives code, and just play through a few times in a row. In hindsight, I'm amazed and baffled by how much time I put into that game with all the challenge removed, just to watch the graphics and see how far the score would go up. I specifically recall I once got up to 1 million points, which took beating the game 5 times. I'm all the more baffled after going back to play it with emulators and having no particular difficulty beating it with 30 lives. Was I really that bad? Or was I just too lazy to challenge myself? All I can say is that at the time, I didn't really think about it.
Meanwhile, there's the "mystery", which I knew nothing of at the time. I "knew" Lifeforce was a sequel to Gradius, which then had another sequel called Gradius 3. When I looked up the info in the internet age, I found out it was "really" based on a game called Salamander. I also figured out there was a separate game that was originally called Gradius 2, meaning that Konami pulled what we '80s kids would have called a Super Mario Bros 2 Except... there was also an arcade game called Lifeforce, released in Japan and the US. At this point, we're getting into the same territory as the Italian movies with almost as many alternate titles as cast members. So were they really all the same game? And if not, why weren't they all given separate titles?
This last week, I finally made a step forward with my investigations. It happens at the end of last year I won a Nintendo Switch in a raffle at work, which was like giving an Amish guy a tacky seat warmer, and by a series of further misadventures, I finally got it a few weeks ago. So far, most of the games that I've picked up have been old NES titles, and naturally, I went looking for Lifeforce. Inexplicably, I haven't found the NES version. What I did find was a pack on the online shop that includes Salamander and the American and Japanese versions of Lifeforce. Naturally, I've spent the last few days playing them all into the ground.
The big surprise here was that it's the Japanese version of Lifeforce that most resembles the NES game, if only because it's the only one of the three to retain the "shop" system that lets you choose your power-ups. Unfortunately, it's also the one that doesn't allow applying multiple credits, so I haven't gotten further than the (insane) stage 1 boss. On the other games, I can pile on about 60 lives, which gets me up to the 5th stage, which is when the game actively murders you if you lost your power-ups. Based on this test, Salamander and the US arcade version of Lifeforce are effectively identical, the Japanese Lifeforce somewhat less so. It's still good fun, presumably more so if you're any good. An extra bit of weirdness is the story screen for the American version. On most games, this would be on the lines of "Blow up the Evil Alien X", but here, there's a story of a super-soldier called Sentinel XR-1 being infected with an evil bio-technological cancer, meaning that this is a Fantastic Voyage deal! Of course, the online videos I have checked confirm that it still ends with a planet blowing up, because nobody really cared.
In playing these games, what I can't escape is a sense of the familiar yet not quite right. I'm sure the main reason is familiarity with the NES version, and being used to navigating my way through it without that much trouble. Even so, there are many things where I find the 8-bit downgrade preferable. The play control and powerups are easier to manage and at the same time more sophisticated; the music is smoother; even the graphics are in many ways cleaner. (On the other hand, what the Hell they were thinking with stage 5 of the NES version baffles even me.) The arcade versions have been a pleasant discovery, but I'm still going back to what I know. With that, I wrap this up; as always, more to come!
Image credit Games Database.
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