A playthrough of Konami's 1988 shoot 'em up for the NES, Life Force.
Life Force is an NES classic. Whether you like shooters or not, it would be difficult to argue that this wasn't a landmark game for the machine when it was released - it far surpasses Gradius in its playability, balancing, variety, and supplants Gradius as arguably the best US-released NES shmup to this point.
It's a quasi-port of Salamander, which was a spin-off of Gradius (unfortunately the west would never see an official release of the amazing Famicom port of Gradius II), and it is closely related to the mainline Gradius games.
The American version of Life Force is particularly cool because of the graphical facelift the game was given - whereas the Japanese version felt more industrial with its mechanical enemies, the American one is more organic in its designs. The pulsing squirminess of many of these enemies and obstacles gives it a slight feeling of body horror, and the stage designs often resemble parts of the body. It's all quite unsettling, and serves as a clear inspiration for the style seen in Abadox (which was done by many ex-Konami employees for Natsume).
The graphics are extremely impressive and the soundtrack is loaded with classic Konami goodness. The gameplay is tight, precise, and quite demanding. The ship controls are quick and responsive, and the modified power-up system from Gradius allows you to approach the stages with your own strategies, and it all makes for quite a satisfying time. It is fairly difficult, too, especially in how claustrophobic most of the stages tend to be. There isn't much room for error at all here, but it is generally fair - well, except for that cheap sequence at the very end that is all but impossible to finish without dying unless you gave it committed to memory.
While it would eventually be surpassed in the NES's later years, Life Force is still a fantastic shooter that really stretched what could be done on the NES in 1988. I have a ton of fond memories of this one!
And if you happened to see this video in the hours directly following its publication... I have no idea what happened. Hahaha, I had uploaded the video, closed my laptop, and gone to bed, and when I got up I saw that somehow it had been made public. Oops. Now it has a title and a description, so hopefully that makes up for any disappointment from what was lacking before :) Sorry for any confusion!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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