[/caption]This is the twentieth post in our Game of the Day series.
Upon finally possessing a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) of our own, my brother and I were allowed to buy one game in addition to the Super Mario Brothers which came with the console. I can't remember who supervised the purchase, where the funds came from, and why our [grand]parental types green-lighted the thing ... but I do remember we chose games back then based on box art rather than recommendations, magazines, or the undiscovered internet. Thus we picked Life Force, and it promptly kicked our tushes.
We had no idea that this was the sequel to Gradius, another space shooter. We also didn't know about the "Konami code" which some of my friends still have memorized. And so it was that we began a game in a genre we'd never played before and were given 3 lives to our highly-destructible space ships. I keep saying "we" for a very good reason: this is perhaps the first co-operative video game I had ever played.
Prior to playing Life Force with my brother, all other games seemed to be about solo or competitive experiences. Gradius II didn't even have a competitive mode, so all you could do was cooperate to try and help each other finish. This powerful concept has only been re-visited in a few titles I've tried, Duke Nukem 3D and Halo for example, yet it seems to be a minority feature of multi-player modes. I discount squad or group games, like World of Warcraft, because there's an entirely different level of satisfaction with just one other person to have your back. It's much more intense, intimate, and stupendously gratifying.
Anyway, our ships blew up. A LOT! In fact, we very nearly threw the cartridge out the window. In the early days, the second level was the farthest mark we achieved and inevitably the giant waves of fire would rob us of our last lives. Another part of the steep learning curve involved properly configuring your fighter based on power-ups. Rather than simply being given specific enhancements, you received generic point rewards that you'd have to quickly (while continuing to fly, dodge, and shoot) decide whether to engage the current ability based on points/power or wait until another power-up. Thus necessitating a very precise rhythm in the early stages for getting setup just so.
Somehow we received the code which granted thirty lives, ten times the normal amount, and off we went to win whatever and destroy all those awesome bosses, try out all the artillery, marvel at the level environments, and generally play sloppily. Every other level was side-view or top-down, which added an extra mark of variety to them.
At the end of each level you'd lock into a single-room battle with some gigantic bad guy, each weirder than the last and influenced by the level preceding them, which required different skills than the constant-scroll of the navigation up to that point. At the very end you not only have to fight something, but race out of the exploding planetoid. Depending on whether you make it or not, the cut-scene afterwards shows or does not show you escaping before it explodes -- awesome! It's like your own personal Star Wars experience, except with much weirder environments and adversaries.
Beating the thing did not mean abandoning it, however, and we continued to refine our experience and alter our tactics. Later it became clear that we no longer needed the code or the bonus lives. In fact, I distinctly remember being able to conquer it completely without the loss of a single life, a huge testament to the design of the game, our skill, and the emptiness of our library (beat LF or suck at SMB?).
P.S. -- One of the most vivid things I recall about this game is the sound of your firepower hitting the brain boss at the end of the first level. Weird, huh?
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