While the story in the arcade original is not entirely clear, the NES version claims a large creature named Zelos (possibly the serpent often pictured on the game's cover art) is preparing to swallow your planet whole, and you must stop it from the inside out. ![]() The story between the different versions of Salamander differs. Salamander was followed with an official sequel in 1996 entitled Salamander 2. Near arcade-perfect ports were released for both the PC Engine and the Sharp X68000 home computer. For the NES conversion, elements were taken from the original Salamander and the Japanese Life Force re-release, and some elements, such as levels and bosses, were removed to make way for new content. The game was simplified substantially for the European 8-bit home computer market, including the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Several home conversions of the game were made. The number of continues can be changed through DIP switches. There are no continues in Salamander's single player mode, however, in the two-player mode, players are given two continues. Players are allowed to continue from where they leave upon death instead of being returned to a predefined checkpoint per Gradius tradition. The game features six stages which alter between horizontal and vertical scrolling. Two players can play together simultaneously. The first player controls Vic Viper and the second player takes the reins of debuting spacecraft Lord British. Some of these would later become the norm for future Gradius games. Released in 1986 as a spin-off to Gradius, Salamander introduced a simplified power-up system, two-player cooperative gameplay and both horizontally and vertically scrolling stages. Salamander ( 沙羅曼蛇 サラマンダ, Salamander ?), retitled Lifeforce in North America and in the Japanese arcade re-release (see version differences), is a scrolling Shooter arcade game by Konami. For the NES conversion of these games, see Life Force. It's a short, sharp shot of 80s sci-fi that's as electrifying now as it's ever been.This guide is for the arcade versions of Salamander and Life Force, and similar ports. Konami's series is a world in itself, a place of wide-eyed wonder and fantasy. I'm not even sure if you ever get to visit the planet Gradius throughout the series - forgive me for the oversight if I'm wrong, but I've always had other priorities on my mind in the hundreds of hours I've spent playing the games over the years - but that's neither here nor there really. ![]() It's thanks to the shorthand of 80s video game design where no pixel could be wasted that playing a prime shooting game of the age - and I'd argue that Gradius is as premium as they get - is as instantly evocative as looking at a great piece of pulp sci-fi cover art, both able to transport you to another world in a heartbeat. Gradius offers outer space as hostile and unknowable, yet it's comfortably absurd - those Moai heads floating in the ether, for example, or even in the chubby round edges of Vic Viper itself - and absolutely full of wonder. For all that disparate patchwork, though, for all those disparate interviews and all the disparate places you're sent, these are games with an indelible sense of place. Really, though, you just have to rifle through the development team's cinema ticket stubs to see what it's all about: there's Alien, of course, in the requisite xenomorph world of Gradius 2's second stage, or the pervasive influence of Lensman's laser-filled brand of sci-fi. With Gradius, so much of the detail comes from the atypically verbose MSX spinoff Nemesis 2, with other scraps being pieced together as the series passed from one set of hands to another. ![]() ![]() Maybe there was a deeper story sitting on a design document somewhere, a grand thread stringing these disparate worlds together, but I'm just as sure most of the detail was sketched in later by other hands - by someone in a marketing department on the other side of the world, perhaps, or some copywriter filling up space in one of the manuals that'd later become scripture. Lore's a funny thing when it comes to older games, especially those churned out in the heady industriousness of Japan's bubble economy era, where production was often fast and loose. I was only dimly aware of the fact that ship was piloted by one James Burton - the name a combination plucked from Metallica, apparently in honour of James Hetfield and Cliff Burton. I'm not one for lore, I'm afraid to admit, as can be amply illustrated by the fact I've only just discovered that Gradius - a series close to my heart, and one that's taken the most from my wallet over the years in various forms - takes its name from the fictional planet its hero ship Vic Viper calls home.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |