#Gradius 2 vs lifeforce series#

Two gets you side-winding missiles, essential for stages that are home to wall-clinging enemies. With one power-up, you can activate a permanent speed increase. But, if you destroy certain enemies and collect the power-ups they leave behind, you'll charge up an enhancement selector on the bottom of the screen. Your ship starts out with a relatively lazy velocity and only a basic, forward-firing gun for offense. Serving as the foundation for these two core innovations is the recognized power-up and control structure from the first Gradius game, remixed a bit. The variety the shifts offer is welcome, too, as no two adjacent levels are ever alike - odd numbered stages scroll to the side, even numbered levels go up.

It's a radical concept in a game of this age, as the design team responsible for Life Force's development essentially produced two separate shooters and then merged them together. The game begins with the familiar left-to-right progression that Gradius players would find most familiar, but as soon as you enter the second stage everything's changed - the 'camera' shifts and you're instead flying down-to-up. The Virtual Console is home to several side-scrolling shooters, and also a great deal that scroll vertically instead. Co-op isn't Life Force's only interesting feature, though, and, in fact, it's not even the most obvious one - that distinction falls to the game's swapping perspectives. What's more, much of Life Force's level design is specifically engineered to encourage two player play - there are several occasions where the screen will split into two separate, parallel paths and one ship alone wouldn't be able to cover both. The dynamic was, and still is, a blast - like Konami's other notable co-op action title from the same age, Contra, it was just much more fun to have a second player right there with you in the middle of every firefight. You take the high road, and I'll take the low road. Now it wasn't just you piloting the lone Vic Viper deep into enemy territory - it was you and a buddy, blasting baddies side-by-side. Life Force, though, spun that design around and added an extra layer of depth by including a simultaneous two-player co-operative mode.

#Gradius 2 vs lifeforce series#

Gradius has always been regarded as one of the greatest spaceship shooter series ever made, but Konami's classic franchise has also almost always been focused on the single-player experience - you, by yourself, facing off against the endless alien hordes. And that's because you don't play it alone.

But Life Force is a truly unique design and well worth its praise, even in the middle of a crowd of seemingly similar shooters. And, by that description alone, you'd be perfectly justified in raising an eyebrow towards the decision to place it as the best yet-to-be-re-released NES title from that feature a few months ago - after all, the Wii Shop's shooter genre is already overflowing, even including three different prior installments from the Gradius franchise. Life Force is a forced-scrolling shooter from Konami, and served in the United States as the sequel to Gradius (since we didn't get the 8-bit edition of Gradius II here in America).