Is it all right to post a review here?

[spooie]

Being new and all, I just want to make sure it's alright with you guys. I wrote up a review for Gamefaqs of Gunforce for SNES. Haven't submitted it just yet, since it's the first viewer I've gone of a game in a few years. So I thought I would post it here and see what everyone thinks first.

So, if it's okay with everyone here... feel free to chime in and compliment me on my genius, or chastize me for my poor judgement skills.

:-P

Hope you all enjoy and all.

FORCED at GUNPOINT...

Irem, Irem... Ah, yes... Irem. Sweet, loving, caring Irem! Creators of the immortal "R-Type" series that spanned the geneartions, and, along with Konami's "Gradius" line, revolutionized the modern day shooter and set the standard for all things great in the universe.

And now, looking back towards 1991, what is this I see? Konami is creating a new, updated version of "Contra" called "The Alien Wars" and Irem is creating a new game similar to it, called "Gunforce" !?!

Oh, Joy! Jolly ol' good day! This is indeed a time worth celebrating! Now there will be TWICE as much fun! Surely, with the release of "Contra: The Alien Wars" and "GunForce" on the new Super Nintendo Entertainment System, I can finally relax knowing that the blissful amalgam of merry run-and-gun action will ensue.

Or so, I would believe...

Contra: The Alien Wars, in it's ever graceful presence brought us into a new era of console gaming, with it's barrage of pulse pounding action, challenges and difficulities, and array of mode 7 graphics and special effects that pushed the scales beyond all forms of prior comprehension. Adding to previous incarnations in the Contra series with the ability to carry not one, but two powerful weapons, superbombs, a load of new powerups, and it's full roaming overhead 3D worlds and that really showed off the capabilities of the SNES in it's infancy.

And there could be no doubt that the awe-inspiring, soon to be release, Gunforce would be the perfect companion to such a great game. For starters, It's got the word "GUN" in the title. I mean, how cool is that? Just think of all the fun you'll have shooting things, 'cause you've got a big old gun in your hands! And it's packing a FORCE... a FORCE... to be RECKONED WITH! Oh, man... It's like totally awesome! This game is gonna rock!

Afterall, Irem couldn't possibly go wrong. Not the creators of one of my favorite, most underrated NES games, "Metalstorm", right? ...RIGHT?

Fast forward to late 2002/early 2003 and I'm on an eBay high, buying up NES, SNES and Genesis games left and right. And what is this I see out of the corner of my eye... why, it's GUNFORCE: BATTLE FIRE ENGULFED TERROR ISLAND! --[And, yes... that IS the actual title of the game].

I remember reading about and looking at that game. Man, I have got to get me some of that action!

So the bid is placed.

Waiting...

Waiting...

Waiting...

YOU ARE THE WINNER OF THIS AUCTION.

WOOHOO! --So I get the game, and, of course I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. I stick it in SNES, turn the power on and voila! Only now, I was left wondering... "Wha... Wha...? WHA..?!?!?!" --INSTANT CRAPPINESS ENSUES!

All right... I'll lay it out straight for you.

Gunforce is a poorly conceived and poorly executed rip-off of the Classic NES Contra games, with a little bit of Alien Wars tossed in for seasoning. If you've played any of the side scrolling Contra games from the pre-Shattered Solider era, you'll know exactly what kind of game this is. Run-and-gun mayhem, where you blast away anything and everything "evil" on the screen before it does so to you. Only, once you take away everything that was new, innovative and fun about THAT game series, you will be left with THIS one.

You play some random guy who is sent down to an Island Jungle, to battle through 5 stages of enemy territory. Basically, it's the same exact story as Contra. Whereas a helicopter drops you off in Super C, you parachute down in Gunforce. Whereas you obtain weapons like the laser, machine gun and flamethrower in Contra, you obrain weapons like the laser, auto-gun and flamethrower in Gunforce. The main enemy of Contra is the evil red falcon alien heart with little alien spider creatures that pop out and come after you. Gunforce's main enemy is an evil mutant bug entity with little mutant Ewoks that pop out and shoot you. And it's the same exact SCREEN! Yippie, skippy!

The first thing anyone would probably notice when playing this game is the sheer amount of slowdown in this game. I don't even know how a game could be this bad, when Contra: The Alien Wars was so smooth and had 100 times as much action going on, on screen. We're not specifically talking "Super Ghouls and Ghosts" slowness here, but, at least the slowdown in THAT game actually made it more fun and easier to control. This just hinders on being a pain to move and control.

Why? The screen does not move with you. Often you have to PUSH the screen by getting very far to the side, and much like most other run-and-gun games, you cannot backtrack once you've passed something. So, you'll be walking toward the edge of the screen, and it will slowly chug along and start moving over to the next, when BAM! You get shot from something moving ever so slightly into the screen, from off-screen. Aggghhh...!!!

What makes that worse, that is that the controls in this game are sluggish and often take some time to respond. Your character moves way too slowly. The jumping action is not touch sensitive, so you will always jump the same height, no matter how long you press the button. You can't aim very well with shooting or jumping. And the WORST part about it is, the standard "Jump" and "Shoot" buttons are reversed by default, and you cannot change the controller options at all!

But I guess it can or cannot help that the artificial intelligence in this game is cheap. Unlike almost all run-and-gun games, there is NO collision detection. You can walk into the enemies and you will NEVER get hurt! The only time you do get hurt is it they specifically shoot you, which seems to happen at random. For one of the stages, I was dying more from boxes fall on my head than I was from enemy encounters! And that's always fun, you know, dying from boxes.

Most of the characters die from 1-hit shots, but a few will require 4 or 5 blasts to take out. On some occasions enemies will be grouped up, and out of the way of fire and you will be forced to travel a certain path the advance, giving them a clear shot at you and no way to fire back at them, which will lead to many an unforgiving death. Other enemies will just run out in large groups and never fire a single shot, and just continue jogging along off screen. If they aren't going to shoot, and can't hurt you by collision, what's the whole point of having them?

The bosses, or lack thereof, consist of motionless machines and guns... like, say... the end of first few stages from the original Contra. Except, there are no cool aliens or mutants popping out, or little bubbly things chasing you. It's just 3 or 4 guns, shooting in the same spot, every time. You can easily take out every boss without even trying any effort. And nothing says "bad ass" more than a radar dish shooting big red energy globs of... um... ENERGY GLOB, at you.

At least they TRIED to do something interesting, allowing you to use the vehicles and mounted weapons at your disposal. Much like the tank in Contra: The Alien Wars, you have the ability to ride vehicles such as, jeeps, helicopters, mechs, rafts... yes, I typed RAFTS. Also, much like Contra: The Alien Wars, you will encounter zipline ropes that you will be required to crawl across or be lifted from. You can also control makeshift gun turrets left behind from enemies, which, for the most part, do nothing to help you since the other enemies are almost always out of range or aren't even there. And the gun only shoots in 3 specific lines of fire. It could have been a great idea, if only they had applied it to something.

The graphics are a mildly above "Altered Beast" territory. You'll feel like you're playing either a shiny metallic early era Genesis game, or a muddy, muted era Genesis game, depending on where you are at the time. The character animations, all THREE of them, like bland. Nothing really MOVES in this game. The vehicles, such as helicopters and tanks, all have almost zero animation. The gun patrol enemies have TWO animations. When the guns move from the right to the middle to the left side of the screen, it's just TWO animations. The original frame, the middle frame, and the original frame flipped backwards. The enemies, your character, the bosses... nothing stands out.

The sound is bland. The music is instantly forgettable. After finishing, and even while playing, I couldn't tell if the music actually changed by stage or not. The gunshot sounds are all the same. The explosion sounds are all the same. When you die, your character will yell "Aaagggghhhh...!", which sounds horrid, as if it were 8-bits.

Surprisingly though, it does have a decent amount of replay value. It's like a bad game that people love to play anyway... such as Tomb Raider or Mortal Kombat. What can I say? The game tries nothing to prove it is anything but a bland Contra rip-off, as I'm sure you've picked up on already, but for being a bland Contra rip-off, it's not downright horrible. And much like Contra, it's very short. You can most likely beat it in a 20-minute span.

So, unless you're into poorly made Contra clones and have played the other 800 Super Nintendo games, you might want to give it a try for nostalgiac reasons. Otherwise, it's probably wise just to skip it. Which is why I'm giving it a bland, but playable, 4 out of 10.

[Daniel Thomas]

Hmm....but tell me what you really think. Don't hold back!

The funny thing is, I don't even remember Gunforce. Maybe I'm confusing it with that Konami shooter with the giant mech robots.

Seriously, it's a pretty good read. Gamefaqs takes a little while uploading reviews, so don't worry about it. I haven't sent them anything in a long while, but I'm a little miffed that my profile doesn't link to my website (only listing the www address instead). That doesn't help if you're desperate to raise your Google page count. (which, in my case, would be anything above zero).

[spooie]

Well, thanks for the response. :)

I believe you are thinking of Cybernator, which if I'm not mistaken was Assault Suits Valken in Japan.

Anyway... since I've got at least ONE person reading, I might as well post my earlier rant of Alpha Mission. I wrote this up in about 20 minutes, a few weeks back when I played the game for the first time in years. Hope everyone enjoys...

In the late 80s, somehow my brother and I came into possession of the SNK shooter by the name of "Alpha Mission" for the NES. Supposedly it was a port of the Arcade game, which I had, and still have, never played. Within the next year, the faulty wiring from the air conditioner in our living room window led to a fire that incinerated my home, leading my mother, brother and I to move in with my aunts for about 6 weeks, until we found an apartment.

I'm not really sure where Alpha Mission ended up along the way, as I remember going back inside the house to find the smoke charred remains of the Nintendo games we owned and the remains of our melted Oddysey 2 system. But somewhere, somehow, the game was lost around that time.

Enter the year 2002. I was working nights at a local supermarket, saving up money and blowing the "spare change" on eBay. I was on a videogame buying high, bidding on a buttload of games for my SNES, GEN and NES systems, at exceedingly low prices. Apparently you sit around and wait 10 years, people would practically give them away at such great prices.

Well, one day, out of the blue I spotted Alpha Mission, with a staring bid of 50¢. I'm not sure why, but something clicked with me. I figured, hey, what the hell... I've always wanted to play that game again. It's been so long, and I had fond memories of it 12 years prior. So for 50¢, I really couldn't lose.

It arrived, and much with my other games, was placed on my bookshelf for many months, until my mother bought a house and I relocated there. Thanks to the lack of sleep from my night job, I never got around to playing many of the games I had bought in the last few years. The game went back on the bookshelf, until I picked up some small plastic bins for my SNES, GEN, SNES and GB games. It was placed nice and neatly inside, alphabetically, and put on the top shelf of my closet where it sat until tonight.

Realizing over the last few months, the sad fact that I've been wasting away money on game I'll never play, I knew something had to be done. I decided that I would sell some of my "lesser desired" games and soon, focus on the ones I had never beaten. And tonight, I decided to pull out the NES bins and play some games from there. I pulled out Journey to Silius, Batman Returns, Star Solder, Life Force and Alpha Mission.

I started with Journey to Silius, but couldn't get by the 4th stage both without falling to my death. Finished Batman Returns, which, as far as the NES version goes, is a very dull game with only a racing stage worth any interest. Then I popped in Alpha Mission.

I must say that that all the great memories I had playing this game quickly rushed back... and crumbled before my eyes as, nearly 15 years I realize just how BAD this game really is. I mean... it's just not good.

While the game certainly has some interesting ideas going for it, like collecting "energy" bars to use in selecting a wide array of weaponry at your disposal, the ability to collect "inverse" power-ups that would take away the exact ammount of power the regular versions gave, and the ability to not only warp ahead half the stage, but to be transported back half a stage if you collected the wrong power-up, there really wasn't much THERE.

The stages themselves were short, and the enemies inane and showing no mercy as the stages progressed. Your ship was slow, your weapons were slow, and the game itself was just dull to both look at and play. And everytime you died, you'd start way back at the beginning of the stage.

I noticed that I seemed to be dying A LOT, because I couldn't MOVE the ship fast enough to get out of the way, because I need to power up the ship first, because, well... that's just how the game is.

And the power-ups act randomly, as you bomb square blocks on the ground. They don't whiz by the screen or float towards you. They just sit there, like most all of the oldschool shooters do. So you slowly creep towards them, hoping that you can reach one before it scrolls off the screen. And heaven forbid you shoot a block just before you touch it, and it has the "C" power-up, which completely depletes your ship's energy, your power gauge for the guns and missles and whatever special feature you are using down to NOTHING.

Well, I decided I had had enough, and pulled out the old game genie. After searching online for some codes, I put it unlimited lives and unlimited shields. I turned on the shields, and just played on thru the game.

What I realized then, was that not only was this a bad game, it was a short and uninspired game. Without minor variations on the bosses, all of the stages are bland and start looking similar to one another. But that's no big deal. I'll probably never play it again after today, so I just wanted to head on through and see what the ending was like.

So I battle my way through stages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Make my way to stage 7's boss, which is the lamest boss I've ever encountered in a shooter. Unlike the strange space creatures of the prior 6 stages, you fight 4 corners of a pyramid... And that's the boss... while it shoots little blue seeds that home into you and break into tri-bullet effects when shot.

What made the boss even more lame, was the fact that it takes about 5 minutes to blow up the corners. And that is with my shields on, standing directly on top of it. Not good when you can breeze through the rest of the game in 10 minutes. And once THEY blow, another spot opens in the center. You do the same for it. The spot blows up, to reveal another spot right on top of it. You blow THAT up... AND... AND... your ship floats away to find 3 more energy power-ups.

Hmm... I would have certainly figured THAT was the last boss, but NOPE! "Stage 8" superimposses itself across the screen. I figure, alright, let's get it on! But... but wait. That's not right. Stage 8 is a carbon copy of stage 1, only with minor differences.

Alright... I get it now, I need to play thru the 7 stages again, fighting more powerful and harder versions of the bosses to get to the ending. It's the old level upgrades that games used to do, like the second, slightly harder, quest in The Legend of Zelda.

Once I get to the bosses I realize, hey... there is not a whole lot different. In fact, there is nothing different. I think 2 of the level 1-6 bosses actually had something different about them this time around. In fact, they seemed easier now. But that's okay... I've made it to the boss of level 14. Same pyramid... same corners... same LONG time.

And it is destroyed. The ending is nigh. I can feel it, I can see it, I can reach out and crush it in my hands... buhh.... whaa...? What the hell is this? 3 MORE power-ups? You've got to be kidding me. I need to play through it AGAIN!!?!?

But... wait a minute... wait a minutes... no... no, it can't be... NOOOOOOOOOOOOO.........! Stage 14 quickly moves into Stage ONE. THE FIRST STAGE. It re-looped back to the beginning of the game. Then it hit me. This game... this game HAS NO ENDING. It was never designed to be beaten. It's so hard of a game, so BAD of a game to begin with, SNK could never have expected anyone to beat it, and thus, never put an ending into it! It's like the owner of Noah's Arkade from Wayne's World. An even devilish ploy to consume quarters, as, afterall, it was a port of the arcade.

It just goes on and on forever, and ever, and EVER... It's like the minus world in Mario. Only, it's not a cool bonus area caused by a glitch in the programming... it's the actual game. It never ends... it never ends... EVER!!!!!!!

I hate games like this.


Anyway... that's all. Thanks for reading.

:D

[Half Japanese]

I've got a complete copy of Gunforce I got from ebay a few years ago, and it's pretty generic and stale. It's like someone neutered my Contra.

[Gamereviewgod]

Try Gunforce 2 in MAME....hard to believe it's the same series. Right up there with Metal Slug if you ask me.

Spooie: Add some scores to those reviews and send 'em to Joe. Get 'em posted. Good stuff.

[spooie]

There is a Gunforce 2? Is it also by Irem? O_O


And... forgive me for asking, but who is Joe? :embarrassed:

[sisko]

It's like someone neutered my Contra.

QUOTE OF THE DAY! LOL LOL

Informative review though, thanks :)

[Gamereviewgod]

Yep, Gunforce 2. There was never a home release (at least in the US), but it's just awesome.

Joe Santulli is the site's main guy....the owner type guy if you will. ID here is Digitalpress. Drop him a PM.

[spooie]

Wow, really? I didn't know that.

Right now I'm getting ready for Xplay and playing through an SNES game, so I'll have to drop him a line in a bit.

:P

[NoahsMyBro]

In my opinion, you should eliminate everything until & including the 'I'll lay it out straight for you'. Begin with the next sentence. That's where the review actually starts.

But obviously this is just my opinion. Either way, it's always good to contribute.

[spooie]

Well, thanks for the input. When I start writing, I like to tell the story that leads up to the review. With so many reviews that are just facts and information, I often find that personal history and background of the reviewers often enrich what's being told and lets you understand where the ideas are coming from. But, anyway, thanks for the advice.

:D

Now, I submitted this to Gamefaqs shortly after I posted it originally... so do I assume that doing so excludes my chances from contributing it to this site as well?

[Packerfan66]

Your timing could not be better. I was just reading about GUnforce today in a old Gamefan issue. The game looked pretty cool from the pictures I looked at it. Your review is going to save me $5.

[spooie]

Well, thanks for all the kind words everyone. I submitted it to Gamefaqs yesterday and they REJECTED IT on the basis of being "Tech Filler"... whatever the hell that means. Yet, they posted the Alpha Mission review, which was about 70% just being the story around my playing the game.


O_O I don't get it.

[DigitalSpace]

Well, thanks for all the kind words everyone. I submitted it to Gamefaqs yesterday and they REJECTED IT on the basis of being "Tech Filler"... whatever the hell that means. Yet, they posted the Alpha Mission review, which was about 70% just being the story around my playing the game.


O_O I don't get it.

From some of the reviews I've seen on GameFAQs, I'm surprised they reject anything. LOL

Those reviews were a good read.