#115: GunForce

BATTLE FIRE ENGULFED TERROR ISLAND?

GunForce is another game that was entirely new to me. Guns make it sound like some sort of shooter. First person? Side scroller? Turns out it's more of a platformer. It's basically a Contra clone, actually. The opening sequence featured music that sounded like someone was trying too hard and a graphic sequence that was trying to use mode 7 graphics to be cool but failed miserably.

Get to the Choppa!

The game played a fair bit like Contra. Kill enemies, get some power ups, have better weapons. Jump into a vehicle or two. Get killed from one shot from anything. Lots of lives and continues and your power-up dropped on the ground when you died so it didn't feel too bad to die. It felt like it had the parts to be a fun game.

WHERE AM I GOING?!?

And then the game had to go and have a fundamental flaw. You walk faster than the screen scrolls. So if you walk forward you quickly find yourself at the very front of the screen. In a game where you die to one hit from anything. The way I saw it this left me with three options... Play the game enough to memorize where every enemy spawns so I can jump to avoid them and their bullets without seeing them. Juke back and forth to get the screen scrolling and then run back to safety, making very slow progress but at least having a chance to dodge bullets. Stop playing the game. I tried #2 for a bit but it wasn't fun at all so I moved on to #3.

The game also screwed up the controls. This is hard in a game with all of two buttons: jump and shoot. They decided to map 3 of the 6 buttons on the controller to jump and 3 to shoot but they went opposite of every other game that has ever been created. The button I think should be jump was shoot. The button I think should be shoot is jump. This is like when I tried to use OpenOffice but they'd flipped what tab and enter did compared to Excel. Maybe that was a fine way to control a spreadsheet. Maybe it's even the best way in a vacuum. But it's different from established conventions and that makes it annoying. I don't like to play games that are annoying.

The control issue I could have gotten over, but the scrolling issue is such a key component to a platformer that I can't even consider this as a real game anyone might want to play the way it is set up.

Rating: F-