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Known as Gradius to the rest of the world, and the game that started the whole 'shmup genre.
For me, Nemesis was a real turning point in the development of arcade games. Sure, we had had some scrolling shoot-em-ups (or shmups) before then, but they had no complexity and certainly no real heart.
I remember seeing Nemesis for the first time in 1985 in an arcade in a Welsh holiday town. The sort of games that we had seen before then were quite rudimentary (although great at the time) - Space Invaders, Pacman, Asteroids, Tron, Gorf, Defender, Galaxians - you know the sort of thing. But then came Nemesis, and with it a game that had a real "feel" to it.
Not just a game with heart though, it had far more than that. It was one of the first horizontally scrolling games that helped to expand upon the simple gameplay of previous efforts. It had a totally unique power-up system that too, contributed to some real gameplay moments. That death-rush as you lost all of your power-ups as you frantically try and recover them all by shooting as many power-cell carrying enemies as possible so that you can regain your ship's capabilities. How your heart sank as you were in the thick of it and suddenly you were defanged and had to try and scrape your way through overwhelming odds.
Unlike later games featuring a power-up system, Nemesis allowed you to choose which power-ups you had by using a novel collection method. At the bottom of the screen there is a power-up collection that read SPEEDUP, MISSILE, DOUBLE, LASER, OPTION and SHIELD. Each time you collected a power-cell in the game the currently selected power-up in the collection was switched to the next - from DOUBLE to LASER for instance. When the power-up that you wanted was selected you just hit the "select" button and that power-up was then granted to you.
The trouble is though, with the on-screen action being as hectic as it was, hitting the "select" button at just the right moment could be a very hit-and-miss affair. As you struggled to collect all of the power-cells from dead enemies the selection could race past the power-up that you wanted and you'd have to wait until the next time around before you could select it again. There was nothing worse than playing hard for another OPTION only to find that in the thick of it all the selection had skipped past onto another useless SPEEDUP - which only made the game harder once you got to a certain speed! Oh the agony.
And if you mis-timed it and selected DOUBLE when you were aiming for MISSILE and you were already carrying lasers - the step down in destructive power sent the air blue with loudly-shouted expletives (which you then started to mutter to yourself as you remembered that the arcade was full of children as well).
For the first time too - end-of-level bosses. Not just wave upon wave of enemies to destroy, but now seemingly a force behind them all - presenting real substance to the foe that you faced. The first time you saw those volcanoes exploding on level one and trying to work out where the hell you could position yourself without being hit from the rocks that were being spewed-out. It wasn't until you watched the demo screens through that you got an inkling of where you could go to save yourself from that particular danger. And then, as if to add insult to injury, a large alien ship to destroy immediately after that initial volcano - but luckily the ship was a far easier proposition than the volcano itself.
All of this quite simple now and no problem for a seasoned Nemesis player - but back then, what a ride!
Exploring later levels you began to see organic structures and those mysterious Easter Island stone heads. You never saw these kinds of landscapes in other games; and they added so much atmosphere to what was already a soulful experience. Although primitive-looking by today's standards, the game's graphics back then really were a step ahead of the games that had gone before. They added so much to the way that the game drew you into its alternative reality and blocked out everything around you - this was no five-minute distraction, this was exploration!
But this game was so unbelievably hard. Although the screen was never filled with projectiles the way later Japanese shmups were, it was still incredibly difficult to get very far on a single coin. Instead, you were forced into shovelling those 10 pence pieces into the machine before you started in the vain hope that the "continues" they bought you would carry you further into the game than you had ever gone before.
The way you lost your power-ups when you lost a ship felt terribly unfair as losing your power-ups quite often meant that you would lose life-after-life in quick succession as your ship was no longer a match for the enemies that you faced. So in the end, the final game-over screen is what you were presented with only a short time after losing your first life. An oddity of this screen that separates Nemesis in the mind from other games is the way that you are asked for your gender and star sign as well as your initials for the high-score table. A strange addition, but one that again serves to characterise the game as being quite unique.
So there I left it, ROB, Male, Cancer - and beaten again by this king of games.
[Posted 12/07/2008] |
