Life Force

I know that I usually talk about current games and tech but lets go back in time and talk about a game from 1986.  I found this gem in the corner of Galloping Ghost Arcade and played it for longer than I care to admit.  I call this game a gem not because it is beautiful but because it is old and kids these days may in fact believe it was formed millions of years ago.

I spent over two hours lodged between two big arcade machines playing this.  It was hot.  It was loud.  I had about a foot and a half of space to stand while playing it.  In spite of all this I greatly enjoyed playing it all though I had to look it up online to actually figure out what the game was about.  

When playing the game the only thing I could figure out was you were a space ship flying through someones body while the body tried to destroy you.  When playing it i kept having flash backs to my childhood and watching The Magic School Bus episode where they got shrunk and went inside someone to learn about the human body.  Later on when I did some research it was revealed that you were flying inside an alien and trying to destroy it from the inside, however even after this research I had trouble wrapping my head around the idea behind the game.  This may just be due to the fact that I am used to judging games by today's standards.

At first I was greatly underwhelmed but the more I played the more I began to enjoy myself.  Life Force is fairly easy to get the hang of due to the fact that the game is fairly simple and it is on a set path with no random events so once you have played it through a few times you can memorize how the game will progress.  Even with these game mechanics the game is challenging.

Even though I played this game for over two hours and the game was the same every time you played through it I never made it past level two.  I contribute part of this to the fact that the game is challenging, but if I have to be honest it could also be due to the fact that I wasn't very good at it.  Life Force is a side scroller which I am not very good at to begin with but the controls are also very different from what I am used to using.  I feel like if i was playing with a mouse and keyboard I could have done better.

There are several power ups in this game that are dropped when you kill things and you can collect them as you go along.  When doing my research afterwards I learned that there are a fair amount of these power ups but I am only going to be talking about the ones I collected since I can talk about how those worked.  The first and most common of these was one that gave you a drone that would follow you and when you would press the attack button both you and your drone would fire and you could collect multiple of these.  I say drone but it would be more accurate to call them little circles that would follow you around.  The second one was called "pulse laser" and would turn your normal laser (main attack) into a pulse which would destroy thing in a wider range as opposed to the default which could only hit things directly in front of you.  The third and final power up (at least out of the ones i managed to collect) was destruct missile which would shoot out at about a 45 degree angle from both sides in front of you.  If these missiles did not hit anything by the time they reached the walls of the level they would just travel along until they hit something or would go off screen.

The game controls were very simplistic with one joystick two buttons.  The joystick would control forward, backward, and side to side movement of the ship.  The first of the two buttons would fire the laser which was the main attack and later on the pulse laser if you had the power up.  The second of the two buttons would fire the missile if you had that power up. If you had pulse laser and missiles all you had to do was keep pressing the two buttons as fast as you could and just worry about steering.

Over all the game is old and kind of boring but I still enjoyed playing it.  Its challenging, it reminds me of some games I played when I was young, and it is a great way to kill time.  If you live in the area I would definitely recommend grabbing a few friends and checking it out Galloping Ghost Arcade and while your there try this game out at least once.  I guarantee that there is at least a chance you won't regret it.