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April 16[edit]

Video game from mid 1980s[edit]

Sometime in the 1980s, I saw a video game at a campground game room which I have never forgotten. The player was piloting a small spaceship in a left to right side scrolling shooter game. The object was to enter a gigantic space creature and make your way from the entry point in its stomach all the way to its brain. I think that the creature was a good space alien who had gotten sick. If its on-line somewhere, I would love to play it again! Any thoughts? -OberRanks (talk) 16:37, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Some quick guesses: Salamander_(video_game) AKA Life Force, Gradius series, or even maybe one of the R-types - I'm pretty sure all of these involve flying into an alien at some point, at least in some versions. These are all mid-to-late 80s, the very early 80s didn't have nearly as many 2D side scrolling Shmups. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:54, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)Urgh, there are literally hundreds of scrolling SHMUPs, at least half of them horizontal scrolling and from the mid 1980s. A particularly popular one was R-Type (which had a bunch of sequels); R-Type has a Giger-esque biomechanical aesthetic, where some of the environment did resemble the inside of an alien. I think at some point there was an evil space-brain in there too. But the plot description in the R-Type article talks only about war, not about the enteric-exploration aspect you remember. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 16:58, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Life Force definitely has the enteric vibe going. Here is the first boss in the NES version, which is a brain [1]. But that game also definitely has vertical scrolling segments, as shown in the final boss scene [2]. Agreed that even within /80s arcade enteric side scrolling shooter/ there are tons of possibilities. Good news for OP is that that many will be available to play on MAME. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:23, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Abadox entirely "takes place inside the intestinal tract of a giant alien organism" - but as far as I can tell it only appeared on NES, and hit NA in 1990. I was assuming you meant arcade cabinet, but on re-reading your question, I see no reason why a campground gameroom might not have an NES or Sega Master System, etc. So if you know what hardware it was on or what the controller was like, that might help us narrow it down. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:35, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The game was indeed Lifeforce aka Salamander. I watched the play through on Youtube. Strange...half of it seems to be in space when the story is supposed to be flying into an alien creature...who apparently explodes at the end of the game? Hmm. -OberRanks (talk) 18:21, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Great! The "plots" of those games were never the strong suit :) FYI the game is available on Wii, Wii U, and 3DS [3], and you can play it online here [4]. Enjoy, SemanticMantis (talk) 20:21, 16 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

According to Salamander (video game) § Development, the original Salamander plot was changed in the North American Life Force version to take place "inside a giant alien life-form which is infected by a strain of bacteria" and the original version's starfield backgrounds were changed to "the web background from Stage 1 to maintain consistency with the organic setting". --Bavi H (talk) 01:20, 17 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]