Thursday, January 31, 2013

"Nemesis", Game Boy, 1990.

Konami, who do you think you are fooling? We know this is you, not "Ultra", and that the game's Gradius, not "Nemesis". Try harder!
The power to stop the reign.

You're about to strafe the stratosphere, obsessed with ending the long bloody reign of King Nemesis. Suddenly, that heap of rancid royalty's horde of henchmen swoops down out of a nebula, spraying you with lethal molecular bursts. You grit your teeth, clench the controls of your pressure-cooking starfighter, the Proteus 911, and power up its arsenal of land-blasting lasers and dual devices of destruction.

But wait! A barrage of enertron bullets streaks toward you. With lightning reflexes you fire your mauling missiles as you're hurled into yet another level of terror. Your last hope is to double your firepower and create a duplicate starfighter with the ship-cloning option. What will be your fate?

Bonus levels... or oblivion?

The headline is a little off -- this is ad copy that tries too hard, following strict guidelines on how many words they can go in a row without conceding to alliteration or heinous non-words for SF flavour. "[T]hat heap of rancid royalty's horde of henchmen": not the most elegant phrase. They suddenly swoop... out of a nebula? Just how fast are we traveling here? Their lethal bursts are ... molecular. My starfighter... is pressure-cooking. Then two sick alliterations in a row and a new paragraph discussing "enertron". None of this breathless flavour is contained in the game itself, much to its benefit.

The ad artwork is awesome, perhaps because in a Game Boy context the art has to be awesome, because the visuals the game itself delivers aren't going to be. Say what you will, up against such an array of badnasties (flying space skulls? siiiick!), I'd want my (apparently atomic?) defense to be something a bit beefier than the Zilog-80-powered original pea-soup Game Boy. Maybe a Wonderswan or Lynx?

The box art in the ad perplexes me somewhat also; I gather that the action is taking place occluded behind the dark side of the nearest of three gas giants. (But how is it the same side of the other two planets is lit? Is the star light source between them?)

And that's all my half-baked analysis for today! Not much deep insight, but at least you get some fanciful eye candy!

4 comments:

  1. Would you believe me that only at this point in my life, from reading this post, have I finally learned what having a letter of a quotation in square brackets means?

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    1. 'Cause how often do you get to see the before and after side-by-side? This blog is totally educational, just not about what it's meant to be educational about.

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    2. Can you use square brackets to change Konami to [Ultra]?

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    3. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!

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