A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1988 light gun shooter for the NES, Freedom Force.
In this video, I played through four loops in order to show each of the ending cutscenes.
6:52 Loop 2 begins
12:18 Loop 3 begins
17:47 Loop 4 begins
"A Frighteningly Real Tale of International Terror!
MISSION: NEUTRALIZE EXTREMIST ELEMENT.
The fate of the airport is in your hands.
Standing in your way are two deadly units of extremist guerillas. Four stunningly lifelike - and deadly - airport scenarios, and a climatic one-on-one duel with the most feared anarchist in the world today.
Your assignment is to terminate the enemy element with extreme prejudice.
You, and you alone, are freedom's last hope!
The Ultimate Zapper® Gun Game!"
So reads the description blazoned across the back of Freedom Force's box. It's not entirely accurate - there are no one-on-one duels and only half the game takes place at an airport - and it's patently absurd, but it captures the broad strokes well enough. Sure gets them juices flowin', don't it?
Released exclusively in North America for the NES and the Nintendo Vs. arcade platform in the spring of 1988, Sunsoft's Freedom Force is an ambitious arcade-style rail shooter that's slathered in 1980s action movie ma-cheese-mo.
It's like Death Wish 4, but it's an 8-bit Zapper game. Or Lethal Enforcers, if Lethal Enforcers had come out five years earlier.
As Rad Rex/Sting (P1) and Manic Jackson (P2), "enforcers [who are] specially trained to deal with critical situations," you're on a mission to hunt and gun down an entire criminal syndicate in an afternoon "neutralize guerillas".
Armed with a .38, a Dirty Harry hand cannon, or a grenade launcher, you take out bad guys as they pop out of cover (while hopefully avoiding the civilians) as the camera pans back and forth across an airport runway, an airport terminal, a nice city street, and a slummy city street.
You can snag extra ammo, health refills, and gun upgrades by shooting at the icons that flash in the bottom right corner of the screen, and between some of the stages you get to play a violence-themed Hangman minigame.
As you'd expect from a late 80's Sunsoft game, Freedom Force is both super difficult and super stylish. You get one life per game and there are no continues, but a full loop of the game only lasts five or six minutes, so having to restart from the beginning each time isn't a big deal.
Especially not when you take the time to appreciate the effort that went into the presentation. The graphics are slick - the sprites are big and well drawn, the characters have loads of animation frames, and that intro sequence is pretty eye-popping, especially for an 80s NES game.
(Though the quality of the graphics is probably the reason that the game is so short. You can only cram so much into 256K!)
Many of the people that worked on Freedom Force later worked on Sunsoft classics like Blaster Master and Batman, and their talent is readily apparent here. They hadn't quite perfected their house style yet, but they were definitely getting there.
Random thought: That plane has an awful lot of doors. If it's a Boeing, I really hope the passengers appreciated the effort the terrorists put into keeping it on the ground. I mean, don't they at least deserve a thank you card and a cheese sampler basket?
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
3 июл 2024
