Don't call it a comeback but...
I'm thinking I'm back. Yeah...I'm definitely back. And here we have lucky profile number 13.
Chances are if your are a fan of space SHMUPS in the vein of Life Force and R-Type, you'll know what this game is, immediately. If not, let me bring you up to speed. It was the early 1990's. As a certain Nerd once described it, it was the "Barf Age". A time when what was marketable was the "gross-out" factor. If it was disgusting; whether everything from Mad Balls to Garbage Pail Kids, you can bet something was going to cash in on the craze.
With space shooters being nothing new and games like Gradius defining the territory, how do you up the ante? Make a shooter chock full of bio-mechanical nightmares, viscera, entrails, and eyeballs intermixed with technology and horrors that call back to the gold and silver age of monster movies and sci-fi madness.
Enter our game in question. A game advertised with a TV commercial glorifying how absolutely disgusting its visuals could get. Developed by Natsume and distributed by Milton Bradley (also known for the NES port of arcade classic, Cabal), this one follows in the footsteps of Konami's Gradius and sets the stage for tiles in the next generation like Irem's Super R-Type.
Its name? Abadox. Or more formally, Abadox: the Deadly Inner War.
It opens up with a pretty standard sci-fi trope. A mothership slowly pans in from the upper left of the screen before dropping its passenger--in a mobile mech suit into the depths of space through a beam-in. After a short booster-powered flight, the suit ditches the additional thrusters and goes at it alone to its target: A demonic planet so evil it has a perpetual angry face.
The mission? EXTERMINATE. That's all you need to know. Six nasty stages between you and victory. Every other level switches from side scrolling to top-down (with emphasis on down, as in direction) shooter.
This is Abadox:
Prologue and Title
Stage 1. Really sets the tone with a planetary surface made up pulsating worms, guts, and entrails. And features a decaying hellhound skeleton miniboss and a stage boss that may or may not be inspired by R-Type's own first stage boss, even down to the eyeballs on twisting, turning, optic nerves that stretch out far from the body.
Stage 2. Setting the tone of "Bio-mechanical" with undulating guts and organs grafting themselves onto machinery as we go for a vertical drop down into enemy territory. A centipede-esque miniboss only sets things up for a nasty, meaty version of the alien flytrap right out of Little Shop of Horrors. All that's missing is for it to be saying "Feed Me, Seymore!"
Stage 3. Also known as the cave of dead spaghetti guts. Featuring waterfalls and icy cave formations in the first half and a flying barracuda fish for a miniboss, the second half gives you an empty space breather before dropping you in the middle of long strings of giant, crisscrossing veins and arteries which culminates in the form of a deadly alien that's so large it hugs the wall and ceiling in a "Gamma" shape.
Stage 4. Back to top-down and featuring a stage I initially mistook as a rocky mineshaft but I soon realized was made up of bubbly meat-sponge matter with equally spongy background. A spider miniboss will separate you from the rest of the stage before the game hits you with an unexpected surprise. The music suddenly cuts out and the sound of a beating heart builds the suspense as the main foreground turns out to not only be a massive elongated obstacle but also the main body of the boss itself.
Stage 5. And we go super-technological in this one. Starting with that familiar spongy red bubble matter, we quickly shift into machinery and honeycomb backgrounds with hanging pipes like propane storage tanks and walls of scanning tube-beams before facing a miniboss that's actually a trio. It seems the enemy has sent three of its own answer to your mobile suit. This continues on to more mechanical layout accentuated by deadly force beam generators before it pulls the ultimate sci-fi reference and pits you against a giant Terminator inspired boss.
Stage 6, Escape, Ending and Credits. The final stage has us going to extreme depths in both senses of the word. With a custom-crafted grid/tile background that utilizes the closest I could make to a half-pile effect, more meaty bio-matter walls are mixed with technology and weird mechanizations that really sell the bio-mechanical aspect. The miniboss is just an eye flanked by smaller eyes. The trek continues downward with more force lasers and a nasty surprise: a hydraulic double-press in the walls. The boss is a similar one to the earlier fly trap. Defeating it releases an alien girl princess in a bubble. What happens next is a high-speed escape through a montage of earlier stage layouts (and an implied rescue/escort mission what with your mech holding the princess-in-a-bubble). In fact this last zone disables your weapons completely and force you to play a game of evasion. Do you have the lightning reflexes to make it out alive? If so you'll be treated to the game's simple ending of returning to your mothership as the planet explodes in a supernova. Roll credits.
Once again (as always) cheat codes were used to accelerate progress. Not intended as a walkthrough but a showcase of the profile.
That said...it's good to be back. Again. See you whenever next profile is ready!
Update: Stage one's sprites have all been realigned as I had been informed many of them were off center along the Z-axis, making 3rd person camera perspective look awkward. Corrections to later areas will be made in time.