The Guardian Legend
Sometime
in the future, the great question of life on other planets is answered
rather directly when the artificial world of Naju comes hurtling towards
Earth from beyond the Solar System. Assuming the impact alone doesn't
put the blue ball in the Solar pocket, Naju is also packed to the rafters
with murderous alien organisms. Enter the unnamed Guardian of Earth-
you! As a gun-toting brunette in a red armored bikini. Using your battle
suit's ability to transform into a starfighter, you have to dive deep
into the surface of Naju and hunt down the planet's self-destruct triggers,
which are either guarded by or manifested as twisted boss monsters.
The
Guardian Legend was my favorite game out of the NES's library, and I
still play it off and on. The two diverse play modes, the Zan/Gun-Nac-esque
Corridor shooting sequences and the exploration of the Labyrinths were
perfect for me, as someone who likes wandering an alien landscape and
gathering keys and items but need plenty of chances to excercise my
trigger finger. The basic layout of Naju consists of a relatively harmless
overworld with portals to the different environmental Areas. Each Area
is a maze inhabited by different creatures (and a few palette-swapped
Overworld monsters, like the Spider With Too Many Legs, and the Hockey
Pucks of Doom.) Within these Areas, you'll find occasional hatches leading
to the Corridor shooting stages, which are fast, furious, and hard
as hell. Especially the bosses. Though the Guardian gains no less
than 20 special weapons, TGL doesn't have a 'shot absorbtion' trick
to fall back on, which makes battles with giant, suprisingly-mobile
bosses that fill the screen with small, usually homing projectiles
a challenge no matter how many times you've creamed this game. It's
not enough to know what weapon damages the boss the most; you have to
really figure out how to use the thing to keep yourself from getting
cornered and exploded violently.
I
don't know what they did, but the way this game handles its graphics
is pretty impressive too. Somehow they managed to keep slowdown to a
minimum through most of it, in spite of the volume of attackers at any
given moment. The only noticeable slowdown I remember was in the forest
and 'biological' sectors, where scads of spores and particles are flying
all over. And really, in those sort of situations, slow-motion isn't
necessarily a bad thing. The sprites are pretty nice, with the Guardian
as a two-tile tall character with a stiff walk. (I guess toting around
a small aircraft on her back and a gun isn't the ideal chiropractic
situation for a presumably human soldier. Such is the world-saving business.)
There are actually sort of cut scenes when you enter a Corridor that
feature the Guardian's actual transformation. Strangely, her face peeks
out from the rear underside of the plane when you start rolling with
damage. Maybe she's a Go-Bot. As for enemy graphics, I'll just say that
they range from colored moving boxes to a giant floating head that starts
vomiting a hail of eyeballs after you explode its own eyes. There's
an odd creature in the undersea Area that bursts out of the ground and
tears up the ground as it follows you; a nice touch. The worlds are
all made from a limited tile set, as per most NES games, but are mostly
laid out (or at least infested enough) that they feel natural. The exception
being the Space Area, which was presumably created to simulate the living
conditions of animals that live in the vacuum of space(?!). You think
it'd be easier to give them a cell on the planet's surface instead.
Another
gratuitous example of how ahead of its time TGL was, it features RPG
ELEMENTS (you gather items to advance, and there are oddly-translated
hints scattered about on monitors) and even some traces of Survival
Horror (running off the screen as quickly as possible when your Power
Chip supply runs low and something nasty is on your tail.) One of the
simulataneous pluses and minuses of the Labyrinth scenes is that enemies
are restricted to a single 'room', regardless of whether or not there
are actually obstacles to keep them at bay (like the wide open spaces/single
screen overworlds in Zelda.) I suppose that's to make the creatures
seem more 'territorial' or something. And of course, let's not forget
the fact that the titular Guardian is a female girl lady of the opposite
sex, not to mention a DAME. I personally don't really see how Samus
Aran gets so much credit for being the First Lady of Alien Slaughtering
when suited up head to toe in armor plating. The Guardian didn't need
a hidden ending or JUSTIN BAILEY code- she wasn't afraid to let us know
she was a woman from the start. Er, after she was done pretending to
be an airplane. I guess you could still give Samus credit for breaking
the ice, anyway. Compile's Guardian still has her outgunned. Plus she
was slicing up the scenery with a dual light saber long before Darth
Maul was an ink blot on George Lucas's steno pad.
There
was even a bonus play mode in this thing: the so-called "TGL Mode."
By putting your password in as TGL, the rest all blank spaces, you could
play through all of the game's shooter levels with the difficulty tweaked
up slightly and your Special Weapons doled out sparingly between stages.
Of course, the difficulty of some of the later stages being 'tweaked'
is like taping a straight razor to the front of a German tank. If the
description slips past you, that just means that you're going to be
so swamped with killer mushrooms and homing eyeballs that a random extra
flying fish isn't going to mean much to you.
Are
any of you big companies listening? We got a wide array of futuristic
weapons, diverse play modes that complement each other better than peanut
butter and nails, and an attractive, powerful woman in a battle-bikini
surrounded by dozens of slathering beasts. Some of them even have tentacles
(Tecmo, paying attention now?) And to top it all off, it's a name that's
been sitting idle for the better part of fifteen years and just waiting
to be dusted off, and remade with tender loving care. Just
a thought.
Oh,
and Acclaim need not apply, kthx.