Abadox: The Deadly Inner War

"Geez, is this Aliens with a slightly different ending? I pity you, Ripley..."

Ranking:

Graphics: 8/10
Sound Effects: 8/10
Music: 7/10
Originality: 7/10
Play Control: 8/10
Group Enjoyment: 4/10
Individual Enjoyment: 6/10
Challenge: 9/10
Ending: 3/10
Overall: 7/10

Yet another run-of-the-mill space shooter, Abadox has little to contribute to the genre. You are the generic hero, sent out (alone) to take out the evil alien menace that his headed towards Earth. What sets this apart from other shooters is the method your character goes about taking care of the alien baddies - he travels down the gullet of the beast, and takes
it out from the inside!

So, does your little flyin' man succeed and save the world, or does he die and is immediately replaced by another guy who looks exactly the same, minus the powerups, who will die as well and will be replaced...

Good Points:
The game has good graphics, depicting the gory depths of the beast you are flying within. The play control is also top-notch, as you have very nice control of your character (and figuring out what does what isn't hard). The originality, even though this IS a shooter, is pretty high too, as it does more than just carbon-copy the genre. It's challenge is really up there, too. While it isn't QUITE as hard as I'd like it at times, the balance is good (until you die and lose your powerups...).

Bad Points:
I felt the ending just doesn't make up for the work put in to beat the game. Also, I have ALWAYS hated the idea of losing ALL your powerups when you die. That's a horrible idea for gameplay, as it was invented primarily to have kids keep pumping quarters into arcade machines (for games like Contra and Gradius). If you lose all your powerups, you're more prone to die, and then you have to put more money in...this game is for the Nintendo! You already own the cartridge! Why have that as a challenge factor? Why not give us more enemies and obstacles to test our reflexes, not give us less and less to work with!

I also wanted more special weapons. 3 or 4 are nice, but after a while you get tired of the same 4 weapons. 1943 had the regular gun, a laser gun, a lightning attack, a tsunami attack, and a myriad of special guns. Heck, even Gradius had the double shot, missiles, options, lasers, etc. This game has a small amount, and it's feels like it's even smaller, given the frequency they're given (not very often at all).

General Ratings:

Graphics:
This is the main part of the game that will catch your attention. You see, you’re flying through space, fighting...flying eyeballs? Gigantic mouths? Rotting corpses? Geez, the programmers of this game are REALLY sick. You have to fight a gigantic head with the eyeballs protruding from the skull, for crying out loud!

Once you get past the graphic content, the game really does look good. Your character, while rather bland in color (Yellow and Brown...yesh, who thought of THAT combination? Colonel Mustard?), has a fair amount of detail to him. The landscapes take the cake, however. The beginning stage has you flying over a GIANT set of intestine, and they are actually well drawn! I believe the only thing that could have made the backgrounds better for this game is if they were actually moving...then again, would you WANT to see a bunch of intestines pulsing and moving as you flew by? I didn't think so.

The enemies in this game, while equally gross, are quite nicely drawn and animated. Ok, some of them only have 2 frames of animation, but it's the Nintendo for cryin' out loud! That was GOOD for the Nintendo! Giant mouths snapping shut while flying at you, eyeballs with their nerve endings floating eeriely behind them, or weird little cockroach-things with giant protruding eyes, the enemies in this game are great. Well, great in the sense of how they were drawn...you still want to kill them (or would it be RE-kill them?).

Finally, the bosses in this game are, to say the least, gross. I'm going to say gross a lot in the description of this game, ok? The first level boss is a giant head with the eyes extended out of their sockets, hanging on by their optic nerves. Gee, guess what you're supposed to shoot at. Some of the other bosses definitely aren't for the squeemish, which shows all the more that the graphics are good, albeit graphic in nature. Did that make sense? I hope it did...

Sound Effects:
I wanted more gooey sounds, not spacey sounds! That fact aside, though, the sound effects are pretty good. Your have the standard ''beep'' when you fire your gun, the ''boop'' when you die, and various ''BeepBeepBoopBeepieMcBoopster'' when other things happen. Diversity counts, because it shows effort on the programmer's part.

Music:
Darn it, creepy music, not gung-ho music! It's more fun to think this guy's taking on this giant alien by accident, not on purpose! Who takes on ANYTHING in just a space suit, anyways? If you had a spaceship, you'd be able to take some hits, but a space suit? A small rock could rip your suit, and you'd be dead in a couple minutes...I like to think this guy was in a bad rip-off of Alien, only he was the one that got shot out into space.

That rant aside, the music for this IS pretty good. There's a lot of it, even if it ISN'T very creepy (like half the stuff in Castlevania 3 or the introductory screen of Metroid). When you get to a miniboss or actual boss, the music changes to a different theme. When you beat 'em, it goes back to the main music of the stage, or plays a different tune, letting you know you won. Good job there, programmers!

Originality:
Sure, the space shoot-em-up has been done, but how many have been done inside a gigantic, living organism? Not many, I'll tell ya. I think the only problem with the idea of ''Taking out the evil from within'' is that it was used in a previous, more successful game - Life Force (it came out in 1988, while Abadox came out in 1989). Aside from that, what else is original in this?

Well, how about the weaponry? That HAS to be original, doesn't it? You start off with the standard single-horizontal shot, and eventually upgrade yourself with speed options, multi-angled shots, lasers, and more. Another neat item I found was the fact that you are not a dinky little space ship, sent off to destroy the evil armada (or giant alien, whatever). In this game, you are instead a lone man in a space suit, with a large gun in front of him. That's a neat idea - makes you think he WAS in one of those dinky ships, and for some odd reason had to eject, thus forcing him to go at it from his space suit. Geez, I'd hate to be that guy...

Finally, I loved the Mini-Shields idea. Certain enemies drop a little powerup that rotates around your character, and can absorb shots and enemies if it collides with them. While you can't control where it stays or how fast it flies, you CAN control its radius from your body by using the A button. Simply hold the A button down until it's at the distance you want, and it will continue to rotate at that point. The good thing is that you can collect up to 3 (I believe...I've never gotten more than 3, so I don't remember), so you're pretty well off when it comes to taking care of projectiles.

Play Control:
As with any good space shooter (and this one, too), you have great control over your ship. Moving about is a piece of cake, and it only gets easier when you nab some speed upgrades. Figuring out the controls are easy, too - the B button makes you fire your gun, while the A button (once you get one) controls the radius of your Mini-Shield(s). So let's see...speed up items - check. Weapons - check. Easy-to-figure-out controls - check. Hyper Nuclear Death Ray - Drat.

Enjoyment:
This game can get pretty frustrating, especially when you beat the game.

Ok, aside from that, the game is really just above average in funfactor. There really isn't much replay value, since there isn't anything to do once you've beaten the game. Yes, you can go through and see if you can get a higher score over and over, or see if you can do the entire game without dying, but that's not really what an average joe does for fun. If the game had a challenge setting, or a 2-player option, then we'd be in for a real treat. Come to think of it - there were a lot of shooting games for the Nintendo that used 2-players simultaneous, but why didn't they use the multitap and create 4-player shooters? I know I would have gotten it! Oh well...I suppose the mere thought of that would melt the Nintendo down, so maybe not.

Challenge:
This game has challenge out the wazzer! (I made that word up in an effort to avoid saying ''butt''). Enemies galore, big, gooey bosses, and other stuff to make you sick! I wanted a challenge option, though...

Ending:
Don't talk to me about this ending. After all that junk you put up with (unless you cheated and put in the invincibility code), THIS is what you get? I'm not saying the ending makes the game, but for certain games, if the ending isn't worth the effort you put in it tends to drop the replay. This is one of those games.


Overall:
Overall, this is a decent game, which you can pick up at a local FuncoLand for about 2 bucks. That’s just about all it’s worth, too. Replay and gameplay are 2 different things - this has one, but not the other (you can guess which one I'm referring to).

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/13/00, Updated 09/13/00