D-Force retrospective: Force manure | Super NES Works

While I'd love to wrap Super NES 1991 on a high note, the games actually seem to be getting worse as we approach the end of the year. D-Force is easily the lousiest Super NES game of 1991, and it's a strong contender for worst-of-all-time, too. A dull, clumsy shooter that would have been embarrassing on an 8-bit console, D-Force only throws its awfulness into sharp relief by including a Super NES-specific gimmick that somehow makes the game even less fun to play. Truly, we've punch through the barrel's bottom here.

[@GameplayandTalk]

The final stage you get for going through the full game is absolutely ridiculous. I never cheat in shooters, but like a masochist I wanted to see the end and recently used the extra lives code just to get there. I generally consider myself decent at the genre, but in D-Force, even with the bump I *still* couldn't manage to finish it. All of the game's poor design choices and broken hit boxes mix for a true tsunami of "WTF" on that final level. It's really, *really* bad.

[@Fluoride_Jones]

+Gameplay and Talk I'm going to take your word for it. I don't think I'll be playing "D-Force" anytime soon. The term "dumpster fire" comes to mind when considering your comments on this game.

[@METR0lD]

I remember renting this game back in the day. It's been so many years that I almost forgot this game exists, but your video has brought the unpleasant memories back. Thanks Jeremy!

[@SNESdrunk]

Yuck, sorry you had to sit through this one. Your weapon sounds like someone tapping their fingers on a microphone, that's bad enough. 4:00 "Sure, just have the boss intermittently speed up here and there, that doesn't look broken or anything."

[@kidv2]

Hey there Sir Drunk :)

[@Fluoride_Jones]

+SNES drunk So, you're saying "D-Force" is *not* worth playing today? ;)'

[@MissFuzzbottom]

When your death animation takes so long that it has to play the death noise twice, you're probably doing something wrong.

[@orichumo]

get your butter knife ready! we're getting lagoon!

[@kidv2]

The worst thing is that mode 7 feature is not such a bad idea when you think about it it’s just done so poorly here

[@MynameisHukos]

I was a Genesis kid growing up so I have a lot of experience with classic Genesis shooters - Thunder Force III/IV, Gleylancer, Battle Mania Daiginjou, etc. and I love all of those! This is... whoo boy this game needed some work. Fortunately, there are some pretty good shooters on the SNES, but it'll be quite a while before we get to something really special like Axelay.

[@barny15]

Axelay is, in my opinion, the best shoot 'em up on the system. It's so good.

[@tsp1999]

MynameisHukos do you remember Truxton?

[@Fluoride_Jones]

I've honestly never heard of this game, and I read ALL the video game magazines back then. I was a damn lucky kid! :D

[@CSplitter]

The opening pun was extremely D-forced.

[@MrPurple3000]

I mean, I see it's bad...but that's a pretty clever use of Mode 7. Even if it's poorly implemented it's kind of awesome to see this kind of experimentation with features early in a system's life.

[@z3r0slugfm]

You’d all be speaking a new language if it wasn’t for the Nuclear Apache Helicopter pilots who flew through those 6 countries and sustained bone crushing injuries to stop that Mid Eastern Dictator. Comprende? I can still hear the roars of those dinosaurs. There weren’t your every day variety, these were helicopter eating creatures that brought a true test of one’s non stop creative thinking. /s. Seriously though, the schtick in the manual is by far more entertaining than the game.

[@jacobbelyea7945]

z3r0slugfm Pro tip: Don’t add /s to the end of sarcastic comments. Even without it, everyone can tell they’re sarcastic. Pointing out that they’re sarcastic ruins the joke.

[@kyleolson8977]

I appreciate that you have a goal to talk about every SNES game. But this one is so bad in a dull fashion it's just hard to care. I'm amazed you found 8:07 of video. That's heroic.

[@JeremyParish]

Sometimes I need to hurt myself to feel alive

[@danpatrick7176]

I actually have a huge soft spot for this game. This is the first shoot em up i ever played and me and my brother loved this game. I still hum the music to this day. I still enjoy the game in spite of its flaws.

[@acelyasummer422]

On the other hand, Verytex for Mega Drive is quite good. That system always seemed to have better luck than SNES when it came to shooters.

[@declanfair4540]

The Mega Drive's faster processor made shooters easier to do well on the system. Not to say that there weren't excellent, creative, and fast shooters on SNES, but it took longer to get there since technical trickery was required to bring it up to speed.

[@djsquarewave]

For Verytex, ISCO hired a marginally more talented studio, who in turn hired some fantastically-talented musicians. So you got a competent game with a great soundtrack rather than an awful game with a competent soundtrack. :)

[@duffman18]

@@declanfair4540 yeah that's why it's annoying when some say the SNES was more powerful than the mega drive "full stop" and that that's just the end of the argument. No, they're both better at different things, and having tons of sprites on screen is something the mega drive is just better at, while the SNES can do certain things the Mega drive cannot.

[@barny15]

Yeah, I absolutely love Verytex. It's not a classic shoot 'em up by any stretch of the imagination, but it's at least fun and has cool bosses, and the soundtrack is among the best for any 16-bit era console.

[@chaseman94]

I like that game as well. Did anyone ever notice that the music in the game sounds like it belongs in a Data East Mega Drive/Genesis game?

[@FloatingSunfish]

The D actually stands for _"Daaang, this game _*_sucks!_*_ "_

[@Larry]

Shame really, especially considering Sega did the same concept with Thunber Blade, and that came out pretty well.

[@dumpnchase]

The best helicopter shooter was Ajax. This game wished it was that.

[@AujiTheSquirrel]

The music is awesome and it has dinosaurs. I see no problems here.

[@Azraelfromgamefax]

I love the outro music so much

[@MaidenHell1977]

ha, wow, never saw this game in motion until now... great video as always! looking forward to the next one!

[@chaseman94]

To think when this was released I was tempted to rent it at the video store or buy it used at a video game store but I always ended up passing on it for something better. For years I wondered about this game now thanks to you I'm not missing anything special here.

[@MatSpeedle]

Picked this up on my last trip to the states in a thrift store thinking, this looks neat, did a quick google and thought "ah nice a shooter, this looks ok"... really should have checked some video on youtube... I instantly regretting it after 2 mins of playing it... oh well! :D

[@Seafoamgaming]

i died listening to the dinosaur stage theme

[@KnuxKitsune]

I played this game when I was young because it was one of 3 games I had at the time. "Super Mario World" is excellent. "F-Zero" is radical! "D-Force" was...it was awful. I knew it was bad back then, but I did like vertical shooters back then, and would play "Aero Fighters" whenever I'd go to the bowling alley, and I had no idea it was also ported to SNES. I never saw it in stores. However a vertical scrolling shooter I did like, which I picked up when K-Mart went out of business was "Strike Gunner - S.T.G."

[@a.calder8217]

Thus game feels like something an kid would come up with on Shoot'em Up Construction Kit on the Amiga that was inexplicably given a full SNES release.

[@InnagadadaDBZ]

I've been binging your videos for the past few days. Thank you for all these great retrospectives! :D

[@MikeChimeri]

After watching this, I went over to Game Sack's SNES Shoot 'em Ups 2 episode. I remembered that the D-Force segment joked about the Mode 7 zooming: "SO MUCH POWER!!!" kzbin.info/www/bejne/jIXHgJ2Ifp2Cos0

[@johnsimon8457]

I feel sorry for these little studios making a game on no budget and Nintendo’s shite handling of third parties. But bad hitboxes and no feedback when shots register on some enemies and easily cheesed boss design ... agh people have made more compelling shooters with less.

[@SNARC15]

6:07 Wait...is that the "YEE" dino?

[@jasonblalock4429]

More evidence of what an over-sold gimmick 'Mode 7' really was. It made for great advertisements and some cool transition effects, but ways to successfully utilize it in gameplay were few and far between. Nintendo made such a big deal about the SNES having "hardware scaling and rotation" but implemented it in such a way that was usually little more than a glorified special effect.

[@duffman18]

I never remember mode 7 being talked about much at the time, though I'm in the UK so maybe our advertising was different, plus i was a young kid so maybe I just don't remember. But it is on the other hand a thing constantly brought up in KZbin videos. Maybe that's why it seems like they made it out to be a bigger deal, because youtubers always talk about it. I dunno. You are right that it ultimately was mostly pointless, except for racing games. Or the map on zelda, that was pretty useful, but it probably could have been done without mode 7 somehow, with your approximate position just being a coordinate in the code

[@jasonblalock4429]

@@duffman18 In America, at least, they made a HUGE deal out of Mode 7. It was treated as one of the main selling points over the Genesis/MegaDrive. (Which in turn, is why the bonus level in Sonic 1 was based on full-screen rotation. Sega was basically saying "What you do with hardware, the Genesis can do with software.")

[@bjornh1527]

I´ve never heard of D-Force! Obviously a hidden gem!

[@JeremyParish]

Coprolites are technically not gems, I'm afraid.

[@bjornh1527]

Oh. My mistake.

[@mymangodfrey]

At least they didn’t call it Super D-Force.

[@dezm101]

I remember this game as one of the few titles that even Nintendo Power would call out as crap lol

[@FrothingManiac]

I'm interested to see what you think of Lagoon, because I would genuinely rather play D-Force over that.

[@JeremyParish]

I've yet to revisit it for recording and writing, but I remember renting it back in the day and finding it too uninteresting to play for more than an hour.

[@craigachuff6087]

I played this daily as a kid. I like it. Still have the family SNES. Shaq Fu too.

[@jjmah7]

It’s weird, this game actually looks awesome. I never played it though...but the graphics look pretty decent

[@JeremyParish]

No man, it's extremely bad, I promise

[@jjmah7]

Jeremy Parish haha I’ll take your word for it! I can see how kids would’ve been duped by looking at screenshots or the back of the box.

[@CarozQH]

Oh god this game

[@reallycoolguys]

"Extraordinarily terrible," reviewers love to live in hyperbole. I appreciate the flashback though. I got this game as a 7th grade poor kid. I didn't have a lot of games. It was fun enough....let me tell you after all the terribe NES games I rented as a kid....allowed to rent one game a week..and getting burned time after time with something like X-Men NES.... D-Force wasn't that bad. A little boring...but I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. Better boring than something so hard you can't get past the first level.

[@barny15]

On the same token as "reviewers love to live in hyperbole", people love living in the past and cloaking themselves in nostalgia. I'm not trying to dunk on your childhood memories, and I'm guilty of wearing the nostalgia blinders now and then, but D-Force is a bad game, and Jeremy's deal is looking at these games without the trappings of those blinders. Some reviewers just end up telling a truth that might sometimes hurt.

[@KuraIthys]

Well, that's just depressing. The sprite positions don't even update every frame and STILL there's slowdown. I mean, what IS this game doing behind the scenes? Perhaps there's some truth to the idea that some developers were using high level languages like C... That's a terrible idea on a CPU as slow as the 8 and 16 bit systems had, when making realtime games... The performance cost is just too high. The result will almost inevitably be awful...

[@NESADDICT]

Never played it!

[@discordinc]

That zoom in mechanic is so distracting. I thought there was something wrong with the video

[@JeremyParish]

Oh, there definitely is something wrong with this video: it contains 8 minutes of discussion about a terrible game

[@ScrumBeeble]

God. I had this game. Still do somewhere. It was genuinely terrible.

[@samuelthehobo4441]

Hehehehehe.....D-Force......hehehehe

[@TheCommentNinja81]

The most generic shmup of the SNES would not be Raiden Trad? I'm not a fan of helicopter, but I did enjoyed the music.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

I love Phalanx's box art!

[@JoeBushOnline]

Parrish DESTROYS Bad SNES Game

[@gsilverfish]

I am so upset that my big takeaway from this video is that I've been saying Darius wrong.

[@akxmedia0]

Not sure where Jeremy got the idea of pronoucing it "Dah-RY-us" but the japanese enunciation is "Dar-ee-esu" Being as the game is of Japanese origin, I wager that is the correct way to pronouce the name. The "Dah-Ry-us" enunciation is from the bible IIRC. Also that "ダライアス" in a translator pronounces it as Dar-ee-esu" So with that, and the actual japanese commercial for the game leads me to believe it is indeed pronouced "Dar-ee-esu" or "Dar-ee-us" and Dah-RY-us is incorrect.

[@JeremyParish]

I got the "idea" by reading the title as it's written out on Japanese packaging and other materials: ダライアス. "Dar-ees-u" would be written as ダリース.

[@akxmedia0]

@@JeremyParish ...and because I enjoy beating a dead horse, here is a commercial for DariusBurst...with yep, the correct "Dar-ee-esu" enunciation. OK, I promise...I'm done for now... kzbin.info/www/bejne/gnPVi4V-YtSGY7M

[@roberthanthonymartinezrive7383]

Goddamit, this fucking game. I finished it once on the highest difficulty and I never plan to play this game again unless I'm subjected to it as a joke from friends. This is one of the absolute worst SNES shoot 'em ups I've ever played. The guy who sold me told me it was a good game but after playing it, I was bamboozled. Holy fuck...

[@furrymessiah]

1:42 You say Earth Defense Force, but you show the box art of Phalanx.

[@JeremyParish]

And the caption corrects it.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

@@JeremyParish Oh well, still I loved seeing that again! I feel like there should've been a TV commercial with that ol' coot on it telling us the story of what the game is by the campfire!

[@exactspace]

It’s so cold in the D

[@THEmuteKi]

Now that's a showpiece helicopter shooting game that is surely worse than Super Thunder Blade?

[@cherokeefit4248]

Seems painfully easy as alien vs Predator lol

[@picc9000]

Literally thought the first seconds of the video were an audio glitch.

[@kayceecheshall2818]

The theme song is really pandering to the lucrative French market.

[@f0ry0u81]

What does the D stand for? Deez nutz!

[@adamking6645]

No wonder Sega ruled the 1991 Christmas season. What did the SNES actually have during that time outside of Super Mario World? At least the Genesis had games such as Streets of Rage and Toejam & Earl among other exciting offerings to go along with Sonic.

[@epicnipple8746]

My old lady wants a D Force. I should buy her this. She will be so happy, thank you!

[@0palheart]

thanks for playing the bad games so we dont have to jeremy

[@massivepileup]

yyyeaahh... With the SNES year finished are you going to focus on the Game Boy again? I gotta say I find that series more relatable since everybody had a Game Boy and plenty of games or multi carts.

[@MrJWTH]

massivepileup I don’t think so since in the comments section of past videos he said that it would back in 2020.

[@JeremyParish]

Virtual Boy Works is standing in for GBW this year. I think at this point it's pretty clear the two systems and their libraries were VERY closely related.

[@duffman18]

@@JeremyParish your virtual boy series is awesome. I've never seen such an in depth look at the system, even already with the videos you've done so far. I've never heard anyone talk about mario clash before for example, and how it's like almost a sequel to the original arcade Mario Bros, but turned "3D". I wanna get an old 3D TV for cheap now and play virtual boy games on it, as I heard that actually works with the glasses on to create the 3D effect

[@JeremyParish]

@@duffman18 Thanks-Mario Clash episode is in two weeks!

[@duffman18]

@@JeremyParish ah I must have watched that one on patreon then

[@StriderZessei]

At least the music isn't terrible!

[@JeremyParish]

But sadly drowned out by that terrible machine gun effect...

[@AntiPseudo]

@@JeremyParish ptap ptap ptap ptap ptap

[@darktetsuya]

don't think i ever played this one, doesn't look like I missed much. even something like STG: Strike Tactical Gunner seems leagues above this boring turd of a shooter.

[@bluespaceman7937]

I had never heard about this game. Unfortunate that it turned out so poorly.

[@fireflocs]

DEEZ FORCE

[@jamesmoss3424]

I never play D-force and I not play it.

[@kidv2]

The thematic seems all over the place

[@Poever]

That constant zoom-in mechanic is sure unnecessary

[@kabutops87]

Slow frame rate, choppy graphics, poor design choice, boring and unsipired music. Jeez! everything sucks in this game.

[@PandaXs1]

tfw you make a fake version of a public domain song

[@imaxjunior6531]

So many NES shooters were better than this.

[@VahanNisanian]

Terrible game.