Famidaily - Episode 0252 - Salamander/Life Force (沙羅曼蛇)

It's time for the best looking Famicom cartridge. But how's the game inside that gorgeous translucent shell?
Famidaily is my attempt to catalog all of the commercially released Famicom games.

[@anactualmotherbear]

One of (many) reasons I got into collecting Famicom games, besides them being so cheap, is just how colorful and different all the cartridges look. This one I've been eyeing for some time. It's absolutely beautiful and I want it on my shelf.

[@toastrave7820]

fun fact Salamander got a 3 part OVA series with all 3 episodes getting a subtitled VHS in 1995 in the UK by a company called Western Connecyion

[@darktetsuya]

fond memories of this one on NES! a super tough one though for sure and that's even WITH the konami code. would love to own the famicom version though with that sweet translucent cart!

[@sjake8308]

I've never seen the cart before and you're right, it really is a sight to behold.

[@epicman63]

This game is good for its atmosphere.

[@ezequielgomez7083]

I remember love playing Salamander (Lifeforce) on Famicom a lot when I was a 8 year old child since 2009

[@JohnnyUndaunted]

I'm not much of a theologian, but the character 羅/ra in 沙羅曼蛇 and 魂斗羅 is also used a lot in Japanese and Chinese to transcribe the name of Buddhist and Hindu deities (e.g. 阿修羅, 羅刹, 羅漢, 閻羅王), so there's probably a religious nuance there that is lost when you rely solely on J-E dictionary definitions. Also, I might add that the FC Salamander is not a direct conversion of the arcade version - it's a combination of Salamander and its JP-only revision Life Force. The former used instant power-ups, while the latter used the Gradius-style power-up selection meter.

[@sjake8308]

It's not really a combination of Salamander and (Japanese) Life Force, either: The Japanese version of Life Force was simply Salamander reskinned and with the Gradius power up system added. The Famicom version of Salamander is more like an arranged version of (Japanese) Life Force.

[@jescis0]

This is another game that I have CIB and I have the player's guide(or whatever they call it) 😁😁😎😎

[@sjake8308]

This game is pretty good, but I think it's the worst version of Salamander I've played. Not for technical reasons: The graphics and sound are amazing and the production values are classic Konami, but the changes made to the game make it a much harder and less enjoyable experience overall. The original Salamander was a very fair game, but the Japanese version of Life Force made the game much more difficult simply by adding the Gradius power up system. This version cranks it up another notch by making stage 1 harder, replacing stage 2 with stage 4, and rearranging stage 3 so that it's now muderously difficult instead of the relative cakewalk it was previously.

[@nate567987]

msx called

[@stevep9177]

4:00 boooooo arbitrary difficulty increase for the US market

[@sjake8308]

Actually, I believe this was because Konami used one of the custom chips in the Famicom version (the VRC4, I think) and they weren't permitted to use it in Western releases. I gather that a number of their other games had to be reworked slightly for the Western markets for similar reasons.

[@nate567987]

bet the vrc4 didn't work with the nes-10@@sjake8308