In a sense, the interaction in a shooter is about the most basic interaction available in the medium. You reach out and touch your environment by sending out a “ping”; a probe. As you mention, the shooter is the original videogame — starting with SpaceWar. Even Pong operates on a similar principle, really. It’s just… backwards, kind of, in that the “bullet” is coming toward you, and you’re trying to catch it. (I don’t quite like this model as much.)

All through the medium, shooting more or less equates to exploration. In Metroid, you test the walls, and get a feeling for your environment, by shooting at them and it. In Asteroids and Centipede, your shooting shapes the very gameworld.

It was something of a revolutionary leap to switch away from this mechanic in Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. — that whole thread that I was mumbling about before. In that model, you’re no longer pecking at the environment from afar but personally running around and punching and gobbling and jumping through it. Sort of interesting to tie this into what I was saying earlier. Not sure how it all goes together.

…

Mizuguchi went back to a rail shooter for Rez for a reason: he wanted a clean slate; to strip away all of the junk we have piled on top of the medium for the last few decades, and make the most basic videogame he could, that would still be palatable to a contemporary audience. There’s nothing more basic than a shooter. This is ground one, for videogames. Everything else is built on, or exists in rebellion against, this mechanic. Mizuguchi then tried to find just how much he could express with this mechanism — to show, in part, that it’s not the game system which necessarily drives a game, on an artisic, on an emotional level. Also, just to show how much can be said with how little — and thereby to ask why we have come to tend to express so little with so much.

This is why I like Rez — just the whole way it disassembles our whole notion of the videogame, and shows how it might be used more well than it has been.

I’m really curious what his next step might be.

Parts of the above, combined with parts of what I said about Gradius V

About Life Force: sure, it ain’t perfect. As with anything good, what it is is an arrow pointing in the right direction. And those are rare. Whatever weird qualities the game has, whatever technical issues it might have, its solutions, although dismissibly simple, remain the best that Konami has yet come up with — and in some respects amongst the best in the sidescrolling subgenre (though it would take a while to discern, then show, why I say this).

Part of the genius in Gradius V, from what I have played of it, is that Treasure knew to draw from Life Force more than from the other games in the series. The answers were already there, in essence; Konami had just ignored them for the last near-on twenty years.

Enhance the most progressive parts with some of Treasure’s own puzzle-style level and boss design, and you’ve got a working model of near-ideal horizontal shooter design (at least within the framework that Konami provides for the series). It’s almost a meta-game; it comes out of nowhere with an outside perspective, to self-consciously illustrate how much potential the series still has, in effect showing us what it should have been doing since the beginning by reminding us what it did do very early on yet never really has since.

It’s like a lesson plan. “Here’s what you’ve been doing wrong,” the game says, by doing what in retrospect is obvious as hell.

All that needs be added, as far as I can see, is what I mentioned earlier: a way of reclaiming some past power when you grab your Options back. Maybe each Option would give you back one power, should you catch it (or maybe each would act as a power capsule). Though again, that could be addressed in the difficulty setting — depending on how hardcore you want to be, when playing.

The reason I bring this up is, all of that comes from the template of Life Force. It’s all there, basically — sitting, waiting to be noticed and developed further.

Especially for the standard of the time — as documented by the overall NES library — the game is something of an achievement. That we still have something to learn from it is perhaps both impressive and sad, in its way.

, is also why I find Ikaruga one of the most meaningful games of this generation.