Low G Man Is Not A Half-Life Mod Featuring Lil Jon

I friend of mine purchased Low G Man: The Low Gravity Man for me for. . . some reason. I guess just to see me write about it and add to the poverty collection. He probably chose this game in particular because it cost two dollars and it has oddly simple box art. Low G Man is a 1990 NES game developed by KID, the people responsible for Burai Fighter and partially responsible for Mendel Palace. Oddly enough, the game's most unique feature isn't the gravity.

 

Sure, your character can jump high, and apparently with the proper item drops can jump really high, but there are other games where you can jump high and it's just not very impressive. The unique thing about Low G Man is the way you attack and interact with the enemies. In a side-scrolling platformer in which you use a gun, I expected the combat to just be a simple system of shooting enemies until they explode, but it isn't that simple.

 

 

By default, your infinite ammo gun doesn't do any damage, but is capable of freezing enemies. In order to actually kill the enemies you have to attack them by holding up or down and hitting attack, which does a melee attack. Because of that, the general flow of combat is based around freezing enemies and jumping onto them to perform melee strikes. Since you are unable to do the melee strikes directly in front of you and it usually takes more than one strike to kill an enemy, it is quite difficult to take out enemies without freezing them first.

 

 

It's sort of like a more cumbersome version of Metroid after you've got the ice beam. When you kill an enemy various types of items. They can be health refills, weapon upgrades similar to a shoot'em up, or sub-weapons. These weapons are different types of shots that are capable of killing enemies, but you have limited ammunition. Other powerups, that you can only get from specific enemies, are vehicles that allow you to attack in better ways or fly for a limited amount of time.

 

The graphics are kind of bad and the music seems out of place for the game, but Low G Man is a sort of interesting game due to its combat. Due to the look of the game I guessed that it was a conversion of some licensed Japanese game like Shatterhand was, but it wasn't and was only released in North America and Europe. I guess I was fooled by the cheesy 80's anime aesthetic in the opening cutscene.