So Jets’n’Guns (gold edition, this matters due to some new weapons being added in that version) is a rather old game by now.
I haven’t played it for at least 14 years by this point, but I still remember the vast majority of the game. The weapons, map, enemies, plot and music all stand out clearly in my mind to this day.
What really stands out though, are these two thoughts.
1) It was a great game and I’d love to play through it again.
2) I’ll never be able to play it again.
The game is a side scrolling “shoot-em-up” kind of game where the plot starts out weird and then goes off the rails so hard that the rails come running after it in confusion.
The enemies are wonderfully ridiculous designs. The big bad guy in each level is just fantastically out there. The weapons are much the same, which is the big issue.
Everything that is going to be a mainstay of your general loadout is starting out using stark colors and screen dominating effects that like to flicker a lot.
Upgrading them makes them be “the same, but much more of it”.
Back then, when my epilepsy didn’t affect me much at all. I frequently lost sight of my own ship even though it naturally had to be centered within the attention hogging blue circle of death. This caused me to fly into obstacles, get stuck and die when the left side of the screen caught up with me (assuming I hadn’t already died to repeatedly slamming myself into a wall).
A personal favorite of mine was a weapon that was included in the Gold Edition and it would be a weapon I’d be very hard pressed to do without if I were to ever play it again. It was also a weapon that formed a huge, wheel shaped, blue shockwave around the ship. Flashing in shades of blue towards green, reaching out in serrated claws and spinning fast around your ship.
An example of the blue wheel of death can be seen here:
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Other weapons in the game included giant red beams that shot from your ship towards either the left or the right side of the screen (or if you kitted your ship out for it, towards left, right and bottom right at the same time).
A short video of some of the other weapons are to be found here:
It holds a special place in my heart as a game that would occupy me for hours upon hours. With a plot that naturally looped you straight into new game while letting you keep all your stuff from the last playthrough. Even rewarding you with new unlocks depending on how many secrets you picked up on the way.
Knowing that this is just permanently locked away from me for the rest of my life stings more than you’d think it would. Even though we’re talking about a game that I haven’t even bothered to play in the 10 years between last playthrough and my epilepsy changing my life forever.
It’s not so much a thing where I can no longer decide to open the door or not. It’s that the door is still there. I can nudge it open any time I want, and I might die if I do.
Writing this piece has been weirdly cathartic for me, even though it didn’t really come up untill a few days ago.
I haven’t written anything for this blog in ages, having really felt the difference in urgency that came with my medicine being introduced in my life. It’s really weird to feel guilty about not suffering so many seizures, that I need to tell the world about each one I get.
Being safer shouldn’t make me feel worse about my own disability, but here we are anyways.
Electronic Epileptic 