Growing up with the NES in the 1980s I played more than most of the games that made their way to North American retail. But to be fair, much of that was largely due to the local video rental stores and my father’s healthy addiction to watching new films every week. Anytime he made the trip to get his movie fix I was able to bring some new games home.

Games I actually owned when I was young for the most part all had one thing in common, they had all came to me by way of the discount bin at the Kay-Bee toy store. That was how I got to possess Abadox: The Deadly Inner War. Developed by Natsume and published in North America by Milton Bradley who was quite famous for making board games, but not so much for video games.

The basic plot is that your home world has been consumed by a giant space parasite and become a huge hungry death planet that’s pretty focused on devouring everything it comes across, including a space ship with a very important princess on board.
You take up the role of Second Lieutenant Nazal, who will bravely pilot his power suit into the maw of the beast and go to war within it’s guts!

Falling under the shoot ’em up genre, Abadox switches from vertical and horizontal scrolling with each stage. In my opinion the game moves slower than most games of this type. That just allows you more time to bask in it’s gorgeous sprite work inside the horrific setting.

The game has never been ported, nor does it have any type of virtual console release. Perhaps worth picking up a copy for that reason alone, Abadox remains to this day one of the NES & Famicom’s buried treasures.