CABAL (ル ベ ー ル) - NES LONGPLAY (NO DEATH RUN) (COMPLETE WALKTHROUGH)
Cabal (カベール, Kabēru) is a 1988 arcade shooter video game originally developed by TAD Corporation and published in Japan by Taito, in North America by Fabtek and in Europe by Capcom. In the game, the player controls a commando, viewed from behind, trying to destroy various enemy military bases. The game was innovative for the era, but only a mild success in the arcades, and became better known for its various home conversions.
Cabal has one-player and two-player-simultaneous modes of gameplay. Each player assumes the role of an unnamed commando trying to destroy several enemy military bases. There are 5 stages with four screens each. The player starts with a stock of three lives and uses a gun with limitless ammunition and a fixed number of grenades to fend off enemy troops and attack the base. The commando is seen from behind and starts behind a protective wall which can be damaged and shattered by enemy fire. To stay alive, the player needs to avoid enemy bullets by running left or right, hiding behind cover, or using a dodge-roll. An enemy gauge at the bottom of the screen depletes as foes are destroyed and certain structures (which collapse rather than shatter) are brought down. When the enemy gauge is emptied, the level is successfully completed, all of the remaining buildings onscreen collapse, and the player progresses to the next stage. If a player is killed, he is immediately revived at the cost of one life or the game ends if they have no lives remaining. Boss fights, however, restart from the beginning if the only remaining player dies.
From time to time, power-ups are released from objects destroyed onscreen. Some power-ups give special weapons such as an extremely fast-firing machine gun or an automatic shotgun with a lower firing rate and larger area of effect. Others grant extra grenades or additional points.
Cabal was ported to several home computers of the era, including the DOS computers, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST and Amiga. It was also ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System console by Rare. A version for the Atari Lynx was previewed and even slated to be published in April 1992, but it was never released by Fabtek.
When converting the game to the Nintendo Entertainment System, Rare were given a Cabal cabinet but did not have access to the game's source code, so they had to play the game over and over and redraw the graphics from memory. To accommodate the many layers and sprites of the arcade game, programmer Anthony Ball used a common coding trick: swapping sprites from left to right every other frame. This has the negative side effect of causing the sprites to flicker when they reach the console's limit of eight per line, but Ball, like many programmers of the era, found this an acceptable trade-off for including all the game's content, and in a 2016 interview he said he is happy with the quality of the conversion.