This week on Fun For Free, I’ll be talking about the boss fighting game, Banana Nababa.

Banana Nababa is a Game Maker game created by Lazrael. The game consists of six vastly different boss fights. That may seem like a short game, and it is, but the difficulty level and and lots of replayability will keep you coming back for more.

The first thing you will notice about this game is the graphics. They have a very retro feel mixed with maybe a little bit of Cave Story. They look fantastic and fit the game perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, that I really can’t see how it could have possibly looked better.

The music is also something that you will notice right away. This also has a very retro/Cave Story feel, which I really like and I wish it would be in more commercial games (that goes for the graphics too). All of the tracks in the game are fantastic, except, unfortunately, the last boss music. It’s just not as good as the other music, and it doesn’t really give the feeling of epicness that it should.

The controls are basic: you move left and right, jump, use your weapons, and switch weapons. The gameplay is similar to games such as Contra, where the controls are simple, but you really have to master them to beat the bosses. The control placement is kind of odd, but it ends up giving you a lot of different setups.

The game is split up into six levels which get progressively harder as they go on, except level 4 which is just insane. All of the levels take place on a single screen, so you only have to worry about a small area. The gameplay itself is very oldschool. Like I mentioned before, while the gameplay isn’t exactly like Contra — no 8-directional shooting, for instance — you have to approach it the same way. Unlike a lot of games where there are specific ways to beat a boss, like in Super Mario Galaxy, you have to figure out a boss’ movements and learn when to attack them. Once you figure out all their movements and how to counter them, the game gets a lot easier…except level 4 is still really hard.

All in all, this game is fantastic and probably my second favorite indie game of all time. I recommend it to everyone, especially those who like games from the NES days.

[edit] - As many people have mentioned in the comments, you can in fact play this on Windows Vista. According to AleksOD, you just have to right-click on the game, choose properties, then compatibility and choose Windows XP SP2.

Official Website

Download Link