| paleface [sys=PS1; cat=Shooter_Horiz; reg=JPN] |
| | | Shoot it in the eye! Well, here we've got ports of Gradius I and II with relatively little slowdown. Gradius II is bit more interesting as far as I'm concerned, what with the fire dragons, weapon loadout selection, digitized speech, and more variety in the levels.
Back in the Gradius NES days I never really understood why it seemed so popular--sure the big stone heads are kind of funny and the games are sure as hell challenging, but they've always felt a little lacking in fun-factor for me, and I still get that feeling playing them today. "Shoot it in the eye" always gives me a grin though. |
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| | | | Ah yeah okay I can't really hang with the Gradius thing because when you die you lose not just your weapons--that actually isn't so bad--but also your SPEED, and drop back down to a painful crawl through space. Blargh. I hate that so much I find myself just compulsively save-stating to avoid any deaths--which I would probably have fun with, EXCEPT then you hit the opposite problem where you power up to this uber degree with a million options firing laser beams and missiles everywhere or whatever and it's too easy. |
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| | | | This pack might be better than say extracting the arcade ROMs from the Konami Classics Anniversary Collection because you can set this version to narrower-than-4:3 "Arcade" resolution, whereas MAME just runs them in 4:3. |
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| | | | The default move speed here IS pretty much unplayably slow--unlike the MSX Gradius games in the Konami MSX Antiques collections. |
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| | | Not feeling Gradius II right now and its elaborate tall stages of star dragons and weird web things. Gradius (I) though, yeah--with infinite lives cheat in DuckStation! : D (MIGHT let it kill me at start of each stage, we'll see how stressed I get. ; )) (II has continues that seem to work more or less like lives, really--starting off at some checkpoint, not necessarily beginning of stage.)
(Also not feeling Gradius III & IV--silly things like desert lions (III) and eh well just the flashing the 3D-ness of IV.)
(Also still not feeling Darius (Cozmic, etc) at all right now, seems I went the grunginess and graininess of Gradius.) |
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Gradius (in DuckStation)
I used the Infinite Lives cheat from DuckStation's Cheat Manager, and a whole lotta save states. ; D
The ending still seems abrupt and anti-climactic--like the MSX version--and overall it feels like a short game. But it's got the crunchy pixelly difficulty I was looking for, I think. ^ _^ And heck there are three higher difficulty levels to kill myself on if I want! = o (The first and last difficulty level are "1 PS EASY" and "6 PS DIFFICULT" (which is after "4 DIFFICULT" and "5 VERY DIFFICULT" ; D), so it sounds like this PS1 port probably added those two difficulty levels.) |
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