| | Compilation of Konami's five "Parodius" shooter parodies: a remake of the original MSX "Parodius," Parodius Da!, Gokujou Parodius (see entry 101 for those two), Jikkyou: Oshaberi Parodius ~ forever with me (aka "Chatting Parodius"; see entry 134), and Sexy Parodius (see entry 248).
Each game has an added or modified menu screen that lets you set difficulty levels, screen resolution (stretch-to-fit or the smaller, original resolutions, as well as a new resolution with additional space on the sides), button mappings (you can double-map the controls, which is nice), autosave, turn off the slowdown found in the original versions, and so forth. Very well handled.
The Parodius remake looks nice, but there isn't very much going on, and it really just feels like a stiff, early Gradius game with silly sprites and a springier soundtrack.
Da starts to increase the wacky factor, with lots more color and animation, and multiple character selection, which makes a big difference. The game feels looser and more fun, with whimsical backgrounds and gigantic bosses.
Gokujou carries on in the same vein, with animation improvements. Gokujou introduced two-player co-op to the Parodius series, but no two-player option is available in this PSP compilation, unfortunately.
Oshaberi is again much more animated and "zany," with many more playable characters, but it also seems a little scattered, and I'm not as charmed by the stage design, and the "chatting" feature, ie a Japanese dude yelling at you, is uh not always pleasant.
Sexy, on the other hand, the culmination of the series, is probably the best. In addition to having more characters and animation than any of the previous Parodius games, the enemy and stage designs are sublime (and yes, sometimes a little sexy), and there are amusing little hints at story in the cartoons shown at the beginning of each stage.
"Chatting" and Sexy originally had team-up features whereby certain playable character combinations got additional benefits from playing in close proximity, but with no two-player option in this compilation, those features are lost.
Aside from the lack of two-player, and perhaps an occasional pause as the game has to switch music tracks mid-stage (I'm not absolutely sure about this, but it seemed to happen once or twice in the later games), it's a lovely compilation, and a very handy one for the shooter completist. |
|
|
