Famicom Fanatic: May 2011

The 3rd and final part of this 3 part Gradius Special!

And now we arrive at the final and (in my opinion) best Gradius game for the Famicom. Konami pretty much nailed everything in this game. The difficulty is perfect in the way that it starts out relatively easy and progressively gets harder. The Music is pretty much perfect throughout the game and the inclusion of voices when you select a weapon or item is a nice extra feature. The graphics are some of the best on the console and the bosses are big and have a sense of danger to them which Konami is really great at implementing in their games. It’s a shame that Gradius 2 never got released outside of Japan and i really wonder why that is, It’s not like they had a lot of text to translate, and to my knowledge the entire game is in English, from the start screen to the end screen it’s all English letters. The only thing i can think of is that Gradius 2 might have a built in FM Synthesis chip like Akumajou Densetsu (Castlevania 3) and the American and European NES couldn’t play those games because of pin shortage on the game cartridge.

The game starts of by giving you a choice between 4 types of item layouts. They are all special in their own individual ways but I always prefer the Laser setup with the spread bombs. The Laser cuts through the enemy and the bomb explodes on impact and a blue explosion stops for some time and constantly hits the enemy multiple times. Combining that with some Options just gives you a devastating power and a truly “Force to be reckoned with”. Although just like the other games, one hit means that you die and lose all of those sought after, hard to get weapons and powerups (Unless you of course have the shield).

The game begins with you piloting the Vice Viper again around some really big fire rocks with fire dragons around and gigantic flames that crosses the screen like enormous waves. The later levels include a alien lair straight from contra and the standard grass and volcanic planet from the first Gradius. There’s even a boss rush part when you fight against 4 bosses one after the other, each getting harder and harder to beat. The thing about the Gradius bosses are that they are almost too easy when your ship is full powered and way to hard when you accidently died and try the boss again but with maybe a speed powerup at best.

I always loved the manuals for the various Famicom games because they differ so much from the manuals we have now. For instance they cover in greater detail how the Vice Viper works and where the parts are laid out on the ship. And they include every enemy in the game and show either a direct cutout from the game or the art for that certain enemy and then wright their names to. The Power Up explanation is also drawn for every type of weapon instead of just one screenshot. They had fewer people working on the games during that time and they still made everything as perfect as it could be.

A fun fact is that I bought this game for less than 5$ and wasn’t aware that the game would come with the box and manual, sure that look beat up and old but I still think it’s a real catch. This is also one of the games that I bought the Famicom for, to play those games that we didn’t get and we missed out of. There are a lot of those games coming up on future reviews.

Hope you guys enjoyed this 3 part Gradius review.

Arashes Out!

The 2nd game in this 3 part Gradius Special!

Salamander differs a lot from Gradius and was released between the 1st game and Gradius 2 in 1987.

For instance, in Gradius you would die and start over the stage entirely or at the last checkpoint, but in Salamander the screen just continued scrolling and a new ship that was invournable spawned. You could play 2 player co-op at the same time and in every other stage the screen would scroll vertically insted of the classical horizontal way. Even the cartridge design was different.

The music were a big update as well as the graphics. The plane now had a more smooth animation like when you went either up or down, making a tilt animation on the ship look more realistic than previously. Salamander also replaced the "shield" with a "force field" that could resist some enemy fire no mather were the bullet hit the ship. (Unlike in the 1st game where you were only protected in the front) The "Lazer" weapon even got longer and slower which in my opinion is way better. Also the weapons could get upgraded 2 times which made them stronger and faster. The interesting part is that they switched the buttons around on the "shoot" and "chose weapon" buttons. Gradius 1 used the "A" Button to shoot and "B" to pick items and from Salamander and forward they used "B" to shoot and "A" to pick items. It's more logical to shoot with "B" since every other game had that formula. Perhaps Konami wanted to be different. Speaking of Konami, during that time Konami started to add some really gorey parts and aliens in their games like the final stage of Contra and the entire 1st stage in Salamander where the walls are made out of flesh.

There really isn't much ells to say about Salamander. Its a interesting Gradius experiment / Spin-off that had some nice ideas.