#2: Gradius III

G3 baby!

This was the only third party launch title for the SNES. Originally an arcade game it was ported to the SNES and made easier by allowing continues. I have to say, from my playing today, it is not easy enough. Holy cow this game is hard! (Apparently the arcade version was pulled from arcades because it was really too hard!)

Continue from right here!

Gradius III is a traditional shooter. Your ship is on the left and is flying right. Swarms of enemies fly onto the screen shooting pellets at you. Hit anything and die. Kill special enemies for mandatory power ups. In particular, your ship starts off so slow you can't possibly dodge anything but you can spend a power up for SPEEDUP. Or you can spend 2 powerups for PHOTON. And so on across the line. Anything less than 2 SPEEDUPs seemed suicidal. Die and lose everything you have. Respawn in the middle of the level. Die again because you have no speed and there are bullets everywhere.

Customize powerups!

The game has a neat feature when you start where you get to choose what powerups you want to collect as you play the game. You can pick from 4 premade sets or you can build your own with different options. It's a nice twist to a standard shooter and I remember really liking this feature when I played the cartridge in University.

In addition to being stupidly hard the game also suffers from massive lag when too much stuff is on the screen at one time. Everything moves slower which can make it easier to dodge things if you know when to anticipate the slowdown. When you're just picking up the game again for the first time in 11 years and don't have the intuition anymore it just gets you killed. I remember getting good enough at the game to beat it once upon a time but right now I was barely able to beat 2 bosses. And that's using all of my continues! The problem with losing all your powerups when you die is the game is actually reasonably easy when you have a twinked out ship but you can't survive long enough to get all the stuff without becoming really good at the game. I don't think I like that style of difficulty? Or maybe I just don't want to play Gradius III enough to get over the skill hump? I donno. I had a lot of fun with the game in Comfy Prime so it can't be all bad!

I tried using the Konami code when the game was paused and it blew my ship up. Sigh. I wanted to cheat!

The music/sound didn't jump out at me. It also didn't annoy me, so that's a plus I guess?

Rating: C