As
everyone who reads this site probably knows
by now I love Konami shooters - and I've
loved Gradius since I played the original
game (called Nemesis
in this part of the world) as a teenager. So when I
heard about an arcade sequel to Gradius
3 (the last game in the
series, released way back in 1989 in the
arcades and subsequently ported to the SNES) a few years
back I was suitably intrigued to say the
least. Well a year or so passed and I heard
neither hide nor hair of the game (Konami
seemingly only wanting to keep its Gradius
franchise sealed up in its home country of
Japan..) and I assumed I'd probably never get
the chance to see - let alone play - the
thing either in an arcade or at home on these
shores. Until very recently, when Konami took
everyone by surprise and released a
compilation of Gradius 3 and the as yet
unseen on any console Gradius
4 for the fledgeling Playstation
2! Well I never! At
long last a PSX2 game that I really would
like ;)
Basically it's a follow up
to the Gradius Deluxe
Packs (featuring Gradius and
Gradius 2 - Vulcan Venture) that were released in
1996 on the 32-bit Playstation and Sega
Saturn. It's the first time
arcade Gradius 3 has had a 'proper' home port
(though the SNES version was admirably close it
suffered from appalling slow-down at times as
well as leaving out a lot of features and some
stages) but the real star of the show is
obviously Gradius 4. I finally got the chance of
a quick playtest on this a few days back.. and
visually it certainly is a pretty radical
departure from the first thee games in the
series. The first thing you notice - apart from
the astounding opening FMV - is how most of the
graphics (probably at least 80% if not more..)
seem to be polygon-based, even enemy ships and
some of the bullets, as well as texture mapped
polygon background effects. Unlike for example R-Type Delta's rather grainy
use of 3D graphics compared to the pin-sharp
handrawn bitmap style of old, and this being a
'Next-gen' system of course - the visuals are
amazingly clear and the hi-res texture mapped
polygon objects come near to having the character
of actual hand-drawn sprites- an amazing
achievement. I'm a hand-drawn-spriteaphile
through and through but was most impressed.
Konami should be much lauded here for the work
put into this particular graphic aspect.

What
impressed me less however was the fact that
though I only saw about 5 stages - they ALL
seemed to be re-runs of levels taken from earlier
Gradius games. The opening level for example is a
polygonised re-hash of Gradius 2's opening 'Solar
Flare' stage complete with swirling fire-dragons
(well they are PSX2 rendered 'metallic' gold ones
this time) and 'morphing' dragon end-of-stage
boss but the effect really is one of deja vu. The
second stage is better, a bio-organic level
teeming with alien plant-life where bizarre and
beautifully animated grasping tentacles try and
grab you, followed by a giant mutant plant boss -
but it still felt a little like a similar level
in Gradius 3. The music on this stage was
particularly good though. Later levels see
returns of more familiar Gradius icons like the
errupting volcanoes, fiery caverns,
laser-spitting mothership bosses, and of course
those damn Moai heads. There is also a
rerun of the Gradius 2 stage where you had to
guide your ship through slamming doors in alien
complex while trying to keep up with the
nerve-janglingly fast on-screen scrolling. Also
the choice of ships and weaponry felt distinctly
lacking especially after all those lovely options
given the player in Gradius 3. All in all (and
admittedly it's early days yet as I've not played
all the way through the game) it kind of felt
like an exercise in rehashing old ideas from the
series in a glittery next-gen makeover than
making any real innovative headway in the series
- something which I think R-Type Delta at least managed
to address well with its radically re-designed
weapon systems, play mechanics and (in terms of
other R-type games) fresh stages. That old
Gradius power-up select bar is still there, and
it's still an absolute bind clawing back your
weapons when you get killed. Surely Konami could
think about abolishing the old mandatory
'speed-up' pick up routine after every death? God
knows how many accumulated hours over the years
I've spent trying to desperately get to a
power-up on my subsequent life to getting killed
while watching my Vic Viper move at the speed of
a Morris Minor..(slow) Familiarity in a series
might be a good thing to a certain extent.. but I
think over-familiarity can get to be a bit of a
drag. I still reckon that the biggest jump in
innovation that the Gradius series took was
between Gradius (Nemesis) and Gradius 2 and that
subsequent Gradiuses have seen Konami coasting a
bit, compared for instance to the way they
developed the Parodius series.
Maybe time will tell if it's the classic it
surely deserves to be.. but the question in my
mind at the moment is - where to next for the
Gradius series?
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