Once Upon a Katamari Available on All Major Platforms Played on an Xbox Series X Released October 24, 2025 Developed by RENGAME Published by Bandai Namco Entertainment $39.99 smacked into a wall in the making of this review. This Review was played ONLY on an Xbox Series X.
IMPORTANT: As I was finishing this review, it was announced that UPDATES AND DLC ARE COMING, but unless they add more original, fresh level concepts, it won’t flip my verdict. The DLC is just more music and accessories. Nope, that won’t be enough. But, I try to be fair so I will play post-patchwork and write an update in the near future. This is why you stopped reviewing new games, Cathy, ya dummy.
SPOILER WARNING THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES LEVEL THEMES, THE END GAME, AND SPOILS THE PLOT SHORT SUMMARY: AN UNSATISFYING REHASH MY VERDICT IS A FIRM NO!
Party like it’s 2005! Let’s all wear Ugg boots and gossip about Paris Hilton! In fairness, this is one of two new concepts I really enjoyed. The innovation? Wind. The theme? Tumbleweeds. That’s not a bad idea. There’s a lot of “not a bad idea” ideas in Once Upon a Katamari. I can’t believe I didn’t like this more.
“I hope the next Katamari isn’t a REROLL, but a completely modern Katamari that feels modern. I say that because I can’t say I’ve played a game that maximizes the Katamari concept’s potential. I don’t think it exists yet.“
That’s what I said in my review for We ♥ Katamari: REROLL. Cue the sad trombone noise, because THAT game still doesn’t exist. Once Upon A Katamari, the first brand new Katamari game on a console since 2009, still looks and feels like a game from twenty years ago. It’s not like Katamari Damacy ever felt cutting edge to begin with (even if it actually was), but it could get away with it because it was such a novel concept of a game. Now it’s 2025, and Katamari as a gameplay mechanic is established and even part of pop culture. So my demoralizing disappointment in Once Upon a Katamari mostly confirmed my suspicion that I would not be nostalgic for the way games looked in the PS1/PS2 era. But it’s not just the outdated graphics that deflated my experience. I was enjoying the new game when I first started playing it. The idea that I would be writing such a largely negative review never entered my mind, but as the game went along, I realized I wasn’t having as much fun as I thought I would be. Finally I had to admit that this is too much of a rehash and I’m kind of over the same old thing.
I did plow through to get 100% of the achievements. The final unlock was a second stage based around rolling up the cousins, and ONLY the cousins. Those were both two of the most boring Katamari stages I’ve played. You can also see my create-a-cousin at the bottom. That was the best I could do at making a cousin who looks like Sweetie, my mascot.
Now, I really, really love the core gameplay of the Katamari Damacy franchise. I was VERY excited when it was announced. I want you to keep that in mind because I didn’t expect to be as unhappy with Once Upon a Katamari as I am. I’m so frustrated that, rather than rebooting the franchise with a much-needed graphics overhaul and a greater emphasis on high-score chasing and speed running, they just made a glorified level pack. One that, frankly, doesn’t care all that much about scores or times and is still as self-congratulatory about its characters as every other game in the series after the first one. What used to be a charming and addictive experience is now shackled by a publisher and developers that dig their heels in and refuse to evolve Katamari past its original style.
Never change. Seriously, never change and continue to be a B-list game with middling sales. I feel like an idiot for caring. Here’s a thought: for those fans who buy these games because they think the obnoxious characters are the bees’ knees, make them optional. Let players who only care about high scores and fast times toggle-off the pop-up dialog.
The time travel theme had me hyped, and while it proves that it can work at times to freshen up the concept in a “whole new settings” kind of way, the gameplay is firmly stuck in 2004-2009. The different eras rarely feel utilized to their fullest effect, with levels that often don’t play up to their strengths and instead just recycle the same old gimmicks. Rolling up dinosaurs? Sign me up! Using that setting for the dull-as-hell “collect only 50 objects” level? Not so much. Besides, after over two decades, the camera and the physics just are not getting better, which is going to override any sense of newness the time travel theme could have added. The action is constantly being obscured by walls, with many stages being worse about that than others. Too many indoor settings are based around closed-in spaces, which doesn’t really work in a game where you continually grow in size and are incentivized to grab everything in sight, including stuff stashed against walls.
Even when the ball is small and you’re inside areas that are hypothetically vast and open, it doesn’t matter because things will inevitably block the camera, and that’s not even counting all the pop-up texts that happen dead center in the middle of the playfield. If you don’t think cameras have come far in games, try playing Super Mario 64 and Mario Odyssey back to back. Camera development in 3D games has come a long way since 2004, and that’s why Once Upon a Katamari’s style of throwback is obnoxious instead of nostalgic.
Like, hey, there’s a level set in ancient Egypt where you have to roll up mummies? That sounds awesome! Crying shame about how they closed in the walls so tight that you’re constantly unable to see what you’re doing. Characters and moving objects are still set along tracks and have no complicated behavior and look as blocky and ugly as they last did in 2009, and all those problems ultimately work against the satisfaction of rolling mummies up. It’s weird that they didn’t comprehend that things that weren’t big problems from 2004 to 2009 are going to be big problems in 2025 because gaming has come so far.
Even the “roll-up the planets you made/meteors you earned/stardust” is back and basically the same as before. I’d say they pulled a Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens but even that at least felt like a rehash that utilized modern technology.
There is no better feature a sequel can have than embracing innovation. We’ve already experienced Katamari with all these problems. You know what we haven’t experienced? Katamari WITHOUT these problems. That’s what they should’ve done to freshen up the gameplay. They could have recycled the same old gimmicks until the cowbears come home and it still would have felt new and modern if they had fixed all the problems that have been part of this franchise from the start. Give us the smoothest, most intuitive and hang-up-free Katamari of all-time. They didn’t. Don’t get me wrong: new levels and themes are great, but if all the bad parts come along for the ride and some of the levels are so similar to old ones that they feel more like remixes than outright new stages, well, then it’s just an expensive level pack, isn’t it?
And the objectives mostly are direct rehashes (like Cowbear) or variants of old ones (instead of a sumo wrestler, it’s now a Samurai). Very few feel genuinely original.
I don’t know if the problems are genuinely worse than ever, or if it only seems like it. A good example of what I mean is the act of climbing. Climbing has always been hit or miss in Katamari. You won’t know until you reach the top of what you’re climbing if you’re going to be knocked-back off by an invisible wall or a tiny bump in your Katamari ball. This has been a part of the franchise since the beginning and it seems to be even worse now. I was constantly banging and recoiling off the top of all walls great and small, including ones I should have been big enough to climb. In the old west level, one of the crowns is hidden on a roof. I needed to replay the stage three times because I would bang off the top of the ladder and get knocked back down. Since the knock-back when you bang can be brutal, sorry but after twenty years, they needed to fix it. Even WHEN you need to climb feels inelegant or outright wrong. Topography that by all rights should be small hills, bumps, lips, or ramps aren’t, even late in the game. Like this:
You can see the 12M checkpoint barrier a little in front of me. You’ll also note I’m close to 2M bigger than the checkpoint AND EVEN THEN I have to slow-climb up this tiny little bump in the terrain that outright failed to activate more than once. It’s terrible level design.
What you’re seeing in that picture should be a bump or a slope, but it’s a wall that requires you to press up against the surface and slowly push up it. I mean, if you’re lucky. Sometimes the climbing mechanic just straight-up doesn’t activate. This is one of those situations where I thought maybe my controller was broken (I did end up wearing out an analog stick playing this game, but that controller was old). I had tons of moments where I attempted to climb a small hill or a ladder and the damn ball just idled without moving at all despite the fact that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I could excuse crap like that for twenty year old versions of this game, when the idea and gameplay was still new. Katamari ain’t new anymore. How could they not fix anything after twenty-one years? Arguably the only improvements are the draw distance is well done, at least on Xbox, and there’s now a single button you can press to dash. However, if you dash too many times in a row you lose it for a stretch.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that in 2025 it should be possible to have action not be obscured like this.
I also don’t remember getting jammed as much in any Katamari game. It’s not just because of the items, the magnet and the rocket, either. The magnet has a similar effect to the King Shock from Katamari Forever, and it can absolutely trap you in areas, especially if you grow big enough to no longer be able to squeeze past any exits. It happened a few times, because the magnet has range and is able to pull things past gaps the ball already can’t fit past. While it’s still very fun to use and adds a lot of post-game high score chasing, it also is capable of ruining your run and has an undeniable inelegance to it. But again, at least that backfire effect feels kind of like a video game type of hazard. Getting stuck between two objects though? Not so much, but it happens enough to be notable. In Once Upon a Katamari, I got stuck in ways that I literally couldn’t believe I couldn’t wiggle out of, like this:
Yeah, I’m really stuck there on basically nothing, and remained stuck long after that clip ended. I have no clue how I did it. Oh sure, the one time it feels like my Katamari doesn’t bang off something I can’t roll up and I become ensnared by it. Maybe it’s just a product of poorly thought-out layouts. While wrapping up this review, I realized only two stages made me sit-up in my chair. In the biggest Katamari game ever. There’s like fifty stages, give or take, and two really stood out. Two. And I had a week to think about that, too. Sigh. The best parts of Once Upon a Katamari are undeniably addictive in that “just one more game” kind of way, but they’re also unmemorable. The best levels are, you know, fine. The magnet is fun and probably the highlight of the game because it added the most value to the experience. There’s also a time-freezing stopwatch that, yes, also stops the timer and adds some much needed strategic flexibility. Though I’m not entirely convinced that the locations of the items were precisely chosen to maximize player options and decision making, the game is better off for having them. The other two items are nowhere near as fun. The rocket just led to a whole lot of banging into things and the radar lasts too long.
Here’s a tip for those who actually give a squirt about your scores: any item you haven’t used when you finish a level will carry over to the next stage you play, no matter which stage it is. After I finished all the levels and found all the hidden crowns/cousins/presents, I would play Make It Bigger 1 and bank a magnet, then go play the level I’m score chasing. Additionally, if you reset the stage or finish it and choose to replay it instead of banking the final result, you’ll get the item back! You can replay it as many times as you need with that starting item.
Also, while the radar item remains valuable in levels where you’re searching for specific items (like “Tag You’re It” Cousins-search levels or Pharaoh’s Request), for other levels, it’s rendered useless once you’ve found the present, crowns, and cousins. The game could have rewarded players for 100%ing those stages by replacing the now useless radar with another magnet or rocket, or hell, player’s choice! That’d be cool! But nope, the radar remains and since it takes a while to wear off and you’re capped at one item at a time, it becomes another thing you actively want to avoid. It’s just another sign of how little thought was given to the big picture of the player’s experience. Hell, the level layouts feel like that in general. They might as well just make the stages randomly generated for how inelegant the object placement is. And while I’m whining about items, the camera pulls away when you grow enough to reach a checkpoint to show the physical location of it, and it doesn’t instantly teleport back to you. It moves through the playfield while the timer is going and the game is live. It only takes a split second, but if an item is active, you might lose some of the time you get with it.
I thought all the “find all the specific things” stages were middling at best. In Ancient Rome, you have to locate eight philosophers. If their locations were randomly generated, I might have liked these more. But they’re not, and there’s also no online leaderboards. Once I got an S ranking for this stage and all the items out of it, there really was no point in coming back to it since it just isn’t very fun after the first time. The layout is later recycled for “collect roses” which is much more enjoyable.
Everything about Once Upon a Katamari reminds me that Namco is the same company that didn’t understand why Pac-Man was a hit and bet on the wrong aspects of it for the first couple sequels. The gameplay and the high score/fastest time chasing are why Katamari is a viable release for Namco in 2025, and they didn’t even know that. You can’t see what your high scores/best times are or even what your rankings on levels are from the quick travel menu. That really solidifies my theory that neither the developer nor the publisher understood what keeps players coming back to Katamari. I mean, to not even have the rankings listed? To have no quick access list of what levels you’ve S-tiered or gotten the three benchmark coins from? Here’s what the quick travel menus look like:
You have to manually go to the level, and not just the level, but then you have to click the level and do a “skip dialog thing” to load the “confirm you want to play this level” pop-up and THAT’S what lists your scores. You can also go view “the cosmos” but that’s several steps as well. What the hell? There’s also nothing that lists which levels you’ve earned meteors on, or if you even can earn a meteor at all on a level. I *love* getting those meteors. It always feels like an accomplishment. That they’re not even listed in the cosmos screen, a “bonus feature” in the hub world’s “S.S. Prince” spaceship is just mind blowing. There’s no leaderboards at all, local or online so you can only see your absolute #1 biggest size or fastest time, assuming you didn’t trade a best time for a lower score for whatever reason (you can do that). Hey Namco, you might not realize this, but you have the perfect old school arcade scoring game here. Twenty years later and you still don’t see that?
I earned multiple meteors on some stages. Before I got down to 16 seconds, I got meteors with different names (I think) for slower times. So, like do they ALL count? Only the best one? I’d like to see a list of which ones I got, but Namco and RENGAME seem to believe nobody cares and people are just here for the soundtrack (and I thought this was the weakest soundtrack of any of the console games, easily) and the self-congratulatory story.
Once Upon a Katamari is the least concerned with your best and worst times of any game in the franchise so far. There’s not even an achievement for getting all S-rankings either, which, hey, I guess that means you don’t have to stress doing good on stages that aren’t fun, which is like half the stages anyway. The one thing they did add is three tiers of object-collecting benchmarks for most stages that earns you coins that you can spend to get new facial expressions or gestures for the create-a-cousin feature. The currency system is fine but benchmarks are just dumb and you can only earn the lowest available in each run, plus it only starts after you beat a level for the first time. I would have preferred hiding the coins in the stage. Oh and, once again, you can’t check and see what levels you have or haven’t got the coins from using the quick travel menu. It gets worse. The big climatic stage where you roll up the universe and all the stars? That has no recorded score attached to it at all. I’m not kidding! Oh, there’s a score. Look, it shows it and everything!
Look, a score! There it is, in the corner!
But it doesn’t record that score. It just lists the level. Who cares? It’s only the climax of the f*cking game, with a level populated by objects YOU created. Why would you want to keep track of how well you’ve done with that? Pssh, what are you, some nerd who actually cares about scores? AND IT GETS EVEN WORSE! Three eternal stages are included, like in past Katamari games. In older games, while they were “just for funsies” levels, they still kept track of your high scores. Once Upon a Katamari’s eternal stages don’t. Again, they tell you a score, but they don’t record it. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t complete the object catalog using eternal levels. I mean, unless I rolled up everything in Eternal 3 and somehow didn’t get a single new object for the catalog. So the eternal modes serve no purpose at all except to create stardust that will be inserted into a level that also doesn’t keep track of high scores. WHY EVEN INCLUDE THEM THEN?
They really leaned heavily into the action-blocking dialog in this one.
The poor menus, lack of caring about the actual scores, and baffling DLC model that’s focused almost entirely on music instead of gameplay makes me think that Namco and RENGAME are operating under the mistaken belief that people play Katamari for anything but the gameplay. That the real appeal is limited only to the famous soundtracks or the “humorous” and/or “quirky” King of All Cosmos. The music of this Katamari is the least catchy in the series so far. Not a single earworm. Nothing like, say, Katamari on the Swing from We Love. As for the King? Holy f*ck. Okay, maybe he was cute and funny in the first game, but he’s since become the single worst character in the history of video games. He just ruins everything. His bullsh*t isn’t funny. It’s just obnoxious. It’s 2025 and the King of All Cosmos still has dialog blocking the screen. If you don’t move your hands from the dual stick tank controls (in a game where you usually don’t want to stop moving, mind you) to skip the dialog that blocks the screen during live gameplay, it might linger on the screen for quite a while. Here’s me beating As Fast As You Can 2 in sixteen seconds.
See how much of that sixteen seconds had text blocking the screen? It begs the question, ahem, WHAT THE ACTUAL F*CK IS WRONG WITH YOU DEVELOPERS? Did you not get attention as children? This is about as charming as a clown honking a horn, spritzing water, and pieing people in the face at a mass casualty funeral for stillborn puppies! People have been complaining about this since 2004 and they just keep doubling down on it like it’s the thing that got the game to 2025 and not, you know, the ball and the rolling stuff up part! Like every other Katamari game, the same dialog repeats every single level. Whether you’re rolling up cousins or ninjas or bowling pins, you will see the same dialog block the screen every single goddamned replay, and this in a game that heavily encourages replaying levels. The only exception are the presents since, once you have found them, they don’t return in each replay.
And in this game, it’s not just the King of All Cosmos that blocks the action. For whatever reason, they placed the “your Katamari is as big as…..” boxes in the center of the screen even though there’s plenty of non-action-blocking room at the bottom of the screen. What the actual f*ck? What….. the actual…… f*ck?!
Speaking of doubling down, levels that completely go against the frantic nature of Katamari are still here and horrible as ever. Cowbear, the level that ends the very first time you roll up a cow or bear because ain’t that quirky is back. Just like previous games, the developer’s definition of what constitutes a cow or a bear is trollishly open to interpretation. Run over a single carton of milk that you couldn’t see because the camera is still one of the worst of any 3D action game? The level is over because a carton of milk counts as a cow, even though there isn’t a cow on the package. Well that’s just ridiculous. Saying a carton of milk counts as a cow is like saying a yeast infection is a baby. What’s really infuriating is that the king states the rules require you to catch a cow or a bear. Um, milk isn’t a creature. You don’t “catch” it, nor is it caught in the “catch!” sense. They’re sitting on the ground. YEAH, I’M BEING THAT PETTY! This gimmick f*cking sucks and they keep bringing it back! Petty disappointment is all I’ve ever gotten out of it.
How does touching a piece of cardboard with a picture of a cow or bear on it constitute catching a cow or bear?
Either way, the fast-paced, intense Katamari gameplay is dropped and you’re forced to inch your way through the level while trying to avoid signs that have pictures of cows or tiny little bear wind-up toys, because those count. It wasn’t fun the first time in 2005, and twenty years later it’s still a slog. The best thing I can say about it: at least the level layout isn’t as bad as it was in We Love Katamari or Katamari Forever. BUT, it’s still a pretty boring layout and it’s just not fun. It was never fun, and I don’t get how anyone could enjoy it. It feels like a completely different game. Other returning stinkers include several “only pick up 50” levels. Again, you have to heel-toe your way through the levels despite spotty physics and a terrible camera, trying desperately to avoid the tiny things. I don’t like them, but I could have tolerated having one in the game. There’s (checks notes) more than one, so now I hate the whole concept of 50-only because too many of them replace the type of levels I want to play, which were really just “as big as you can” or “as fast as you can” levels.
It looks like a Koosh Ball but actually it’s just one of the laziest levels in the history of Katamari, where the object is to roll-up icicles. It’s also one of the smallest levels ever in a Katamari game. This was so uninspired that I was genuinely embarrassed for the developers after playing it. It was kind of sad, really.
Sadly, it’s not the only “high concept” stinker. New to this game (I think, at least, my brain seems to have deleted all the handheld games from memory) is a level where you have to roll up sweet, sugary food objects and avoid non-sweet foods. Instead of just trying to create a large ball, you’re trying to maximize the sweetness of the ball to 100%. The setting is a vast open air market and food court, and things like plates don’t count towards the objective.
The drinks? They’re like milkshakes or something. Those are what you want. The things with the caps? That’s mayonnaise. Not sweet, and they come with a hefty penalty. Okay, now go have fun with this totally well thought-out level!
That doesn’t sound like a terrible idea at all, but such a specific concept requires beefing-up the graphics, play control, and camera so that it’s easier to tell things apart and you’re not constantly getting screwed by a camera. Oh and maybe ditch the King of All Cosmos for levels like this since this requires closely paying attention to what’s in front of you instead of just rolling up everything tinier than you. And this is why doubling down on boxy retro graphics, the same 2004 “enemy” behavior patterns, and the screen-blocking text of the King of All Cosmos crosses the line from a bad idea to outright self-sabotage.
In America, ketchup is legally a vegetable.
What could have been a highlight in a modern game is a terrible level when you’re a glorified expansion of a 2000s game. Telling sweet things apart from non-sweet things isn’t intuitive. You have to replay the level and brute force memorize a good portion of the items to know what column they count in. Telling a pepper apart from an apple would be easier if you used that space age technology to actually look good. Not only that, but the scoring system sucks, because most of the sweet things only cause an incremental bump in the sweetness of the ball (with exceptions, like the shaved ice), but the wrong foods come with a harsh penalty. So while building the sweetness is slow, losing it happens too quickly. You know, I wish I could play this layout without the gimmick. It would have been one of the more fun layouts.
Yeah, yeah, you’re supposed to play it multiple times and get a feel for what’s sweet and what isn’t, but nuts to that. The “tofu” looks like a dessert to me. Also, would this be a good time to point out there’s tons of sweet variants of tofu. I once had a tofu custard that was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever had, then I forgot the specific name. I think it was Douhua. Try it if you ever see it on a menu! It’s fantastic! It also kind of proves that this whole “sweet/not-sweet” formula needed to be completely unambiguous. How about adding stink lines to the wrong stuff? Oh wait, that would probably somehow ruin the retro look.
Not every new concept is a dud, though most of the “new” gimmick stages are just reworked versions of old stages. Remember the snowman level? They took the same basic “cover as much of the ground as possible” concept and made it worthwhile by theming a stage around rolling a water ball around a desert. The hook is that you have to continuously dunk the ball in water sources to keep it moist. While it diverges from the core Katamari gameplay and that normally annoys me, it’s fine as a one-off side quest. The racing stage that I loved before returns, only this time it’s a boat race, and it’s just as fun and just as easy. Come to think of it, the whole game is crazy easy. I only failed on one level in my entire week-long play session, and it’s another returning stage: the fireball that you have to build up to light a central end-goal fire, which might be the single worst-designed layout in any Katamari game, and given how lazy that Koosh Ball level is, that’s saying something.
The only bright spot is I’m pretty sure the fire can’t just spontaneously go out. But I died multiple times on this stage from running into water. I never once lost on any other stage and usually got the S ranking within three attempts.
The “light the fire” stage takes place in Roman times and has a coliseum setting. But, they fashioned the layout like a maze, and I don’t mean like a Pac-Man style maze, but an actual “how do I get out of this thing?” maze, only while using the people in the audience as the walls. You have to build up the ball as big as you can and find your way to the center to light a fire. I’m almost certain you won’t ever be able to get big enough to roll people up and the object is to wiggle around the maze. It’s a really boring idea because there’s no room for spontaneity or to really even create your own strategy. It’s too narrow and too railed. It’s a f*cking maze, and Katamari is at its best when you’re in a big, open area where all the corridors are wide. The type of stages that are so vast that it’s overwhelming at first and you have to discover the best path to grow the ball. Also, the thing about mazes is they don’t usually offer replay value once you know the solution. This one is no different. Once you know the routes, the thing that made the stage “special” is over, but unlike other stages, the act of collecting isn’t fun. The pathways are too compact.
In this level you have to not only make the ball bigger, but you need to score X amount of beverages. Other stages have you grab coins or wooden objects and you can still fail if you don’t get the minimum, regardless of the ball size. This isn’t a horrible idea to evolve the gameplay. I still never lost from it, but there were a few close calls. Like “one over the number I needed at the last second” close. It was exciting, and that’s when the game works. They didn’t do that enough to justify $40 or even $20 in my opinion. If I had paid $15 for this, I don’t think I’d be as disappointed. Frustrated and angry? Sure. But not disappointed.
The things that would make up for what the game doesn’t do aren’t here. Again, no online leaderboards. No local leaderboards. The “take a picture of the Namco characters” thing from We Love Katamari REROLL that completely hooked me is gone. Each stage has three hidden crowns but they’re stupid easy to find. The cousins are too, while the presents offer a bit more of a challenge sometimes. For one, I had to look up the location, and it’s because it’s buried in an arbitrary spot on the snow level and only occasionally pops out like a prairie dog. We Love Katamari REROLL and 2009’s Katamari Forever’s hidden trinkets were so satisfying to find. The crowns aren’t, and I know they could have done a lot more. Like, why not hide record albums that unlock the legacy soundtrack? That would have kept everyone, including myself, playing after the credits rolled. Well, there is a legacy soundtrack, but sold separately as a fairly expensive DLC set that doesn’t even add new levels. Right before I published this, updates with new DLC were announced, but they don’t add new levels or new hidden items.
The coin stage is an example of a potentially fun level that keeps tripping over its own feet.
Let me be clear: Once Upon a Katamari isn’t some kind of face-palming disaster. If you’re incapable of getting bored playing this series, this is the biggest game in the franchise yet. There’s tons of levels and all the hamfisted quirkiness that’s been so awkward and exhausting since the second game was a love letter to itself is still here. If you just want a time travel-themed expansion pack of We Love Katamari or Katamari Forever, that’s basically what this is. And actually, I still think you’ll be disappointed. The main “As Big As You Can” or “As Fast As You Can” levels are limited to one setting, Japan, where it scales five times over the course of the game. Other themes might have “As Big As You Can” levels, but they usually don’t scale, and certainly don’t five times. Among the gimmick levels, I’m pretty sure only the returning “feed someone to make them fat but really it’s just an oblong starting ball” has three distinct tiers that open new areas. It really makes it clear that the theme is mostly skin deep, because the primary “as big as you can” or “as fast as you can” levels are so similar that I couldn’t really tell a difference between the new one from Once Upon and the old ones from past games. The big climax is rolling up the King, Queen, and the King’s father. It’s been done.
For what it’s worth, I did enjoy these levels, even if they have frequent camera issues because this time around, the settings are mostly indoors and involve going up and down flights of stairs. The “feed someone” theme is also kind of messed up when you think about it. Like, imagine if, instead of a sumo wrestler or a samurai warrior, it was a goose and the object was to force feed it to create foie gras. It would be the single most controversial game of the decade. But it’s a human and they’re asking for it so it’s okay. I mean, unless you intend the human to be foie gras, because that’s just delicious wrong. I meant wrong! Really!
Even the plot of the King of All Cosmos accidentally blowing up the Earth is here. “OMG he did it juggling a relic and being a show off! LOL, right?” Yea, I guess? I mean, that’s almost the exact same joke as the first game, ain’t it? I don’t get it. To me Katamari Damacy as a series is no different than one of those stand-up comedians who has used the same fifteen minute set for their entire careers. When your job is to literally make jokes, why are you telling the same jokes after twenty years? It gets old. And the joke of the Katamari games really isn’t funny when the characters and their “quirks” cost the actual gameplay so dearly.
A stage in the “present day” time era is basically “roll up all the food stuff, then roll yourself into a deep fryer.” This was the best level in the game, and the most fresh-feeling. What made it stand out is that it’s almost laid out like a platform game, with timing-based moving platforms and a heavy emphasis on very narrow pathways and pits that reset you beneath you. There’s never been anything quite like it from this franchise, and it feels fresh, and they decorated it in a way that’s memorably bonkers without feeling like they’re trying too hard.
Why does Katamari Damacy as a gameplay mechanic even need a plot? The Mario Kart games don’t have a plot. They didn’t come up with a reason for all the Mario universe characters to race. They just do it, and Katamari could be that way. Why not? You don’t have to drop the characters. Just drop the bullsh*t around the characters. Let the players play the game. Focus on high scores and fast times. That’s the fun, not the plot, and if after twenty years they don’t get that, they’ve lost the plot. Hell, they might as well have done this as DLC for We Love Katamari REROLL because, mechanically, the differences are so subtle that nothing really stood out to me, and I played the sh*t out of both. You’re also not appealing to anyone new to the franchise. This is made only for the fans, and that’s no way to grow a brand.
This release makes no sense at all. I was hyped for this, maybe too much. A big reason why this review took me forever to finish was I was genuinely stressing whether or not my disappointment was because I gave my hopes up for something better. My family didn’t help. The kids, the oldest of whom is 14, think Katamari looks fun, but not in a “drop what you’re doing and try it out” type of way. They actually thought I was weird for being so excited about Once Upon A Katamari during its introduction during the July 2025 Nintendo Direct. It’s just not a big deal to them. None of them needed to play it the way my generation did. I didn’t get a straight answer on why, either. They all agreed it looked fun, but not enough that any of them wanted to play it with me. That tells me the freshness is gone for good as long as THIS is Katamari. But, creatively dead doesn’t mean dead-dead. Katamari is still the PERFECT format for a raw, no-frills high score driven, fastest time franchise. If arcades could do games like this in 1980, Katamari’s gameplay would have been a Pac-Man level hit. Don’t be old school in body. Be old school in the soul. That’s where the good stuff comes from. Verdict: NO! *If you can get it for $14.99 or under, and you lower your expectations, and you have plenty of disposable income, meh, whatever, it’s fine for that. $40 for the same old game and very few bells & whistles like leaderboards or even proper menus and high score tracking is a slap in the face.
Castlevania Legends Platform: Game Boy – Super Game Boy Enhanced Released November 27, 1997 Directed by Kouki Yamashita Developed by Konami Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
There’s a couple spots in the game where you get locked in a room and have to defeat waves of enemies until they stop spawning. Then, late in the game, there’s a spot where you’re frozen in place and have to defend yourself from ghosts. At least they tried to find ways to freshen the experience.
My 2025 Halloween Castlevania marathon has been full of “weird ones.” Simon’s Quest, Vampire Killer, and Haunted Castle? Pretty weird. Legends isn’t really “weird” in the same way previous Game Boy titles Castlevania: The Adventure and Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge were, though it maintains a lot of the gameplay. The ropes are back. The big upgrade for the whip being a fireball projectile is back. There’s a lack of skeletons. But, of the three Game Boy titles, this one seems like it’s trying the hardest (and failing, but trying nonetheless) to feel like the console games. They wanted this so much that this was set up to be the ultimate origin story. The game’s heroine, Sonia Belmont, is implied to be the mother of Castlevania III hero Trevor Belmont. If you get the best ending, it’s also kind of implied Alucard is his father, which makes Dracula’s Curse really awkward, doesn’t it? Well, thank GOD that they erased that idea from existence and declared Legends to be non-canon. We wouldn’t want to spoil the integrity of a franchise that features skeletons doing double-dutch jump roping, would we?
“One potato! Two potato! Three potato! Four! Simon’s great-great grandmother was a filthy whore! Five potato! Six potato! Seven potato! Eight! Alucard slept with Sonia after their date! Nine potato! Ten potato! Eleven potato! Twelve! Now Belmont blood is tainted and you’re stuck in helloooo operator! We’re playing Simon’s game! He’s stuck fighting us because of Sonia’s secret shame!”
Actually, maybe the weirdest part of Legends was that it was one of the most negatively-received Castlevanias upon its release. It had FAR worse reviews than Adventure got upon its release, which blows me away. Seriously, if I was put on the spot to name the worst games I’ve ever played in my life, Castlevania Adventure would be one of the first titles to pop into my head. So Legends feels like it got hosed, because honestly it’s not that bad. It’s SLOW in terms of movement, but lots of Game Boy action games feature slow movement, presumably to accommodate the blur factor of the Game Boy screen. But, action isn’t about raw speed. It’s about tempo, and I think Legends maintains a fairly consistent tempo of quality combat and quality platforming, even if it botches most of the Castlevania elements, and it does. But hey, the whip feels pretty good, and they packed a lot of fun layouts, enemies, and boss battles into this thing. Then they sort of screwed it up, but not in a way that completely ruins things.
So long, ropes. We hardly knew thee. Legends added moving ropes, but they’re not as exciting as you would hope because they’re too short to really be anything but transportation.
In a truly bizarre decision, Legends doesn’t have any subweapon pick-ups. Instead, you get subweapons after beating bosses and can select which one you want to use, Mega Man-style. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad, except only one of the standard Castlevania subweapons was used in this game: the stopwatch. And it’s not even presented like a stopwatch. For some reason, it’s a tornado. I’m not sure why a tornado would freeze all non-boss enemies. Either way, you get the stopwatch from the first boss. Then the second boss is a full life refill for only twenty hearts. This in a game where, if you have a full whip upgrade, candles only contain either hearts or, occasionally, health refills. You’re practically picking hearts out from the webbing between your toes in Castlevania Legends. The only way it could be worse is if they made the third item essentially be a cross and work to clear the screen of the bats that become annoying. You see where this is going.
Those had been bats a second earlier.
Now, that bomb is relatively expensive at five hearts and it only does as much damage as the fireball your whip throws, which is half-as-strong as a direct hit with the whip. So it’s not like you can just plow through levels with it because it can’t one-shot anything stronger than a bat. But the bats were one of the main challenge elements, and they’re rendered completely toothless by this upgrade. To really make it obvious how little they thought this whole thing out, the fourth item you get is a weak-ass projectile that seems like it does as much damage as a fully-upgraded whip’s projectile. It’s a little wider than that fireball and only costs one heart to use, but if you’re going to do that, you might as well use the whip and enjoy the satisfaction of one of gaming’s best weapons, right? I never found a good usage for it. So like, why wasn’t THAT the first thing you get? The scaling is all wrong.
This WOULD have been the part where I died if not for the health refill subweapon. Seriously, this was the toughest boss in the game, easily, and it exists in a goddamned bonus stage hidden in the fifth and final level.
And where the hell are the traditional Castlevania subweapons? There’s no axe, knife, boomerang, or holy water. Don’t tell me the Game Boy couldn’t handle them, because they were in the previous Game Boy title (depending on which region you played). Well, their sprites are in this game, but not as items you use. Instead, Legends has hidden them as magical trinkets, one per stage, and if you find all five, you get the fifth subweapon. I should note that the way they’re hidden isn’t very satisfying, as each stage has a few forks in the road, and the hidden item is just in one of the forks. There’s no way to logic out which one. Presumably this whole idea is in there to add replay value, but it’s not creative. I would have rather hidden them in walls along a strictly linear route that was more optimized.
Exploration is great, but there has to be logic behind it, even if I think the level design is good. Legends has probably the strongest level design of the three Game Boy titles, but I’d still call Belmont’s Revenge the best of the trilogy because of the subweapons.
Is finding all five hidden trinkets worth the effort? Well, in addition to getting a better ending that was so nonsensical they struck it and the entire game from the canon, you get a fifth subweapon that might as well give you a free pass to the last boss. Remember how I said the bomb can’t one-shot anything bigger than a bat? The final item is a screen-clearing bomb that takes out everything but Dracula himself for the same cost as the previous bomb: five hearts. Yep, it makes the home stretch before you reach the final boss a cakewalk. So none of the subweapons are particularly satisfying to use. I have no clue what they were thinking with any of this. It’s not imaginative and it’s not fun. The whole system adds nothing to the game at all and feels like it belongs to another property entirely. The funny thing is, the subweapons were always kind of nerfy to Castlevania, and getting rid of them could be a positive thing if what replaces them is more balanced. Replacing boomerangs and axes with any-time-you-need-it full health refills and screen-clearing bombs isn’t exactly balanced, is it?
Honestly, the graphics ain’t half bad, but I still think Belmont’s Revenge looks nicer.
BUT, for what it’s worth, I felt Legends had pretty dang decent level layouts and enjoyable enough boss battles that made Castlevania Legends worth playing at least once. I expected so much worse based on its reputation, and now I’m sitting here puzzled because it’s not a bad game. As of this writing, it’s part of the Switch Online lineup, and if you’ve skipped it because of its critical reception, yeah, take a chance on Legends. It’ll take you a little under an hour to finish, and it’s fine. Just don’t expect one of the stronger Castlevania games, because Legends feels more like a ripoff of Castlevania most of the time.
(shudder) It even gets creepy, something the other two Game Boy Castlevanias didn’t come close to doing.
Really, this feels like its closest kin is Haunted Castle because a lot of the enemy attack patterns are based on crowding you and keeping the combat at closed quarters. Bats and spirits attack in a way where they swoop in from above you. This makes scratching-out distance to get your attack off without taking damage the primary challenge. I hated that for Haunted Castle, but it feels like it works here because there’s a sense of claustrophobia. Otherwise, besides the whip and candles, it never really feels like it belongs in the franchise. But, if you imagine Legends not as an actual Castlevania game but rather as a Castlevania-inspired action tribute that had no clue how to implement subweapons, it’s fine. Really, Castlevania Legends only sucks in comparison to its console big brothers. But so what? What halfway decent Game Boy title that’s part of a legendary action franchise is that not true of? Verdict: YES!
Dracula never got over losing to Wolverine in the first X-Men movie.
Awww, Trevor Belmont was adorable. Who’s the little vampire killer? You are!
Haunted Castle aka Akumajou Dracula Platform: Arcade First Released December 26, 1987 Designed by Masaaki Kukino Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives
“I’m almost certain you don’t understand how flashing works.” By the way, his actual boss sprite looks nothing like this.
Sigh. Alright, let’s get this over with. Rip the bandage off. Pop this pimple. Yank out this white hair. You see, I just realized I’m only a few games away from having reviews posted for every 80s and 90s Castlevania game (not counting threeLCDgames or the cancelled Game.Com game, even though I have the ROM for it). I want to achieve that, but that means I have to actually sit down and review Haunted Castle, and it’s not exactly bad in a way that’s all that interesting. Hell, it doesn’t even have the benefit of being the worst Castlevania game. That honor goes to Castlevania Adventure on the Game Boy (which is technically called THE Castlevania Adventure), and I’d rather be stuck with Haunted Castle than that game. Don’t mistake that as a complement, though I do genuinely have a couple small complements to make in this game that my friend Dave speculates only exists because Konami was pissy of having to cut Nintendo in on a third of Vs. Castlevania’s profits (which I intended to also review but it wasn’t so interesting I could get a whole review out of it).
“Oh, real mature, Cathy!”
First Complement: the soundtrack is really good. Second Complement: some of the settings and enemy sprites aren’t too bad. Really! There’s a convincing fog effect. The game’s version of “The Creature” is probably the closest it ever looked to being like the famous version of the Universal Studios Frankenstein.
Even if it’s a boring boss fight. Then again ALL of Haunted Castle’s bosses are boring.
There’s a genuinely spooky haunted dining room, complete with dinner and kitchen utensils attacking you. A graveyard catches fire and it looks threatening and/or menacing. While MOST of the settings are boring, it’s not all boring. And even when the settings are at their most lifeless, heck, I’ve still seen a lot worse than Haunted Castle’s tour offers. Granted, Simon’s sprite is distracting and his walking animation doesn’t feel confident or heroic. A lot of the sprite work is solid, but others are laughably pathetic. Like, look at this screenshot of blue-haired He-Man battling sawed-off Benjamin Franklin:
It’s supposed to be the fleamen/hunchbacks, but it looks EXACTLY like Ben Franklin. Then again, they did find over 1,200 pieces of human skeletons in Benjamin Franklin’s home. I suppose we can’t completely rule out that he worked for Dracula and was possibly performing a ritual to bring him back in the Americas in the 1700s. If you’re reading this Konami, there’s your plot for the next Castlevania right there!
And now I’m out of nice things to say about Haunted Castle. No shortage of bad things to say, though to be honest, my heart isn’t even into that. It’s just not a very interesting game. The thing that stinks the most is probably the collision detection. Your hit box is just a square that feels much larger than you are, and then enemy attack patterns are tailored to take advantage of the wonky collision box. When it comes to enemies, their collision is much more sprite-accurate, so bats and projectiles require direct hits to kill. They also like to have enemies such as zombies or mummies spawn right next to you, and since ducking or jumping still feature a massive hit box, evasive maneuvers are too hard to pull off and defense is NEVER intuitive.
Platforming is kept to a bare minimum, which didn’t bother me. Most of the arcade barbarian subgenre of the late 80s had roughly the same amount of jumping and moving platforms. If nothing else, Haunted Castle’s maps are boilerplate. That’s all the proof you need that it’s the action that fails this game, not the settings.
So, for example, the mummies begin firing projectiles as soon as they finish spawning. They take multiple hits to kill, AND AGAIN, your box is massive. It’s not a guaranteed life loss, but the resulting gameplay isn’t fun because you’re reacting in anticipation of what this means for your collision box, and not the enemy itself. That’s TERRIBLE for immersion, and action games that aren’t immersive are in bad, bad shape regardless of anything else the game does right. It’s like starting a footrace by immediately stepping on a rusty nail. Even turning around to scratch-out enough distance to avoid their attacks, or to counterattack something else chasing you, usually isn’t effective because of how cramped everything is. Haunted Castle is remarkable because it does NOTHING right as an action game.
These things are an example of the developers crossing the line into full-on trollish design. You kill a skeleton and it turns into these ghosts that are too fast moving and too spongy to slay. Your only option is to start backing away as soon as you strike the killing blow on the skeleton and then duck out of the way of the glorified torpedo it launches at you. This isn’t actually a bad idea in a vacuum. If Haunted Castle had a larger variety of enemies, set-pieces or even styles of layout, this might actually be a great idea for a danger element, especially if you fine tune the layout based around the fact that this will happen. But given the flat, uninteresting layouts and overall lack of satisfying combat, these instead come across as the developer trolling for the sake of it.
It’s an example of counter-optimization, as your attacks are not suitable at all for closed-quarters combat, and almost all the basic enemies are fine-tuned specifically to crowd you and be just above or just below your attack box. The developers did such a good job of crafting and polishing the trollishness that there’s really no excuse for any bad aspect of Haunted Castle. It is polished, but not in a way that’s done for the benefit of entertainment. It’s a quarter-sucker, and nothing more. This was pretty foolish too, because somewhere along the way, they forgot that games that aren’t fun don’t suck as many quarters. Haunted Castle’s fixation on near-miss combat just makes it boring to the point of exhaustion. Even challenging arcade games need to be give-and-take, but this just takes. It skews too heavily in favor of the enemies. Because of that, literally everything else about the game would have to be amazing just to make Haunted Castle rise to the level of overall mediocrity.
It’s worth noting I played two versions of Haunted Castle (out of five total) for this feature, the ones known as VERSION N, which is the initial Japanese release, and VERSION M, which is the second North American ROM and the one notorious for its hard difficulty. Regardless of which version you play, the lack of intuitive collision detection is always the worst problem. I assure you in this shot, my sprite wasn’t anywhere near those fireballs or the bat. You can feel the difference regardless of the difficulty toggles by paying attention to the bats. Version M’s bats attack in a much more cruel, hard to avoid way.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game’s design is just really dull. Now I’m not expecting complicated or even ambitious level design from a coin-op, and I can put up with a game based around mostly flat corridors. Hell, I gave YES! verdicts to Rastan Saga and Cadash in Taito Milestones 3: The Definitive Review. Haunted Castle isn’t that different from those games, with its large sprites and flat, straight-line corridors, minimum jumping, and heavy combat focus. They’re all members of the same graduating class, more or less. But Taito’s beefy action arcaders had a better sense of timing and spacing with their straight line corridors, and even at their most unfair, they never felt as unfair as Haunted Castle. Those games have problems. LOTS of problems. But they also remembered to maintain the sense of entertainment that’s part of that agreement players have with coin-ops. You’re paying to have a good time, after all. Haunted Castle forgot the good time part. I think the design team assumed the settings and connection to the popular Famicom/NES game would be enough by itself to keep players pumping cash, and obviously myself and a lot of critics over the years think they were just plain wrong.
In the opening cutscene, Dracula was white, had jet black hair, and was clean shaven. Now he has green skin, gray hair, and wears a Vincent Price mustache. Simon, you know it gives me no pleasure to say this, but you have to consider the possibility that your new wife did this to him. And he has superpowers! You don’t, so imagine what she’ll do to you! Maybe you should just let her finish him off, because the dude looks downright sickly.
If Simon’s Quest is Exhibit A in the case of Konami not having a clue what they had with Castlevania, then Haunted Castle is clearly Exhibit B. I really think I’m on to something here. It’s not hard to imagine that Konami likely mistook Castlevania’s appeal as being ONLY tied to the superficial elements like the castle or Simon or Dracula and not to the fine-tuned, satisfying combat and heavily optimized level layouts. So perhaps the most positive thing I can say about Haunted Castle is the same thing I said about Simon’s Quest: they needed these failures to point them in the right direction.
This final lead-up to the Dracula fight is so embarrassing. It’s just a typical collapsing bridge sequence, maybe the longest example of this trope ever done in a game like this. You cannot stop to fight all the bats that are spaced out along the way and eventually have to accept a few life slaps. The collapsing bridge trope ALWAYS gets my heart racing, and it’s a damning indictment of how bad Haunted Castle is that it takes one of my favorite gimmicks and runs it into the ground so badly that it becomes boring AND THEN IT STILL KEEPS GOING! By the way, this is the ENTIRE final level of the game. It screams “we have no clue how to feel climatic!”
Haunted House might not be fun, then or now, but in a morbid way, we still owe it a lot. It showed Konami that Castlevania as a theme can’t work as an empty shell. That’s a lesson a lot of franchise owners never got. Sometimes it takes learning what a franchise shouldn’t be to realize what it can be. Or to put it another way, Konami had a red hot property Castlevania, and it’s a good thing they burned themselves on it a couple times very early in its existence, but in ways that didn’t damage the brand overall. I think that’s what allowed Castlevania to become one of the most consistently good franchises in gaming. It’s something like, say, Tomb Raider never got. Then when Tomb Raider suffered its first critical and commercial failures, those failures did real, lasting damage to the Tomb Raider brand. Castlevania’s early failures, on the other hand, were pretty much inconsequential to the brand, yet valuable lessons were still learned from a purely gameplay point of view. That’s why Haunted Castle is kind of a lucky break for gamers, because it allowed the owners of Castlevania to touch the stove while nobody was looking and say “yep, don’t want to do that again!” Verdict: NO!
Vampire Killer
aka Akumajou Dracula Platform: MSX2 Released October 30, 1986 Designed by Akihiko Nagata Developed by Konami Never Released in the United States
NO MODERN RELEASE
I played a patched version of the ROM created by developer FRS. The patch improved general performance without altering the core gameplay. It just readjusted the speed, more or less. WARNING: If you use this patch, you will need the ability to map keyboard commands to your controller or just outright use a keyboard (which can be used in addition to a controller) or you will NOT be able to finish Vampire Killer. You see, there’s a door/tunnel maze in one level that normally requires the ability to press both UP and DOWN at the same time, but this patch prevents that. Instead, you have to press “M” to enter the doors.
Get the patch HERE. And I apply patches using THIS TOOL. I should redo the MSX games in the Konami SHMUP feature using FRS’ patches.
If you’ve never heard of the MSX version of the original Castlevania, well, you’re in for a treat.
The original Castlevania wasn’t just released to the Famicom. Four days later, its cousin hit the MSX2 computer, and it’s, ahem, different. And this is why I love experiencing Konami’s output on the MSX, because they didn’t just shrug their shoulders and copy the maps from the more powerful NES. Instead, they took the base gameplay, roster of enemies/bosses, and level themes and settings and then reworked them to accommodate the MSX2’s hardware limitations. MSX in general is notorious for not handling scrolling all that well, and you can either roll with that and make side-scrollers that are played one screen at a time, or you can use it as an excuse to get creative. That’s what Vampire Killer does, turning the game into an exploration-based title where you search for keys to open doors and try to avoid soft-locking the game. Wait, what?
Weirdly, this carry-over from the NES game plays much smoother and more predictably on the MSX than on the NES. It’s MUCH easier to time the presses.
Yeah, soft locking is a legitimate possibility, and it’s not all that hard to do. First, let me explain what exactly is going on with Vampire Killer, because this isn’t Castlevania like anyone from America would be familiar with. Instead of just going from Point-A to Point-B, the MSX Castlevania features six levels, each of which is divided into three blocks. Each block has the standard Castlevania 1 door, just like the NES game, but there’s a twist: it’s locked. Hidden somewhere in the block is a silver key, which is not to be confused with gold keys like the one seen in the above screenshot. Gold keys can only be carried one-at-a-time and are only useful on treasure chests that lay around. The silver key looks like this:
Ignore the “Stage 20” thing because this screenshot is taken from the second loop after I beat Dracula, but this is really the first proper stage of Vampire Killer.
With a couple exceptions, the silver keys are usually hidden behind breakable walls and have to be searched out. It’s an inspired idea and it works fantastic. I mean, for the most part (she said as she eyes the rampaging elephant in the room). The blocks are never too big, either, and there’s one other twist: the maps wrap around. So when you reach the edge of the block you’re on, if it’s not walled off, you will come out the other end. So here’s the first screen in the first proper stage, and it’ll look familiar to NES fans:
Now, I could go to the right, like you would in the NES game. Or, I could go left, which won’t take me back outside the castle, but instead take me to this room on the far right side of the map.
Neat, huh? It’s not pointless, either. This is heavily incorporated into the level design and used for navigation-based puzzle solving, and it works vertically too. Well, sometimes. The vertical version of the map wrapping is a little more problematic because there’s also bottomless pits like any other Castlevania game. There are maps that you can find and pressing F2 calls them up, so you won’t necessarily have to jump blindly. But, I kind of wish they had just eliminated the potential for death by pits altogether and focused on the exploration, because it’s usually really well done otherwise. I enjoyed it so much I attempted to play this blind, with the only guide I used being StrategyWiki’s list of what all the items do.
See the person with a staff sitting on the ledge? They’re basically a shop, though you have to hit them over and over, which will eventually lead to them making a one-time offer to sell you an item. But it’s a LOT more complicated than that, because they change into different colors, and sometimes they’ll just give you hearts and sometimes they’ll take hearts from you. Even the sale mechanic itself has layers to it. Throughout the levels are two types of bibles: white ones and black ones. If you collect a black one, the price of the items in the shops will go up, but white ones make the price go down. It’s crazy how many extra layers of complexity they added to make this version stand out. They really went all out, which is in stark contrast to the elegant simplicity of the Castlevania that Famicom/NES owners got.
I highly recommend anyone who plays this for the first time keep that item page bookmarked, because there’s a TON of items that all work in a variety of ways, both passively and proactively, and almost never intuitively. In Vampire Killer, a whip isn’t even necessarily your primary weapon. The knife, axe, and boomerang REPLACE the whip once they’re picked up. Oh, and the axe doesn’t behave like the axe from the NES game and is instead a short-range boomerang, while the blue cross boomerang (which is fairly rare) goes faster and further. Oh, and if you don’t catch either of them on the return trip, you lose them and go back to your leather whip. Yep. I should also note the boomerangs and knife don’t use up hearts, but the two subweapons do, and they take “overpowered subweapons” to a whole new level.
I think Vampire Killer might earn the title “the weirdest 2D game in the franchise” because of how different it is from the typical Castlevania. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the whip was my least favorite weapon. I never use the throwing knives in most 2D Castlevania games, but I preferred them for this game because knives gave me range and speed without having to worry about losing them every time I used them. Plus, the knife was reliable in terms of collision, whereas whip was inconsistent. I was constantly whipping right through candles to no effect, and in general, the whip has none of the OOMPH you expect from a normal Castlevania game’s whip.
The subweapons are the holy water and the stopwatch. The stopwatch is another item I almost never use in Castlevania games that I got heavy usage out of in Vampire Killer, to the point that I actively sought it out. That’s weird, but not as weird as the method of activating the subweapons. To use the stopwatch, you have to jump in the air and press DOWN. Yes, really, but the holy water is even worse. To use the holy water, you have to jump in the air and tap LEFT or RIGHT. Now, I have twitchy fingers these days, so I was constantly throwing holy water accidentally while jumping at angles. Thankfully, hearts are plentiful and they’re not stripped from you between levels. That’s strange, because everything else is! Yep, ALL ITEMS wear off when you finish a level and you go back to your leather whip. Does it get weirder? Actually, yeah: you can possess the stopwatch AND the holy water at the same time, and they work on basically every boss except Dracula (because they can’t reach him). So five of the six bosses are pieces of cake in this game.
The bosses are CRAZY SPONGY if you try using your other weapons. But they have no invincibility frames at all, making the holy water’s fire extremely effective at quickly draining them. If your timing is true and you activate the stopwatch while throwing the holy water in a way where the fire is damaging them, one-shotting bosses is on the table for pretty much every non-Drac boss. My timing wasn’t, and I still beat Reapy McReapface with two bottles of water.
And it’s at this point I have to inform everyone that my ultimate verdict on Vampire Killer is a bizarre split decision based on how you play it. On the third block of the fourth level, I found myself unable to make progress and decided to use the StrategyWiki walkthrough to figure out what I was doing wrong, and I discovered I’d soft-locked the game. Right before you face the boss of the fourth level, Vampire Killer has the easiest-to-activate soft lock I’ve ever encountered in any game I’ve reviewed at IGC, and it makes this review much more complicated than it should be. I’m going to explain it, and if you know of an easier soft lock to activate in any game, meaning one that’s part of the natural game flow and not one you have to go out of your way to do, I want to hear it because I don’t think there’s ever been one.
SPLIT DECISION: PLAYING WITHOUT SAVE STATES OR REWIND
This is the room in question, and I should note that if you find a candle item (not to be confused with the candles you break with your weapon), it puts a highlight box around breakable walls. Keep in mind that all four blocks are destroyed at once, instead of one segment at a time. You can’t make a stagnated stepladder out of them.
See the key? You can’t jump up and get it, even if you have the item that lets you jump higher (which I don’t even think is located in the fourth level anyway). See the blocks in front of the skeleton dragon? If you break those before you get the key, you’re in BIG trouble, because now you have no way to reach the key. If the dragon is already dead and you break those blocks, you have soft locked yourself. The game is over and you have to reset from the beginning. If the dragon is not dead, you have to damage yourself using the dragon in a way where you pop upward and collect the key using the knock back, but it’s nowhere near as easy to pull off the knock back trick in the MSX game as it is in the NES game.
I’m 75% sure there’s a second potential soft lock in “Stage 17” where a player can render the game impassible if they collect a key before breaking blocks somewhere else on the map to create an escape route. The silver key is located behind the blocks to the right of the base of the stairs, but there’s no way to get out of the area unless you do other things first. I activated this one too, and while I think you can probably die on purpose and restart, I didn’t try it and just restarted the level from my save state.
This is inexcusable design and a critical failure of play-testing, but I think it’s even worse than that. Both potential soft locks feel kind of deliberate, like they were a planned part of the challenge. So either this is a deliberate design concept that nobody in their right mind would come up with or it’s just an example of why play testing is so crucial. Here’s the thing: I believe that a player’s natural instinct, in any game like this, is to smash every single block they see. Does everyone agree? Players shouldn’t expect to be able to end their entire run by breaking one block. Well, I did it, and if I hadn’t been using an emulator where I could rewind this mistake or load a prior save state, I would have been so furious beyond imagination. But it also feels like this is something a player could easily do by accident. First off, collision is NOT PERFECT. Second, if you have a boomerang weapon and try to smash the candle that’s right there in front of the blocks, you’ll break the blocks and that’s it. This is really bad design, and if you don’t have the means to play with an emulator that features rewind or save states, I don’t recommend even trying this game. This is completely unacceptable game design. Verdict: NO! But this review is not over.
SPLIT DECISION: USING AN EMULATOR
WITH SAVE/REWIND OPTIONS
Believe it or not, the red skeletons are probably the most threatening enemies in the entire game. They move super fast and they come back to life super fast.
Make sure you throw down plenty or save states or have your rewind set that it can go back several minutes. Did you? Cool. Let’s pretend those two soft lock sections aren’t a big deal, because they really aren’t if you have a nice emulator. I’m not trying to be wishy washy, but we’re not in the dark ages anymore and soft locks can be undone. So, what do I think of Vampire Killer overall?
I stopped and counted to ten and then carried on, and reminded myself that I genuinely enjoyed the maze-like levels.
Keeping it real, a lot of the appeal in Vampire Killer is from a novelty point of view. It’s just so different, for better and for worse. And there’s a lot of “worse” in the conversation. The famously elegant Castlevania combat and enemy design just isn’t here. The actual action of Vampire Killer is pretty sloppy and it lacks the PUNCH that the NES games have that made their combat so satisfying. So most of the appeal, at least for me, is playing a game that’s like an alternative universe version of what is one of the most important games of my life. One thing about the NES Castlevania is it has very conservative level layouts that rely heavily on fine-tuned enemy placement. The MSX game isn’t like that. It has genuinely ambitious level design, which often feels downright puzzle-like. Of course, it can also be so haphazardly done that you can end your game by breaking a single block. Ambition comes at a price.
In my first attempt to beat Dracula, I had the blue boomerang, and I missed catching it during the first phase and had to jump up and whip at the jewel on his forehead with the goddamned leather whip one shot at a time. Eventually I died from the stream of bats. I rewound the game and tried again, missed the boomerang, but I figured out how to block the bats. After a few minutes, I’d barely put any damage at all into Drac himself. Nuts to that. I reloaded the level and found the knife, and then I allowed the continuous stream of bats that he pukes out to knock me back while facing the correct direction (since the ledge doesn’t have enough room to turn around), and that’s how I finished it. It’s worth noting this is easily the hardest of the 8-bit Castlevania games and, if you attempt to play this cleanly, be ready for a game that plays dirty and is still kind of janky. I couldn’t do it. I tried, folks, and Vampire Killer ate my butt.
There’s a voice in my head saying “oh come on, Cathy! If this were any other game, would you be so quick to forgive that god awful soft lock design?” Okay, fair, and the answer is “probably not.” But Vampire Killer isn’t any other game. If the charm of a one-off novelty-like Castlevania experience knocked my socks off, why wouldn’t that apply to other fans? I make no guarantees here, but I think it’s worth checking out at least once if you’re a fan of the series. And I’m not giving it a pity YES!, either. I really did enjoy the level design for 16 out of the 18 blocks. I enjoyed the search for the keys. I enjoyed playing a Castlevania game that’s played one screen at a time and does things other Castlevania games don’t do. There’s a f*cking door maze in this game, for goodness sake!
In fact, the door maze is part of the soft lock room. Now, this will require you to have a keyboard or unlimited button remapping, including the ability to map keyboard controls to game controllers. If you don’t use the ROM patch that I used, this requires players to press UP and DOWN, at the same time. It’s assumed that players are on an MSX with a keyboard right in front of them, and with directional keys, you can easily press UP and DOWN at the same time. Oh, it’s a very inconsiderate and sloppy design, but mind you, for those players using a keyboard, UP is also “JUMP.” Because I’m insane, I tried playing the first level using a keyboard, and I spent the next minute kissing my controller and telling it I will never take it for granted again. I would have taken it even further, but I assume controllers come to life when nobody is looking, Toy Story-style and I don’t want it to judge me.
Hey, I like door mazes! Isn’t it kind of weird Castlevania has never really done a lot with them? They seem like they would lend themselves to the haunted house vibe, and it’s not like I wouldn’t have enjoyed the maze a lot if not for the sour note that ended it. So, I really liked Vampire Killer when it didn’t play as dirty as any game ever has. At the end of the day, after years of being curious about Vampire Killer, I’m actually happy I put in the time to finish it. I can’t say that about Simon’s Quest or Castlevania: The Adventure. Just don’t expect a masterpiece, because Vampire Killer certainly isn’t. Okay, fine, it’s a novelty. But hey, gaming is a big tent, and novelties have their place in it. Verdict: YES!
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest aka Dorakyura II: Noroi no Fūin Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom Disk System Released August 28, 1987 (FDS) November 24, 1988 (NES) Directed by Hitoshi Akamatsu Developed by Konami Included in Castlevania Anniversary Collection
If you’re saying “hey, wait a second, I don’t remember that map in the game” I would advise you to read past my verdict as I talk about quality of life ROM hacks, including the one I used for this review.
Disclaimer: I used a quality of life ROM hack for this review, but one that I feel didn’t fundamentally change the developer’s intent. There was no rebalancing of the experience system or the rate of hearts being dropped, no enemy rebalancing, no level design changes, and no changes to the items. The big changes were quicker day/night transitions, a better translated script, and more invincibility frames when you get hit. For the full review on the ROM hack I used, “Castlevania II English Re-translation (+Map)” by bisqwit, keep reading past my main verdict. NOTHING in the ROM hack I used changes how I feel about this game, so this is my definitive review of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, a game I’ve been putting off reviewing for two years.
Castlevania II has some of the worst Metroidvania-style maps in gaming history. Just totally nonsensical design that neither lends itself particularly well to exploration or action. There’s moments like this, where the path branches out into two paths that will eventually merge anyway, and the commonplace enemies just shamble back and forth instead of having enemies tailored to this area of the game.
Put yourself in the shoes of director Hitoshi Akamatsu and the team behind Simon’s Quest. When the original Castlevania was nearing completion, they must have had some idea that they just created an absolute masterpiece and legitimate contender for the best game on the Famicom/NES up to that point. Not only that, but in Castlevania, they had a game with obvious global appeal and sequel potential up the wazoo. A game that lends itself specifically to sequels from a development point of view, since Castlevania is a LOT simpler than most people realize on face value. It nailed the theme, combat, item design, enemy design, and enemy placement (a seriously underrated factor towards any game’s masterpiece status), but it also features level design that’s actually fairly conservative. Hell, there’s a stage that doesn’t even have a single pit to jump over. The boldest it gets is in the final stage, which is by far the shortest. So they left a LOT of room to grow while staying within a traditional linear format.
Later, you get Dracula’s ring. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to slay him or marry him.
While I admire this sequel’s ambition, it feels like it tries to be too big for its own britches. Simon’s Quest is a very early, very primitive example of a Metroidvania. The irony is, it would be the franchise’s next attempt at this formula that would cement the “Vania” part of the genre’s name with Symphony of the Night. That tells you everything you need to know about how successful Simon’s Quest was despite the fact that it predates Symphony of the Night by just under a full decade. I’m sure they made this game with the best of intentions, but it’s actually remarkable how the direct sequel to Castlevania, a game that got pretty much everything right, manages to get nothing right from a gameplay perspective. It strips out everything that made the first game fun EXCEPT the theme and the most basic combat. It’s fascinating for sure, and it’s also got fans out there which (shrug) I mean, everything has fans. Joe Dirt had enough fans that Crackle did a f*cking sequel to it. What I don’t get is how someone who loved the first game can feel any connection between the two games that isn’t purely superficial.
This is the type of confusing thing that doesn’t bother me. When this came out, especially in the United States, the poor translation made some of the items confusing on how they worked. That sucks and I feel sorry for gamers back then, but it’s not 1988 anymore. There’s strategy guides, like the one I used that’s so useful I got the best ending on my first attempt, though I admit I used rewind to undo false floor GOTCHA traps. But hell, even emulator-based cheating shows that players have plenty of options for solutions if they get stuck or jerked around by the game design. The question I’m asking with this review is “how good is Simon’s Quest when you strip away all the bullsh*t and get down to the nitty gritty gameplay?”
And I’m not even talking about the infamous mistranslated script with its obscure hints, or the agonizingly slow transition from day to night that interrupts gameplay. I just played a version of Simon’s Quest without those things. Once upon a time, they might have been a problem, but after playing through this twice for this feature without those factors, I’ve come to the conclusion they were never *THE* problem. And the Metroidvania formula obviously isn’t a bad idea since the franchise would get its second wind via that genre in the 90s and 2000s. The problem is there’s a total lack of polish to Castlevania II that’s likely the result of a very short development cycle. This was released less than a year after the first game, which is insane given the scope and ambition they had for Simon’s Quest. Instead of just making your way from Point A to Point B, you now have to do things like kneel at a lake while possessing a specific color crystal ball, which will cause the screen to lower and reveal a hidden pathway. Re-read that last sentence. Doesn’t that sound like a game that took at least a year-and-a-half to develop, and not a matter of months?
I won’t claim there’s NO satisfaction in seeing this happen. It’s a cool reveal! I just wish they’d taken their time with the entire quest. You can’t do a 100 meter dash with a game this ambitious!
The rush job explains the total lack of polish and lack of fine-tuned enemy attack patterns and placement. The result is Simon’s Quest is a game with no tempo or flow to it. This can also largely be blamed on the Metroidvania format, which they clearly didn’t know how to build around. For example, the leveling-up system is based not on killing enemies but picking up the hearts they drop. The problem is enemies don’t always drop hearts. While I have no objection to using RNG for currency or item drops, I don’t like the idea of experience points being all-or-nothing RNG random chance. It’s bad game design to leave luck up to heaven. It really doesn’t help that the variety of enemies doesn’t work in a Metroidvania. With one or two small exceptions, none of the enemies feel particularly optimized for the environments they’re placed in. The enemies feel completely arbitrary and often don’t feel like there was much consideration for logic in their design, locations, or attack patterns. Too many just kind of shamble back and forth. The only time I ever felt a sense of danger in the entire game were a few moving block jumps.
Near the end of the game, I was still only up to level three even though I slayed every enemy that I crossed paths with. This meant enemies were especially spongy. As a result, I found myself grinding on these guys, who had high full-heart payouts, to get my level up, and in doing so, I almost cost myself the perfect ending. I beat Dracula as a level 5 (max is 6) on the seventh day/night cycle, which is the very last one that scores you a perfect ending. By the way, that shield I’m holding is actually Dracula’s rib. Of all the bones in the human body, that would not be my first choice for a shield, but I never found Dracula’s hip. Sasha the Kid: “maybe they meant it’s his RIB CAGE and they screwed that up too.” Okay, I can buy that.
What’s strange is that the XP system actually does have a thoughtfulness that’s designed to eliminate the potential for screw grinding. Once you beat enemies in a certain section, they won’t fill up your XP anymore regardless of whether they drop hearts. You have to be near where the next mansion is at, or maybe even inside the next mansion. Also, enemies you’ve already fought become stronger as the game goes along. These are positive ideas, but the cast of enemies just aren’t as fun to battle in these environments. Maybe if they had cut and pasted the entire Castlevania 1 combat system it could have worked, but they didn’t. The whip is back, and although it’s still kind of satisfying, it doesn’t feel quite as impactful as Castlevania 1 or Castlevania III’s whip cracks. Complementary sub-weapons like the axe or boomerang are gone completely, while the holy water loses its combat effectiveness and becomes actively annoying thanks to being so heavily incorporated into the exploration elements. Only the dagger really carried over from the first game, and that’s by far the item I enjoy using the least in Castlevania games. Go figure, right?
One of the new items, the diamond, is just really weak and lacking in the satisfaction of unleashing boomerangs or the axe. It just sort of bounces around. Meanwhile, the sacred fire is overpowered as f*ck. I beat the game with it.
But I think it’s really the level design that drops Simon’s Quest into gaming’s sewer. These are boring maps, and without the pitch perfect enemy placement of Castlevania 1, the sense of claustrophobia the first game had is completely missing. I didn’t really mind the confusing navigation or the backtracking so much. If you use the most optimized game route (I used StrategyWiki to guide my way) there’s really only one MAJOR instance of backtracking and a couple small ones. That’s not too bad for the Metroidvania genre at this stage of its existence. Okay, so I can’t imagine trying to figure any of this stuff out without a guide or a ROM that told me the name of the location I was at, but the days where gamers have to do this stuff blindly are a thing of the past. The problem is there’s only a small handful of sections where I sat up in my chair and said “now this kind of feels like the original game” like seen in the screenshot below.
I won’t say Castlevania II NEVER feels like Castlevania I. Right here, there’s something about the timing of when these fishmen pop out that makes me feel like I’m finally, at long last, playing a sequel and not a spin-off. And yes, since I couldn’t find any other place to talk about it, shout-out to the historically awesome soundtrack. One of the best on the NES. But I don’t play games to listen to music. I play games to play games. Good music can only make a good game better, but it can’t make a bad game better. At least that’s how I feel.
The object of Simon’s Quest is to navigate your way to five mansions to locate body parts of Dracula. Or four body parts and his bling since the last thing you get is the “ring of Dracula” though as Sasha the Kid pointed at, maybe the ring is attached to his severed finger. This actually isn’t a bad idea (I mean the mansions, not Dracula’s finger being stuck in a ring, which is gross, Sasha) but the execution is beyond pathetic. I’m guessing they were aiming for Zelda or Kid Icarus-like dungeon mazes, but they all look basically the same with slightly different colors. There’s also only six total enemies that you’ll ever see in the mansions, not counting the two, yes, TWO bosses total that appear before you fight Dracula. The main two enemies you’ll encounter are skeleton knights and knight-knights, which are functionally the same in that they just sort of patrol back and forth. Two enemies, spiders and slime blobs, appear in the overworld. There’s also hopping devils that shoot projectiles and run of the mill Castlevania bats. That’s the entire roster of mansion enemies. I think that by itself assured the mansions would get old fast and Simon’s Quest would get a NO!
It’s safe to say the primary strategy used by the skeletons and knights in the mansions is to force players to walk into them on the stairs. That’s so unimaginative and boring, which is totally in contrast to, again, everything the first game did. Castlevania I *did* use this concept, but it had more going for it. Castlevania II just keeps leaning heavier and heavier into it. Mind you, Castlevania staples like mummies, ghosts, and the Medusa heads are in this game, but not in the mansions.
Because of the low variety of enemies and the lack of architecture to make one mansion stand apart from the other, they don’t feel like events. Hell, the mansions have absolutely no personality at all. I was F*CKING PUMPED every single time I reached the front gate of a new one. The entrances look like you’re doing something big and important.
No notes. Okay, well, maybe a note. They needed a sign to tell you the name of the place, and maybe they could have done a little more to make the fences look unique.
But the contents inside let me down every single time. They’re complete f*cking slogs to work your way through. Beating a dungeon in Legend of Zelda feels like a big deal. Beating mansions in Simon’s Quest feels like busy work. You’ve got a sacred flame, Simon. Just burn the f*cking building down and grab the bag with the relic in it. It’s not like there’s anything else to do inside of them! Okay, so you have to find and purchase an oak stake to collect the relic, but even that is botched. Even though you can only carry one oak stake at a time, you can prepay for the next mansion’s stake after collecting the relic. The stakes should have been like the big keys in Zelda, IE unique to each mansion. Even if you pretend like that’s the case, the locations of where the stakes are purchased inside the mansions have no sense of discovery about them. They’re usually in arbitrary spots, with only one or two placed in a way that makes it feel like consideration was given towards incentivizing exploration.
This is a great example of Castlevania II’s development team not understanding how to handle progress. The above screenshot shows me getting the flame whip, which is the best weapon in the game and the final upgrade of the whip. This should be a huge, huge moment that’s built towards. There should be a boss fight attached to it, or a quest to retrieve macguffins associated with it, or hell, at this point I would settle for making it the most expensive item in the game since there’s really not a whole ton of sh*t to buy. Something, anything to make the morning star feel like a big deal. There’s none of that! It’s a free upgrade that’s just in the middle of an arbitrary spot. The best thing I can say is the backdrop is unique, but so what? It’s nuts that the people who did such a great job pacing Castlevania 1, to the point that it feels like it was calculated by f*cking NASA, didn’t understand how to present or pace these moments. And don’t tell me it’s because they swapped genres, because big moments in games should have an intuitive lead-up to them. You don’t just spring them on players like this. You build suspense. It’s storytelling 101.
For the most part, mansions are built around sprawling, dull layouts that rely on placing enemies at the top of staircases in a way where you have to wait a long time for them to move out of the way, or false floors. Castlevania II has an obsession with false floors. The only way to really tell if a floor is fake or not is to throw holy water at the ground (you have an unlimited supply of it) and if it goes through the floor, you know to jump over that spot. This is unjustifiable. I swear to you that I hate going back to this point over and over, but the first Castlevania cut a tempo like few games ever did, and here’s the sequel telling players to heel-toe it while gingerly throwing water at the ground like the flower girl dropping pedals at a wedding. It’s unimaginable that they believed this was an effective way to build upon Castlevania’s foundation. And it’s not like the level layouts would be fun without this. In the second mansion, “Rover Mansion”, the level is basically divided into two sides, and the side you start on has NOTHING in it. Okay, so I need to use a map that I’m borrowing from StrategyWiki that was originally created by Procyon. I added the arrow and circle.
Rover Mansion. Not pictured is Fido Mansion and Spot Mansion.
You start Rover Mansion in the bottom left hand corner, where the base of the arrow is. Everything in the circle is a gigantic, winding dead end. The idea is supposed to be that players will eventually discover a false wall. Except, as far as I can tell, there’s no practical clue towards this. I went through every bit of dialog in the game and nothing points towards this. It has to be discovered completely organically by throwing holy water at every solid surface until the player sees one of the jars pass through it. I have NO objection to that, besides the fact that it sounds kind of boring on its face value. What I do object to is the entire circled area in the above map serving ZERO PURPOSE! It’s there only for the sake of a wild goose chase, and that’s just NEVER fun in video games. Granted, they might not have realized that in 1987 and it took games like Simon’s Quest to make that a hard rule, but again, this is the same dev team who, with Castlevania 1, optimized a conservative layout like few games ever have, AND THIS IS WHAT THEY CAME UP WITH? This is some of the least optimized map design in the history of the medium. It’s a bad use of real estate, and inexcusable given what they did with so little in Castlevania 1.
The wall behind me is the false wall in question that’s the key to solving this level. It won’t be the last usage of this gag, but this is by far the least optimized version of it, because it renders half of a level completely pointless.
You can’t even say that sending a player off in a dead end adds to the replay value because it eats up time and could cost players the best ending. Time stops ticking in the mansions. There’s plenty of things that COULD have been done with that area. Why not locate the seller of the oak stake up in there? Why not hide the sacred flame, located in an arbitrary spot on the overworld map, in the furthest dead-end of that area? Why not stick a clue to the false wall being a thing up in there? EVEN IF that would have been bungled in the translation, the dev team isn’t responsible for that. What they are responsible for is a nonsense map, but Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is full of those. What’s becoming apparent is they fundamentally didn’t have a good game plan for creating this interconnected world or building an exploration-based experience. Simon’s Quest isn’t lacking for big events. Things like lowering the lake with the crystal, or summoning a whirlwind to teleport you to a previously inaccessible point of the graveyard absolutely work as big moments. It’s all the sh*t in between that fails as an action game and an adventure game.
Okay, so kneeling for several seconds is not a great means of activation. With events like this, I prefer a single press of the button, which is intuitive, to any form of delayed activation, which isn’t. But the whirlwind does show that they understood, at least on some level, the importance of a big, sprawling adventure having great big “ta-dah!” moments. That’s why I can’t excuse any of the mistakes. They weren’t completely clueless. If they were, this wouldn’t even have been in the game.
And to really hammer home how unprepared and misguided Simon’s Quest is, look no further than the lack of bosses. The first Castlevania was defined by its boss encounters. Even the MSX game was. Simon’s Quest, before Dracula, has two bosses, which appear in the 3rd and 5th mansions. Yep, you have to wait until the game is nearly halfway done before you even encounter your first boss. Presumably they based that on Metroid only having two bosses before Mother Brain. Except, I think the designers of Castlevania 1 should have known better and understood the importance of boss fights and building up to them. TWO bosses? Are you f*cking kidding me? And they’re not even good bosses. One of them is the Grim Reaper, who is the FIRST BOSS IN THE GAME! You don’t even fight him, the actual first boss, until the third goddamned mansion, and he’s a total sponge. The second boss is a spooky mask that’s apparently supposed to be the Castlevania debut of Carmilla. That should be a big deal, except it doesn’t look or feel like Carmilla, or even the skull version of Carmilla that would really debut in Rondo of Blood.
I don’t know if it’s THE worst Grim Reaper fight, but it’s up there for sure.
It floors me that they didn’t recognize the role boss fights played in the original game. And it gets even worse, because they’re not even really framed like bosses. They just appear in the room before the room with the Dracula relic. You can walk right past them since the door isn’t locked. Hell, the music doesn’t even change. There’s no showmanship to them at all. They even respawn after you collect the relic, like basic enemies do! It’s beyond belief that this is what they came up with. In this relatively massive game, THREE bosses, two of which aren’t even given music, and one of which (Reapy McReapface) is basically entirely optional? Because you can beat the game without killing the Grim Reaper. Carmilla has to be beaten because she holds a cross that gates off the entrance to Castlevania itself.
The sad part? This is probably THE highlight of the entire game.
Only the final boss is given the proper weight of a boss fight, but even Dracula himself isn’t very fun to battle. First off, he looks like the Grim Reaper instead of Dracula. Even the kids even said it when I said “hey, who wants to see me fight Dracula?” Second: he’s boring looking in general, but then again, a lot of the enemy sprites are. Third, he’s the easiest Dracula fight in the franchise’s history. I stun-locked him almost immediately with the magic flame sub-weapon and the game ended seconds later. I’ve been saying for a long time that bosses are the metronome of gaming. Simon’s Quest is the proof, because this is a game that feels like it never keeps a beat. In terms of raw gameplay, it’s not close to the worst NES game, but I still would like to nominate it for consideration anyway. They laid the perfect foundation for a sequel and squandered it. Unlike other bad games, they had every reason to do better and no excuses for how bad this is. And it’s HORRIBLE!
“You now possess Dracula’s maidenhead.”
Castlevania II misses the point of the first game so badly that I have to figure this is in the same boat as Super Pac-Man. When you read interviews with Pac-Man creator Tōru Iwatani, it’s plainly obvious he didn’t even understand why Pac-Man was a big hit and chalked it up to “people like to eat” even though there were plenty of other games where you eat stuff. He fixated on “eating is the attraction” for the first two sequels, Super Pac-Man and Pac & Pal and they bombed badly because they featured boring mazes that were unoptimized for chasing and turning the tables (Ms. Pac-Man was made by someone else). It wasn’t until Pac-Mania years later that he seemed to finally realize eating dots was just a means to an end and it’s the chase and the pitch-perfect way of turning-the-tables that made Pac-Man blow up. I assume that’s what happened here as well. I’m guessing Konami and Akamatsu fundamentally didn’t understand what they’d accomplished with the original Castlevania. They probably chalked it up to the whip or the undead setting, but those were a means to an end. Castlevania was a masterpiece because it featured precisely fine-tuned, elegant action that was paced perfectly. All of that is gone here. Castlevania II has no polish and features maps and a game flow that doesn’t seem particularly well thought-out. It could have been salvaged, but they didn’t have time! They wanted to get this out ASAP. My theory is that Simon’s Quest is a victim of gold rush mentality.
You’ll notice a LOT of flat ground in these screenshots. Now, Castlevania 1 is a game that I’ve probably played more than any other NES game and it has a lot more of these straight corridors than people realize, but it can get away with it by utilizing a linear format with PERFECTLY placed enemies, which is to say nothing of the haunted house setting doing a lot of the heavy lifting and the boss fights to serve as checkpoints. You can’t get away with that type of design in a Metroidvania, and especially one that didn’t care one iota about boss fights. The result is a mostly boring landscape to travel.
I get it, by the way and can even see where they’re coming from. You have to consider the circumstances. Konami probably wanted to quickly establish a flagship franchise on the smoking-hot Famicom/NES, which was a new type of cultural touchstone that gamers of 2025 can’t really appreciate. Like, we saw the launch of the Switch 2 this year, right? Now imagine if Switch 2 completely pulled video games from the brink of death to become the single hottest consumer electronics item in the two biggest global markets for consumer electronics and there was a gap of major “brand names” associated with software for the platform. Brand names in this case being franchises. Now finally, I want you to imagine if the Switch 2 launch was as successful as it was (apparently historically successful), only without any established franchises and every hit game being the first game ever in that series. It’s hard to imagine, right? But that’s basically the situation Konami found themselves in with Castlevania.
Simon’s Quest shares blood with The Maze of Galious, a Famicom exclusive they developed which I will review sometime soon at IGC. I have no clue if it’s good or not, but while finishing editing this review, it occurred to me that Konami did do an unsung Metroidvania that I enjoy very much: Goonies II, which ironically I also reviewed (sort of) using a quality of life ROM hack. A full, stand-alone Goonies II review is also coming to IGC because I really want to try to get it re-released. I think it’s fantastic and one of the NES’ most underrated games. It also released half-a-year before Castlevania II did, which shows there’s no excuses for how badly done Simon’s Quest is since Konami knew what a good non-linear platform adventure should look like.
And again, they *had* to know Castlevania was their best piece of software by a country mile up to that point and that it had “marquee franchise” written all over it. So I totally understand the sense of urgency they must have felt to quickly, unequivocally establish the franchise as a brand name that consumers would associate with the world’s hottest brand. Hell, they probably felt being #2 to Super Mario Bros. in terms of direct association with the Famicom/NES was on the table, because it probably was. I don’t think Castlevania was ever that. If you’re an older reader of mine who grew up and went to school in the 1980s and early 90s, I’d LOVE for you to leave a comment and let me know how big Castlevania was among you and your friends in terms of status. Because I think that’s what happened here, and their plan didn’t fail, whether I liked Simon’s Quest or not. It was released just weeks after Super Mario Bros. 2 and sold pretty well, and Castlevania is a famous gaming franchise in the 2020s even with children who haven’t seen brand new Castlevania games in their gaming lives. Simon’s Quest played a part in that. And I’m not naive. I know Dracula’s Curse, my favorite NES game, was as good as it was because they had to make up for Simon’s Quest. We don’t get Castlevania III as good as it is if they don’t completely, utterly, epically, stupendously f*ck up Castlevania II first. So if nothing else, thanks for that, Simon’s Quest! Verdict: NO!
If it was *me* bringing Dracula back to life by assembling his dismembered body, including his heart, I think I would take a sh*t in Dracula’s heart before I started the re-assembly ritual. It’d be messy and gross, especially in the centuries before wet wipes were invented, but it’d be worth it. Then he comes back to life and is like “I, Dracula, prince of darkness, have returned! I vill now conquer zee world using my army of….. vhat are snickering at? Vhat’s so funny, Simon? Vhat, do I have a booger in my nose? And vhy is my chest so lumpy? Vait….. Oh no! Vhat have you done?! YOU SICK SON OF A VITCH!”
BONUS: QUALITY OF LIFE ROM HACK REVIEW
I already knew I hated Simon’s Quest going into this review. I’d tried playing it multiple times for an IGC review, and I just hate the f*cking game. But, it’s one of my most requested reviews, and it is Halloween and it’s tradition for me to do Castlevania games for Halloween. If I MUST do Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, I wanted to be able to examine the game at its peak potential, which meant utilizing a ROM hack. The problem is, there were SO MANY quality of life ROM hacks for Simon’s Quest to choose. It has to be one of the biggest bad games that people have tried to fix, and the volume of ROM hacks is pretty overwhelming to sort through. I wish I had time to review them all because I know how hard the ROM hacking community works, so I’m going to encourage everyone to check out ROMHacking.Net’s Castlevania II page. I went through the list and selected “Castlevania II English Re-translation (+Map)” by bisqwit. I chose it because bisqwit’s translation is cited at places like StrategyWiki and the Castlevania Wiki, and because his version of the game seemed to include the most quality of life upgrades while staying truest to the original intent (IE not improving heart drops, rebalancing enemies).
Bisqwit’s effort not only includes the map above and better translations of the text, but a fully done original prologue. Holy smokes! This goes so far above and beyond the call of duty that I kind of want to give bisqwit a hug, but hopefully being featured in one of my most requested reviews will suffice.
I intended for this to be my definitive Simon’s Quest review and the last time I ever play Simon’s Quest unless Konami puts out an official remake. So please keep in mind that the NO! verdict was not for Bisqwit’s ROM hack. He did a fantastic job improving a game that is, simply put, terrible and I’m bestowing an honorary YES! verdict to his work. If you’re a fan of Simon’s Quest, you’re weird, and also you really should check it out, along with other quality of life efforts for Castlevania II. By the way, I salute the entire ROM hacking community for their hard work. I seriously love and admire all of you and wish that more gaming media covered your work, but as long as I’m around, I intend to use my platform to spotlight your work. So, what made this version of Simon’s Quest different? The biggest change is the transition from day to night is instantaneous. Here’s what it (and the map) look like:
He also added more invincibility frames (what I normally call “blinking”) and the ability to jump off stairs but I didn’t even realize that and never used it until after I’d already beaten the game. Those are the only real efforts towards rebalancing I believe bisqwit did, and he also added a save system to replace the password system. Finally, the dialog is properly translated. Apparently some characters are meant to lie to Simon and provide red herrings that aren’t helpful to players, and I have no problem with bisqwit not changing that. He stayed true to the developer’s intent, whether that intent was stupid or not. The clue books you find in the mansions are much more clear, and you can go back and re-read them in the menu. Even the sign posts are better handled. Here’s some examples of the new dialog, which is based directly on the original Japanese text:
I’m grateful for his effort, because it confirmed to me that my problems with Simon’s Quest are related to nonsensical level design and terrible pacing that goes far beyond a slow transition from day to night. The version I played altered NONE of the level design, enemy difficulty, heart drop rates, experience system, etc. I’m confident that nothing I covered in the main review is going to be different whether you play the normal retail version of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest or the version I played. So what’s here WAS my definitive review, and I’m glad to finally be done with it. This game sucks, but bisqwit’s effort does not. Thank you again bisqwit for your effort! YES! to your patch, even if the game itself is still a NO! And seriously, compilations need to do things like this. There is nothing inherently sacred about old versions of games and including OPTIONAL quality of life fixes is ALWAYS worth the effort, even if the game isn’t that much better for it.
It’s always a thrill for me to have someone who found a Definitive Review looking for reviews of the big, famous games they already knew about, only to find out about hidden gems they overlooked that get lumped into the feature. That’s what makes the Definitive Review format fun for me. Today, I’m doing something a little different. Usually, under-the-radar games have to find their way into my Definitive Reviews by being paired with more famous games, but today, the big game in this feature is, itself, one of those under-the-radar games, at least to people my age. I’m guessing most of my older readers are probably familiar with Irem’s Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. It started as a coin-op but was much more known as a very early NES release by Data East in the United States (1987). Even with an Arcade Archives release, it’s a non-entity today that gets name dropped occasionally when talking about NES hidden gems. What its fans might not know is that it got a whopping three sequels that never came out in America. You might have played one and not even realized it, as one of these games was re-sprited as a Mario game for bootleg NES and Famicom carts.
You don’t know the bird was killed there! Maybe there’s a female bird on the other side of that room and that’s cupid’s arrow!
Today, I’m playing all five games in the Kid Niki franchise except the Commodore 64 and Apple II ports of the coin-op. And, because it’s fun for me, and also because I know Irem’s publishing partners at ININ Games read Indie Gamer Chick, I’m doing this using the imaginary retro collection format. So, I want you to pretend I’m reviewing a compilation of five games called Kid Niki: Radical Collection that my team believes would retail for between $19.99 and $29.99. Assuming ININ Games used the same emulator features they included in their 2024 re-release of Parasol Stars for the TurboGrafx-16, the emulator would earn Kid Niki: Radical Collection $10 in bonus value, which is my mandatory bonus for any fully stacked emulator in a retro set. That means these games have to earn between $10 and $20 in value to combine with the emulator and make Kid Niki: Radical Collection a worthy purchase, and that’s assuming no other special features are added that would earn bonus value. Let’s see how it goes!
GAME REVIEWS
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
Kid Niki: Radical Ninja aka Kaiketsu Yancha Maru Platform: Arcade Released in 1986 Developed by Irem Sold Separately as Part of Arcade Archives Read the Original IGC Review
My previous experience with Kid Niki, reviewed way back when my YES!/NO! system wasn’t even in place yet, left me pretty unimpressed. But, that was played with the limited-in-features Arcade Archives emulator that didn’t offer rewind and had save states that required me to quit all the way back to the title screen. Not the Kid Niki title screen, but Arcade Archives one. Since Kid Niki undergoes a dramatic difficulty spike the last couple levels well beyond my talent, I was curious if the game would be more pleasant with instantaneous emulator cheating features. Now, those features can’t change things like bland level design or remove the frustration of one of the most unfair, money grubbing finales in gaming history. Rewind and save states aren’t a cure-all. With that said, Kid Niki certainly benefits from these features and turned what I thought was a rubber stamp NO! into a much more complicated review.
The entire franchise you’re about to read about is only happening because of how damn satisfying the primary attack is. Which is going to make the fifth and final game in this feature an especially baffling experience. I still can’t believe they didn’t realize that.
The best thing Kid Niki has going for it, besides mostly sublime boss battles, is one of the all-time delightful 8-bit attacks. Instead of slashing a sword in front of you, you sort of spin it. I don’t know quite how the physics are supposed to work, but since basic enemies take one hit to kill and go flying with a satisfying pop, it’s kind of unforgettable. Instead of calling this the generic sounding Kid Niki, they should have named this The Adventures of Katana Twirly. Normally, this would be the type of attack that makes you want to slay every enemy, but two things prevent this. First, the timer counts down too quickly, and even if you don’t come close to timing out, you get more points for finishing with five or more minutes on the clock. Second: the screen can become completely flooded with enemies. Too many enemies for Katana Twirly to deal with, and sometimes they’ll keep spawning until you move.
You’ll notice Twirly’s hairdos aren’t the same in every pic. For screenshots of the coin-op, if he’s got messy hair culminating in a rat tail, like in this picture, the screenshot is of the US version. If he’s got a topknot (a “Chonmage” in Japan) it’s the Japanese version. The other major change is the Japanese original has no checkpoints. If you die, you have to start the level all over. Since a couple of the bosses are brutal, that’s too big a punishment. None of the differences are present in the Famicom/NES game.
You’re also armed with a decent jump that can clear most enemies, so when the playfield becomes flooded with too many baddies to deal with, legging is sometimes an option. Not always. Like in this shot:
You can see more enemies beginning to spawn in the right corner. Yes, they’ll come down in a virtual waterfall of enemies like you see on the left.
You’re going to need to inch forward to get these guys to stop spawning, because they come in at an angle that forces combat instead of avoidance. But in later levels, where bosses might require more time to fight, stopping to turn around and smack guys will just eat up time, especially since they’ll just keep spawning behind you. So in the next picture, it makes more sense to just ignore what’s behind you if it’s not a direct threat.
One other difference: the masked baddies have “angry eyes” in the Japanese version, whereas they look closer to Shy Guys in the US version.
Now, while I personally wasn’t trying to get a high score (what’s the point? I was cheating like I was Derrick Rose facing my SATs), I found myself just trying to save as much time as possible because I wanted to see if I could get the maximum end of level bonus. But even when I tried to rush through stages, I found myself wondering if it was even possible. Even cheating, I couldn’t so much as get the second tier bonus on some of the later stages, and I wasn’t close at all to the max bonus. So, while the combat is cathartic, and there’s even bonus points for wiping out full formations of enemies, there’s also an inelegance to Kid Niki that’s undeniable.
There’s two power-ups, one of which gives you a projectile that looks like your sword. The other is this shield that spins relatively slowly around you but does make progress easier. Both items are used pretty sparingly and wear off eventually.
I admit that I was a little too hard on the level design in my previous review. It doesn’t matter if they have bland platforming layouts because it’s the enemy attack patterns and formations that the design logic is based around. This is a combat-focused game that can do platforming but isn’t really a platformer. Good thing too, because the jumping isn’t perfect. Turning around to face the other direction mid-air isn’t possible. Once your feet leave the ground, if an enemy is behind you, you can’t do anything about it until you land. The Famicom/NES version, up next, isn’t built the same way and offers much, much more flexible combat. Of course, being the NES, there’s also a LOT less enemies and much fewer situations where I would have liked to turn around mid-air. That would have been SO valuable in this version. Alas.
This is the first video game boss who spends the fight, I kid you not, scratching his ass. This isn’t one of those Ring King “it only looks naughty” situations. He’s no-doubt-about-it got an itchy anus. Which explains why he’s so grouchy! By the way, the word he’s spitting at you apparently has no English equivalent but according to Cutting Room Floor, it’s a word that’s used to scold practitioners of Zen. I wonder if Phil Jackson ever screamed it in the middle of a game? That’s TWO Chicago Bulls references in one review, by the way. I do myself proud sometimes.
The coin-op version of Kid Niki is one of those games that proves the value of a great emulator. Katana Twirly goes from relatively easy to learn and clock to absolutely maddening, with minimal middle ground. The curve is so steep that they could name a street in San Francisco after it, and it all finishes with a level that has seemingly random, ultra-fast moving bubbles rise up from the ground. It’s one hit deaths, and because of that, it really feels like the dirtiest of dirty pool.
I had to replay this a dozen or so times in the US version. Weirdly, in the hypothetically harder Japanese version, I got a favorable pattern of bubbles for this segment and aced it. I would have been proud of myself if I hadn’t instead died by shorting jumps I’d already safely made several times before.
And even after you get past the random bubbles, you’re still not done. The last attack pattern of the last boss becomes downright frustrating since he won’t open up and become vulnerable until you retreat to the other side of the screen, giving him a chance to blow his hard-to-avoid columns of fire at you. I guess their heart was in the right place, since they made a cheese-proof boss. But they kind of shot the moon and went too far in the other direction.
You can see my sword is not in my hand. This is the novel mechanic that I’d never seen before Kid Niki. During boss battles, every time you successfully land a shot, your sword goes flying out of your hands and you have to retrieve it. It’s really clever, actually. A great idea that is successfully executed in six out of the eight boss fights. Hell, the sixth boss is even built around the retrieval part of this element. I just don’t like it for the final boss, which I feel is just too unfair and brutal.
I’m standing by my NO! verdict for the Arcade Archives release, but using my preferred emulator, yep, I’m flipping my verdict to a solid YES! But, that’s a YES! is dependent on the emulator because it just becomes too demoralizing without it. With it, Kid Niki actually is a pretty dang decent coin-op experience. Like so many classic 80s games, I’d love to play a version of this that drops limited lives in favor of unlimited lives and a death counter. If ININ and Irem wanted to do a collection of Kid Niki games today, they should consider reworking it with that style. Make it cheating proof and put up a leaderboard for fewest deaths in a run. Don’t forget the toggles, too, since there’s dip switch settings that adjust the difficulty. Mind you, all my whining about difficulty was done on the lowest setting. Granted, most arcade games are still brutal on low settings, but that’s because they need to kick you off to earn money.
I love the art direction. Like this? It looks exactly like how Japanese mythology depicts demon insects. Those big, vacant, nightmare fuel eyes? I couldn’t wait to be done with this boss. It’s a good fight, though. You have to cut it to the bone, segment by segment, before you can kill the head.
By the way, I easily died over fifty times playing the US version, but that was cut nearly in half in the “harder” Japanese version that I played afterward. Emulator cheating helps you to get good. I wasn’t born able to have a no-death run through Castlevania. I got to that point by using rewind and save states, until one day I realized I just didn’t need them anymore. I did the same thing, only faster, with Adventure Island this year. They’re cheating features, but they’re also training tools. Instead of having to work your way back to the sections that kill you, rewind or even quick save/quick load allows you to examine the segments of levels closely and instantly. In just one pitifully played full game run through Kid Niki where I cheated like crazy, I learned enough to cut my deaths in half for the next run. If I stuck with Kid Niki, I think in a few days I might even be able to do a no-game over-run. It’s the ultimate trainer. Basically gaming steroids, only without wrecking your heart and sex organs. Well, maybe your sex organs but that will happen for non-chemical reasons. Verdict: YES! **FLIP** $5 in value added to Kid Niki: Radical Collection + $1 bonus for having both US and Japanese ROMs.
Kid Niki: Radical Ninja aka Kaiketsu Yancha Maru Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released in October 2, 1987 Developed by TOSE Published by Irem NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
The third boss is one of those bosses that breaks into smaller monsters until you eliminate them entirely. In the coin-op, this doesn’t happen if you hit this boss from behind. In the home version, she just breaks apart. Even worse: as far as I can tell, you can’t be killed by the smallest size in the NES version, which you absolutely could in the arcade game. I know, because I died from them more than once. If you look closely in this picture, you can see that my sprite is almost completely engulfing one of the enemies. I’m not cheating or using a code here. It just can’t hurt you. This happens a lot in Kid Niki, but the opposite is also true: some things kill you that aren’t even a little close to you. This has HORRIBLE collision detection, and it does ruin the game.
With a subtitle like “Radical Ninja” you would think Kid Niki would be riding Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ coattails. But Kid Niki in the United States predates the debut of the TMNT cartoon and toy line by a couple months. I can’t help but wonder if it released a year too soon, because it’s not a hugely known game. Long before I was doing retro game reviews, it was easy to notice that a handful of NES games came up as “hidden gems” more than others. Guardian Legend. Adventure of Lolo. Little Nemo the Dream Master. Those games come up so often it’s safe to say they’re not really “hidden” gems. They’re literally famous. Kid Niki doesn’t come up as much as those, so it still has that “forgotten” shine to it, but when it does come up, people tend to LOVE it. And I don’t get it, because this is a rough, borderline broken game. What do I mean? See this picture:
I survived that full-on contact with the enemy and walked right on past them.
Well, in this pic, they actually walked past me, but I did test it with me moving past them too.
Now here’s the same location, same enemies, but I’m a little bit further to the left when contact was made. Like a half step to the left. It killed me.
Here’s me, well away from the sprites of the projectiles thrown by the fifth boss, dying anyway.
Or how about having your forward momentum halted mid-jump? It happens constantly, I assume a byproduct of sloppy coding to the scrolling. In this clip, I’m holding left the entire time, but I just hit a wall that stops me from moving forward. You can see when I jump back to the platform, it doesn’t happen again. However, when I rewind to the original jump, the invisible wall stops me again. I’ve never seen anything like this in a game before.
And that even happens when you’re running along the ground. It only happens for a split second, but it absolutely does take away from the experience. You can see it happen in this clip:
It’s a damn shame that Kid Niki on the NES is so badly coded, because a lot of the charm of the coin-op did carry over. The well done graphics? Sometimes. Like, this looks pretty good:
This? Not so good. In fact, yikes!
The sprites are fine, but the setting really is just nothing. It’s like I suddenly fell into an Atari 2600 game. Now mind you, the very next screen over has a very impressive looking statue.
That looks great, especially for the time! I don’t know what happened to those backgrounds. I’d swear that’s a placeholder that they ran out of time for. And I know they’re capable of better, because some of the areas are REALLY close to the arcade. Take a look at this, and by the way, I have a white uniform on in the NES pic because of a power-up:
Arcade
NES
That’s pretty dang close, right? Now, gameplay is king and the NO! I’m going to be giving the NES version of Kid Niki has nothing to do with a small section of one level looking like sh*t. But I can’t help but wonder if that one “oh my God, what the f*ck?” section is indicative of a rushed game. Whoever coded this seemed satisfied with the sword attack and neglected several other areas. There’s no excuse for a game where mountains look that good to have a section of the game that looks like this:
BTW I’m running in place there. It’s one of those invisible walls.
The only aspect of Kid Niki’s home port that’s outstanding is the sword mechanic. It works better than in the coin-op since you can turn around mid-air and attack on both sides in a single jump. But everything else about Kid Niki, right down to the act of moving, is, at best, haphazard. At worst, it’s outright broken. That’s before I even talk about the gameplay concessions that had to be made for the home port. In the coin-op, the second boss has a deceptively dangerous attack pattern that requires you to jump over him to get a clean shot off. That’s completely gone in the NES game. He’s very vulnerable from the front, and as a result, I was able to beat him in a matter of seconds.
Arcade
NES/Famicom
Again, sometimes the nerfing works to the game’s benefit. The last level is MUCH more fair, and that’s a good thing. The random bubbles are slowed down just enough to make them an exciting obstacle to dodge while you fight the final boss. If this had more consistent collision detection, for all its problems, I would have given it a YES! without a second thought. The combat is that satisfying and the bosses, wimpy as they are compared to the coin-op, are still fun and unique. They even added some bonus stages into the game. Okay, so they’re hidden in arbitrary spots and I have no idea how anyone ever found them, but it’s the thought that counts.
Even the bonus stages aren’t free passes. Some of the eggs are whammies that spawn these creepy-ass bugs, and some give you extra lives.
But I can’t get over how badly developed this port is. It really feels like no bug testing was done. It’s the total lack of consistency that frustrates me. Some things can kill you when they’re not even close. Other things that should kill you, hey, sometimes you can just pass safely right through them. Horrible. I can totally understand why Kid Niki found itself as one of those beloved hidden gems. I wouldn’t consider the twirly sword attack to be equally as good as, say, Simon Belmont’s whip. But it’s not too far removed from it, either. If this had been a game I played early in my life, I don’t think I would have noticed all the glitches and momentum stoppages, or if I did, I wouldn’t have cared. But if the NES version of Kid Niki were to be in a modern collection, I would actually suggest they give it a tune-up. There’s a good game here, but I don’t think Kid Niki on the Famicom got the time or care it deserved in development. Is it worth fixing? Yep. Will it be? Probably not. Verdict: NO! And no bonus value would be added for having both the US and Japanese ROMs.
Ganso!! Yancha-Maru Platform: Game Boy Released July 11, 1991 Developed by Tamtex Published by Irem Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE
You have to break blocks a lot in the Game Boy title. I wish it had a nicer crunch to it.
This Japanese exclusive first sequel to Kid Niki, released on my 2nd birthday, comes from the developers of the disastrous sequel to Kung-Fu, Spartan X2 for the Famicom. That was one of the worst games I’ve ever reviewed (it’s second from the bottom in Kung Fu Master: The Definitive Review), so my expectations for this were just about as low as you can get. I was worried for nothing, as Ganso!! Yancha-Maru is a genuinely solid little Game Boy action game that Americans absolutely should have gotten. It has a bigger cast of basic enemies and a much bigger emphasis on platforming than the previous game, but retains Katana Twirly’s primary attack. Unlike Kid Niki, navigation matters a great deal here, especially in the later half of the game, when retracting/expanding platforms and spinning platforms are introduced.
The little two block platforms above me shift from horizontal to vertical.
Despite the smaller screen size, the level design emerges as a genuine highlight. Levels might even split into upper and lower pathways, one of which will have more enemies than the other. Or maybe you’ll encounter a section that requires fast reflexes to smash through blocks before a platform underneath you retracts. All this while the game keeps a fairly consistent clip of combat. None of the collision problems that plagued the NES game get in the way here. Hell, three out of the four bosses are an improvement even though the “deflected sword” mechanic is gone. That’s a remarkable achievement! The first boss can be cheesed in just a matter of seconds, but future bosses require you to face their attack patterns and score hits when you can. I can’t stress enough: this is a pretty well done game.
The third boss drops these rocks that you have to kill, then it only allows you to score one hit per pass.
Unlike the previous Kid Niki coin-op and its NES port, Ganso!! Yancha-Maru is a pretty easy game. I only died three times, once to a boss, and twice to pits. The items from the previous game return here, but on the Game Boy, I found the projectile had a very limited usefulness. How limited? ONCE per a full run through the game, so twice overall, did I actually use the projectile to kill an enemy on the other side of the screen. The playfield is just too small for it to be effective, and even when you hold it, the enemies are usually right next to you and would die from the sword anyway. They probably should have come up with something else. There’s some weird decisions, like the “B” item you collect that unlocks the end of stage “BONUS ROOM” could have been hidden in a block, but instead it just floats onto the screen when you reach the end of a level. It’s basically automatic to get.
Those clouds with faces all shoot projectiles upward.
Admittedly, I lost interest in clearing every block or going for every hidden room. The blocks take too long to crumble and don’t offer a satisfying enough crunch to justify slowing the game down as much as I did in the early levels. But the combat more than makes up for it, and when the blocks are utilized as part of the challenge instead of something to smash for fun, it’s usually well done. Ganso!! Yancha-Maru isn’t a masterpiece by any means. It’s just a good, solid action game that probably could have found an audience in the United States. I’m going to guess the NES Kid Niki didn’t do too hot in sales, because I can’t figure out any other reason why such a quality, on-trend (at least in 1991) game would be skipped over. Probably the best thing I could say about the Game Boy version of Kid Niki: it was at this point I realized doing this Definitive Review wasn’t a waste of time. There’s SOMETHING here. See, everything about July 11 is awesome! Verdict: YES! $5 in value added to Kid Niki: Radical Collection
Kaiketsu Yancha Maru 2: Karakuri Land Platform: Famicom Released August 30, 1991 Developed by Irem Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Kid Niki 2 has an overworld map, but it doesn’t benefit from it. This is the level you’re placed onto for the map at the start of a new game, and it’s themed around everything being miniaturized. That’s a mid-game trope, and makes ZERO sense for an opening level. It doesn’t have to be the starting point, but who is going to click anything else? Totally nonsensical design. I know people liked Super Mario 3 but not every game requires an overworld map.
The first of two Famicom-exclusive sequels to Kid Niki, Yancha Maru 2 gives the graphics a super-deformed makeover and adds a slew of new abilities. In addition to now being able to swing your sword above or do a downward strike while jumping, you can find items that grant you the ability to temporarily transform into three animals. While transforming into an elephant was an idea decades ahead of its time, I didn’t really find a use for it. On the other hand, there’s plenty of times I had to use the ability to transform into a frog or a hawk to navigate levels. You can’t attack with either and both come with major control issues. The frog moves too loosely and the hawk flies too heavily, but they’re used sparingly to great effect. Since there’s a few areas where they’re necessary to make progress, I sort of think they shouldn’t take points to use, especially since I didn’t want to be them when I didn’t have to be, but otherwise, it’s a nice idea that works wonderfully.
The frog can jump up and reach that extra life, or extra-life like thing.
Now here’s the bad news: even though the animation for the twirly sword attack is basically unchanged, poor sound design and tacky enemy sprites make it feel flimsy and lightweight here. That nice crunchiness to it is gone. Now it’s safe to say Kid Niki 2 is much more platforming-focused than the previous NES game, but there’s still a wide variety of enemies and bosses. It’s just such a shame that it’s no longer fun to fight basic baddies anymore. Some of the designs are downright silly, like miniature enemies in the first stage in the game, which made me giggle with embarrassment. The bosses are fairly generic too.
This is grasping at straws for boss ideas.
And the sequel is a MUCH easier game. Not quite as easy as the Game Boy title, but pretty easy. It’ll take you maybe twenty-to-thirty minutes to finish and offers zero replay value because it’s just kind of bland, but in a way that’s at least worth a look once. For the first time, Kid Niki offers hit points to start every level, which allowed me to cheese nearly every boss in the game. I won most boss fights with a single hit point left, but the fights themselves lasted around ten seconds. I can’t remember a single basic enemy that posed a threat. The only time I died was in the “maze” level, and my death came via lethal moving blocks. When tiny, half-the-size-of-you moving blocks are a bigger threat than even the last boss, the game might have a big problem.
The final level is a brief boss rush made up of a few bosses from the first game, including Death Breath, seen here.
And yet, I didn’t get bored in my first run through Kid Niki 2. Oh, I was ready to be done about a minute into my second playthrough. Again, once you finish this, it has nothing left to offer. So, I guess I understand why this wasn’t released as Kid Niki 2 in America. See though, that’s the beauty of a retro collection. Yancha Maru 2 can’t really stand on its own, unless you can get it for $2, which is the value I’m giving it. But as a +1 for a retro set? Yeah, it’s going to be fine. The coin-op and Game Boy title together will justify the set’s existence, and this is a nice little bonus. I don’t know why they didn’t do better with the combat, which was the main thing Kid Niki had going for it, but the level design is fine and the animal power-ups are cool.
You have to whack bells with your sword to gain power-up points and free-lives. As you can see, the sword sprite is basically unchanged, and that’s the right call. The next sequel didn’t make that call, and it just plain doesn’t feel like a Kid Niki sequel because of it. And I have no idea if that’s supposed to be real Hershey product placement or not.
There’s a couple other power-ups, including the ability to fire a large energy wave that you will need to use a couple times and an overpowered shield that wrecks the already easy to fight baddies. I’m not going to argue that Kid Niki 2 is a lost treasure or that Americans missed out on a big game. This is pretty dang bland, but it controls fine, has decent level design, and doesn’t require a massive time investment to experience. Games can be bland and still be a net gain, in the right circumstances. Retro collections need games like Kid Niki 2. Little twenty-to-thirty minute time wasters that aren’t the main attraction, but worth a look nonetheless. Verdict: YES! $2 in value added to Kid Niki: Radical Collection
Kaiketsu Yancha Maru 3: Taiketsu! Zouringen Platform: Famicom Released March 30, 1993 Developed by Micronics Published by Irem Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Spoiler: Dr. Wily is the last boss. Okay, it’s NOT Dr. Wily and this is not Mega Man, but it’s trying so desperately to be. It’s really sad, actually. It’s so flagrantly, shamelessly copying the gameplay that it kind of feels a little childish.
Wow. Okay, so, this is a Kid Niki sequel in name only, and a game you might have already played. This is more famous for being a bootleg, specifically a ROM hacked bootleg called Super Mario 14. It’s a genuinely baffling choice to turn this into a Mario hack when it’s a direct rip off of Mega Man. I really wasn’t being sarcastic in the above picture. This wants to be Mega Man with some lite ninja-like flipping, and it is, but in a way that fails like few games have ever failed. Katana Twirly is dead, and in his place is a dude with a stick who fires a little sonic energy wave at enemies, making this a platform-shooter, just like Mega Man. The bosses are mostly fought in basic, square-shaped chambers, just like Mega Man, and have attack patterns just like Mega Man’s bosses. Here’s some examples: Fire Man, Water Man, Wood Man, and, uh, Music Tornado Man, I guess? The last one shoots music notes but also turns into a tornado.
Pathetic! PA-THETIC! And it’s not even a good rip-off. This is the Asylum version of a Mega Man game: same premise, but none of the good parts. The #1 thing that made Mega Man famous and stick out from countless hop ‘n pop games, IE stealing items from bosses? Kid Niki 3 doesn’t do that. Instead, the main hook is it rips off the pogo-stick from DuckTales along with the worst wall jump I’ve experienced in quite a while. You have to sword-strike the wall, then jump, but it’s really sluggish. All the movement is clunky, and the frame rate is REALLY bad. The game feels like it’s constantly chugging, which really makes no sense. The graphics and sound are just not good enough to justify how badly the game performs from a technical point of view.
It’s not going to be a total wash, either. There’s moments I would have been inclined to like, like this maze based around these tracks. There’s some good ideas in here, but they’re dead on arrival with these controls and combat design.
Yancha Maru 3 is made by notorious NES developer Micronics, who made such “classics” as Super Pitfall! and the NES ports of 1942, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Ikari Warriors, and more. It explains a lot, because this is really badly made. The level design is almost entirely based around the wall jump, but in a way where it’s deliberately barely working at all because that would be more challenging. It’s certainly not intuitive, even though it should be. The wall-jump is a fixed jump that gives you the same distance every time. Yet, I never got a feel for it. It wasn’t ninja-like, that’s for sure. It’s like the polar opposite of 2024 NES indie Storied Sword, which had one of the greatest 8-bit wall jumps ever. When you take away the responsiveness, you get Kid Niki 3, where even late in the game, I found myself needing multiple attempts to do even the most basic wall jump sequences. My body’s responsiveness is suspect these days, so I had to have the kids test it to make sure it wasn’t me. They couldn’t get a feel for it either.
Fittingly, the best aspects of Kid Niki 3 are the ones that aren’t a Mega Man rip-off. The main progression is done by finding keys to open locked doors. It’s not the worst idea, and thankfully there’s only a couple spots where you have to travel far away from a locked door. But with the poor physics and uninspired, lightweight shooting combat, it doesn’t matter because it’s just not a very fun game to play. Sometimes, the levels would have risen to the level of good IF the mechanics had been faster paced and more responsive. There’s set-pieces in Kid Niki 3, including paddling a boat up a waterfall that work as intended.
The frustrating thing is, Kid Niki 3 does the type stuff you want a game to do: break up the core gameplay with fresh-but-suitable one-off mechanics. Like paddling this boat up a waterfall. That’s fine! It works as a set-piece. This part is okay, and it’s welcome because the core gameplay is so boring that anything is better in comparison.
But then there’s some of the worst swimming mechanics on God’s Green Earth and horribly scaled boss fights. Seriously, the first boss was so much harder than any of the bosses that followed except the very last one. The levels themselves have a difficulty curve that resembles a heart monitor. It occurs to me that Micronics seems to understand what goes into a game, but not the why part. There’s no other way to explain how bad the game scales, or controls, or why the basic enemies just aren’t fun to face-off against. It’s like they played Mega Man games and enjoyed Mega Man games, but never asked themselves why they were having so much fun. So something like this:
Works pretty good, because it’s hard to screw up the classic circular platform. Hell, that chained platform to the left of me is a great idea. You have to whack it with your stick to get it moving. But then you have this game’s version of the Sniper Joes from Mega Man, and they have a quirky sprite of a mouse hiding in a freezer with a tommy gun. Adorkable, except you can’t kill them, or at least, I was never able to. Once you realize that, and players are just avoiding them, well the charm isn’t just lowered, but lost altogether. Do you know why *I* think Mega Man games lasted through the ages? It’s not just the bosses. Every game has bosses, and in the case of Mega Man games, especially on the NES, most of them are beaten in just a couple seconds, if that, assuming you have the right weapon. No, I think the secret sauce with Mega Is that the combat is always so goddamned satisfying that you want to shoot everything you can. It’s rare in those games that avoiding enemies is preferable. Enemies have nice sound design and a cathartic crunching pop when you finally kill them. This game has none of that.
I think that’s why Kaiketsu Yancha Maru 3 felt like such a childish effort at copying Mega Man. It does everything that Mega Man does, only with none of the stuff that made Mega Man stand out in the first place, in basically every single aspect, mechanically and aesthetically The graphics are ugly, especially the character sprites. The gameplay is choppy. The controls are unresponsive. The settings are boring. The sound design is lacking entirely. It made me appreciate how Mega Man games manage to be greater than the sum of their highly polished parts. This is so much less. The previous game was bland, but bland within the acceptable parameters of decency. This is bland to the point of exhausting. Even if the mechanics had been perfect, I still think it would have gotten a NO! Kid Niki 3 is a game based around dull level design, boring settings, and derivative gameplay that’s occasionally interrupted by an idea so good that you’ll wish it was in a better game.
This is a post-SNES release, too. Look how damn bland that looks. And it really is. There’s a couple moments that are handled cleverly, but for the most part, level layouts are just arbitrary and ho-hum. I still say that the early SNES era was also a secret golden age for the NES/Famicom, but this is not an example of that.
I have no idea why Irem agreed to allow Micronics of all studios to make a sequel to Kid Niki in the first place, but why make it nothing at all like Kid Niki? Presumably, a franchise that lasts long enough to get a fourth new game like this has to be pretty successful on some level, right? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the series made it to this game being commissioned based entirely on the satisfying Katana Twirly mechanics. So why the hell would you do something as foolhardy as removing that attack entirely? Because that’s ALL Kid Niki really had going for it. I assume they figured if Doki Doki Panic can be repackaged as Super Mario Bros. 2 and still be a runaway success, they could do something similar with Kid Niki. That makes no sense, though, because they allowed Mario to be different right out of the starting gate. As the second game, really it just showed that Mario could be anything. Same with Zelda II, for that matter. But with Kid Niki, they had multiple games that established what the combat should look like. Not that keeping it would make a difference in this game. This has so many more problems. What irks me is Irem allowed a perfectly good B-list franchise to be killed off here, in a game that doesn’t resemble the franchise. It would be like if the Mario franchise died after Mario is Missing was released. Verdict: NO!
FINAL TOTAL
YES!: 3 NO!: 2 Total Game Value: $12 Bonus Value: $1 Projected Price: $19.99 to $29.99 Final Value with Fully Loaded Emulator/Bonuses: $23
Kid Niki: Radical Collection did make it over the low-end price hurdle, but it’s going to be close. Anything less than the $10 bonus that comes with a fully-loaded emulator and it’s unlikely that including basic bonus features like boxes, instruction books, or ads would make up the missing value. It would require extensive, Digital Eclipse-like behind the scenes interviews, and Kid Niki isn’t ever going to get THAT kind of collection. But I’m not worried about the emulator. ININ proved to me with their IGC-approved Parasol Stars release they’re more than capable of going all-out with that. The same emulator used in that release wins Kid Niki: Radical Collection a YES! But they also can’t lose a single YES! game except maybe Kid Niki 2. Drop the Game Boy title from the lineup? There’s close to zero chance the bonus features can make up for the missing $5. Or if they use the basic Arcade Archives style emulator for the coin-op, that game drops to a NO! and the set can’t win. Since I know they’re reading, hey ININ gang, you should do this set, but you absolutely cannot half-ass it. You need to have cheating options up the wazoo. You need extra features, and you need a sick emulator. But I have faith in you.
Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released March, 1994 Directed by Genyo Takeda and Makoto Wada Developed by Nintendo NO MODERN RELEASE
It took me this long, roughly two minutes into starting a new game, to realize I was not going to be having any fun. While this isn’t REALLY a random encounter into a mini-dungeon, it’s structured to make you think it is. It’s the first of many terrible ideas in this terrible, terrible game.
Oh my God. Okay, so the first StarTropics isn’t exactly a masterpiece. After all, I called it “the absolute stupidest good game ever made” so it’s not like I was expecting to be blown away by a sequel. I didn’t even want the clunky mechanics to be fixed. I got used to them, and there’s basically no game like the first StarTropics. I didn’t mind awkwardly hopping across tiles or having too stiff of movement and rigid turning. At least it played completely uniquely. I would have settled for a glorified expansion pack with more levels, bosses, and less busy work. Well, they did try to fix the mechanics, and the end result is Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II is the embodiment of the “broke, or made better?” joke from the Simpsons. This might be the worst Nintendo-developed game ever made. At the very least, I have to believe it’s their worst sequel, and I do mean EVER. I hope so, at least. I mean, how could they have ever done worse than this?
This got me all excited thinking Zoda’s Revenge would take a break and let me ride the Haunted Mansion, but nope.
I bought StarTropics II for Virtual Console ten years ago and I never finished it. I’m not even sure I beat the Egypt stage, which is only the second level. I had no desire to go on, because everything I enjoyed about the first game is gone here. Just gone-gone, and other aspects that I didn’t enjoy so much have been made worse. The satisfying yo-yo combat? Gone, replaced with generic throwing weapons that have no speed or range. As if that’s not bad enough, the enemies seem to have had their sponginess bumped-up. Maybe it just feels like it because the combat is so much slower. Whatever the reason, the combat is NEVER fun in StarTropics II. It’s a slog. Really boring boss fights too, as none of them have the personality of the original game’s bosses.
F*cking end me.
The tile-based jumping is also gone. In this game, you can just walk across the tiles. They tried to give the level design a greater sense of exploration, including more levels with multiple floors, like in Zelda games. Except it just didn’t work for me because the themes, enemies, and mechanics aren’t as fun. Like, people who are playing a sequel presumably liked the first game, right? So why is the tile triggering mechanic from the first game no longer here? Were people complaining about that? Because if people are complaining about a primary gameplay mechanic, maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do a sequel at all. In Zoda’s Revenge, when a block is a switch, it blinks when you walk on it, letting you know that you have to hop on it. If it’s supposed to help open a door or a chest, it’ll make a question mark ball appear instead of leaving a footprint on the tile and causing a button to rise up somewhere else. It’s such a massive downgrade that it almost feels like the first game’s way of doing the tiles and switches is the updated sequel-like way of handling it.
The developers did attempt to change-up the combat by giving you a psychic lightning ball. A couple enemies, including the ones pictured above, can be harmed only by it. But, while you can fire it faster, until you get the final upgrade late in the game, it’s limited in range just like the throwing weapons. Also, the wide variety of exotic special items from the first game are gone here, and the one that makes a return appearance has its range also limited. God forbid anyone have any fun with this game.
The exotic tropical setting? That’s gone too, at least until the final level which is just the exact same cave that made up the first level from the original game. Literally the same map and everything. The rest of the game has a time travel theme where you meet such famous historic figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Cleopatra, Sherlock Holmes, and King Arthur. Wait, what? And, like so many time travel-themed games, it doesn’t really matter because the action segments do such a poor job of making you believe you’re in a different time period, especially when so many enemies keep showing up in each era. You’re looking for magical Tetris blocks, and, SPOILER, when you beat the game, the alien kids you rescued in the first game are reunited with their father, then peace-out and leave for their home planet without saying goodbye to the villagers who have taken care of them for the last year. Little pointy-eared twerps. Not that I cared or anything but, jeez, what a downer of an ending.
NOTE: MICA AND THE UNGRATEFUL ALIEN TWERPS DIED ON THE WAY BACK TO THEIR HOME PLANET!
But what really sucks about StarTropics II is they completely wrecked the already janky movement physics. They tried to smooth out the stiffness, but all they did was make it easier to walk into enemies. Since ranged weapons don’t show up until the very end, this is a big problem. You can move while you jump now as well, but that REALLY crashes the gameplay. If not for the ability to rewind, I would have certainly eaten a game over from botching even the most basic jumps over pits. Or, if not that, accidentally jumping into pits while fighting enemies and bosses.
The differences in elevation actually create this really unintuitive optical illusion for jumping. It’s hard to explain but it feels like they didn’t properly express how high you are and what that means for the rest of the room.
You see, height matters a lot in StarTropics II for both platforming and enemy attack patterns. Some rooms have elevated platforms, and many enemies and even at least one boss battle require you to jump to damage them. That would be fine with the old StarTropics I physics, where you can’t jump forward unless you’re jumping to a tile or across a pit. In StarTropics II, you can move while you jump anywhere, but you can’t aim at them without also moving. That’s kind of a problem when you surround the player with instakill pits or water, and I died a ton from trying to aim at enemies with my short-range weapons and accidentally falling to my death. In exchange for all that, you can move diagonally now. Oooh, diagonal.
A whopping three boss fights take place on these automatic movement arrows. These specific ones move really fast, and your attack sprite just barely reaches the center of the screen where the boss is. The end result is one of the very worst boss fights in any Nintendo-developed game.
To make matters even worse, with the new movement style comes a much heavier emphasis on platforming. I’m not the biggest fan of top-down platforming in general, and that’s assuming the game controls well. StarTropics II, you know, doesn’t. Since jumping and collision detection is so hard to judge in Zoda’s Revenge, leaning into obstacles based around jumping with moving platforms or disappearing platforms was a recipe for disaster. Oh, and sometimes the ledges will have an invisible wall to stop you from simply walking off the side and to your death, but sometimes it doesn’t. The original StarTropics had some timing-based stuff like hopping over knives sticking out of the ground or cannonballs, but it feels like they tailored the challenge to the limitations of the physics. With Zoda’s Revenge, I get the impression they eventually just sort of shrugged and said “meh, good enough” even though it wasn’t.
It really feels like I cleared it but whatever.
As a result of all the changes, Zoda’s Revenge doesn’t really feel like a sequel so much as a really bad rip-off of StarTropics made by a completely different team. That’s sad, because it’s from the same director and artists. It’s COMPLETELY lacking in charm, and even the busy work is worse than ever. I’m pretty sure the reason I quit the first time was because a gigantic blind maze happens in the middle of the Egypt level. You have to climb these towers to get a peak of the layout, but the actual navigating has to be done without seeing the walls. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad if they don’t overdo it. But then it keeps going and refuses to stop. The one improvement over the original: you no longer have to talk to everyone to open up the actual levels. I guess they were as bored with that as I was.
Also that monkey is later revealed to be Merlin the wizard. I wish I was joking.
So the enemies are dull, the boss fights are charmless, the movement parameters are all screwed up, there’s too many basic square-shaped rooms with no frills in them, the level structure is bad, and the time travel theme is a total bust. It can’t get any worse, right? I mean, it’s not like right before the big final climax, there’s a full-roster boss rush, RIGHT? Of course there is.
At least now you have a ranged weapon for them. The last one isn’t a previous boss but rather Zoda’s head lice. Oh, but it’s evil head lice that unlocks the final battle.
For all of its many, many problems, at least StarTropics felt like it came from a place of inspiration. Zoda’s Revenge doesn’t. Zoda’s Revenge was the final NES-exclusive game developed by Nintendo. Now I’ve played several post-SNES releases for the NES that were so good that I’ve suggested the NES had a secret golden age that nobody talks about. This includes a decent Flintstones game and an even better sequel, a genuinely underrated Jetsons game, a Wacky Races platformer that should make for an excellent children’s game, a DuckTales sequel that I feel easily tops the original and might be the most underrated NES game ever, the long awaited NES port of Bonk’s Adventure, and the third and best Adventure Island game. Other companies weren’t phoning-in the NES’ swan song, so it’s just such a heartbreaker that the series finale of the NES that was made by Nintendo themselves (I’m not counting Wario Woods since that was also on the SNES) sucks so very, very much.
The last form of Zoda, who now looks more like Zorak from Space Ghost, also looks like he’s taking a wiz in the middle of our battle to the death.
It feels like someone at Nintendo said “there’s still millions of NES owners in America who would buy new software for it instead of SNES games. Who wants to make the last original NES game?” and everyone said “NOT IT!” until Genyo Takeda was the only one left. This was HIS last directed game, by the way. He’s the genius behind Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! and he also made the original StarTropics. The first StarTropics was created to appeal to American gamers and never got a global release until Virtual Console came around. Hell, it’s still never gotten ANY Japanese release to this very day, even via Switch Online. Because the Macguffins are Tetris blocks and the final cinematic involves the chief of C-Island assembling them via playing Tetris, I’m guessing they can’t re-release this on Switch Online. That’s fine, by the way, because this is NOT a sequel to StarTropics. It’s barely a shadow of it. It’s fitting that the ending of Zoda’s Revenge is such a downer. It’s art imitating life. Or, wait, is it the other way around? Verdict: NO!
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters Platform: Game Boy First Released November, 1991 Designed by Masafumi Sakashita Developed by Nintendo and Tose Co., Ltd UPDATE: Now Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Déjà vu.
Alright, let’s make this one go quickly. I’m not really THAT interested in the sequel to Kid Icarus. I’m only doing this because of a niggling little voice in my head asking how the f*ck Kid Icarus as a gaming franchise was in the same boat as Metroid to the point that they were basically identical twins for the first, oh, eight years of their existence. I know that’s stating the obvious, but when you lay out the comparisons, it’s actually jaw-dropping.
Both released in the United States in the Summer of 1987.
Nintendo opted to convert the save systems of the Famicom Disk System versions to a new password back-up system even though they had perfected the battery-backup format for Legend of Zelda (arguably their triplet since it was an FDS game released in 1986 which also debuted in the US in the Summer of 1987, but it had a different development team).
And both went on to get underwhelming Game Boy sequels made by literally the same lead designer, Masafumi Sakashita that fixed some problems but ended up much more bland than the original, as if they were afraid to experiment too much.
Kiss the memorable enemy sprites of the first game good bye. Myths’ enemy sprites suck. These things look like malicious portable electric fans.
It’s like the Kennedy/Lincoln comparison of Nintendo, only, you know, real. But Metroid went on to be one of the biggest franchises in Nintendo’s lineup while Kid Icarus apparently wandered off into the woods, never to be seen again. Oh, they say it had a game on 3DS but if it had basically no gameplay connection to Kid Icarus, is it really a sequel to Kid Icarus or a completely new game that just uses the name that was suddenly relevant again because Pit was in Super Smash Bros. You know, the famous fighting game franchise directed by the guy who did the Kid Icarus revival? I don’t really care if the 3DS game is good or not (I couldn’t play it without risking a live reenactment of the stoner film Idle Hands) because the actual Kid Icarus is just gone, like StarTropics, Wave Race, or Gyromite or modern stuff like Chibi Robo or Nintendogs. If I had to guess why, I’d say maybe Nintendo just realized Kid Icarus was never that good.
I thought the bosses of Kid Icarus were lame, but I’ll take them over these bosses that are so spongy and repetitive that all five boss battles become boring.
Kid Icarus on Game Boy is a much closer remake of the original than Return of Samus was for Metroid. If there was anything to salvage from Kid Icarus, this was the chance. And there are some improvements. There’s no falling deaths in this game, it controls MUCH better, and there’s also a much greater emphasis on exploration. The hammers that were only good for freeing NPCs to help you fight bosses now can uncover hidden doors. That’s a great idea. Zelda is basically based around how awesome hidden doors are. Well, except the stuff you uncover in Zelda helps you, and some of it is even essential to finishing the game. That’s not true of Kid Icarus GB, where I’m not sure I found a single hidden room that was actually worth seeking out.
The only hidden items of substance are keys that allow you to go back to already-visited rooms. This is another idea that should have been killed on the drawing board. Nearly every major risk/reward factor of the original game didn’t carry-over to the sequel. This isn’t specifically why the game died a miserable death, but the autopsy certainly lists it as contributing factor.
Most, if not all, of the hidden rooms I found offered a hot-spring to refill your life. That would have been swell, but they also added life drops, including hiding them in the fixtures you smash to reveal the doors to the hot springs. So in order to uncover a thing that refills your life, you have to collect things that refill your life. It made me realize how well done the original game’s damage/healing system was and how destructive just adding the ability to find health refills sitting around is. Hell, at one point the game teased that there was a hidden door at the entrance to the level I was on, so I jumped down to the beginning of the stage and found out that the hidden door was, you guessed it, a life refill. Well, that was totally worth starting the level over again.
I was confused at first by the level design, because the wrap-around playfield from the original game returns for the vertical stages, except now the playfield is wider than the screen is, so instead of walking through one edge of the screen and popping out the other side, you now scroll the screen like a cylinder. I never quite adapted to it, either. It was still disorienting right up until I walked through the final door of the final vertical stage.
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters is one of the strangest cases of a failed sequel I’ve ever seen. It retains the three power-ups (with the same life-based requirements) and the exact level formula of the first game. Three vertical levels and a dungeon, then three side-scrolling stages and a dungeon, then three more vertical stages and a dungeon. The only change to the formula is that the shmup finale is replaced with an actual platforming level that features free-roaming flight. That part certainly works better and the stage is probably the highlight of the game because it’s the only part that doesn’t feel like it’s made by a game designer who keeps checking their watch. Even if, when you stop and think about it, it’s functionally identical to a swimming level in a Mario game. Pump a button to stay buoyant while you navigate tight squeezes. Okay, so you’re shooting arrows instead of fireballs, but it’s the same basic concept.
Whatever. At least the level design is okay here.
But while the finale might be tolerable, at least before you take on the slow, clunky final boss fight, nothing that happens before that final stage is worth anything. NONE of the vertical levels offer the same thrills as the highlights of the NES game’s climbing sequences. It’s not just because the stakes are removed, either. They’re just not that well designed. I thought Kid Icarus had some damn elegant enemy placement, especially considering the nightmarish development cycle. The Game Boy title’s enemies often feel arbitrary. Like “well, we have to put SOMETHING here” without having any logic of how that something relates to the landscape. They also somehow made the moving platforming even slower and more miserable to utilize.
The Grim Reapers are significantly less threatening this time around.
And then there’s the side-scrolling levels, which are a complete disaster because they’re completely spammed with doors to explore. Even if you pretend there are no hidden doors, by the mid-point of the game, Kid Icarus is so completely bloated with shops, enemy chambers, test chambers, arrow upgrades, and assorted other doors that the game has no flow to it at all. When the rooms continuously offer the same stuff, that gets boring. “Just don’t go into the rooms!” But nobody is going to do that. It’s up to the designers to assure that the pace and spacing of their game isn’t interrupted by useless gameplay stoppages. You can’t put that sh*t on players. Even if they had given an actual reason to go inside every single room, I don’t want level design where the main stage has a door every few seconds. The gameplay I’m actually here for isn’t going to be inside them.
This boss looks fantastic, but it’s AWFUL. It pokes its head out for a second or two, then retracts and does the same attack pattern with no variation until one of you dies.
For all of its many, MANY problems, I was never bored with Kid Icarus on the NES, at least until the final stage. Frustrated? Sure. Annoyed? Of course. But never bored. I was SO BORED playing Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters. Even the dungeons were complete letdowns. The only reason I really played the Game Boy game was to experience three more dungeons, but these ones were smaller in scope and much easier to navigate, with no real sense that they’re trying to trick you into getting lost. In the NES game, you might have to climb down a ladder, then fall to the side in order to continue towards the boss. That idea is removed completely. They never even really feel maze-like. They feel slapped-together, because they probably are. Kid Icarus often had the vibe of a game that nobody had confidence in, but this sequel is so much worse because it just doesn’t feel like it comes from a place of inspiration. It feels like Nintendo poking Kid Icarus with a stick to see if it’s really dead, and it is.
It really doesn’t help that, by the time I reached the end, I was killing the Eggplant Wizards in one shot. There’s too many arrow upgrades. What’s really remarkable is those upgrades don’t make the bosses any less spongy. I’m shuddering thinking about “what if I hadn’t gotten those?” I’d probably still be fighting the second and third bosses. Oh, and you’ll note the items work in the dungeons this time.
Now, in fairness, this wasn’t Kid Icarus’ shot at redemption any more than Return of Samus was for Metroid. The redemption would have been an SNES game made by a team that was bound and determined to turn Kid Icarus into a flagship franchise. That’s what Super Metroid was, and that series has been a pretty damn big deal ever since. I said it was unfair, but if I had been a decision maker at Nintendo and had to do a Sophie’s Choice between these two, I’d have chosen Metroid as well. The truth is, Kid Icarus’ vertical gameplay was already topped by Super Mario Bros. 2, and the shooting mechanics with a colorful cast of enemies was topped by Metroid itself, and even the potential for a game based around flying was taken over by Kirby. What really is left for Kid Icarus? The dungeons? That’s what Zelda is for. The humor that the original designer didn’t even want in the first place? Hell, that could be any Nintendo game.
The boss chambers are bigger than the screen. Don’t you just LOVE fighting super-spongy bosses who make the fight last even longer by weaving in and out of the visible playfield. No? Yeah, me neither.
It kind of hit me while making this review that Kid Icarus is just a hodgepodge of gameplay concepts that Nintendo already was building other games heavily around. Everything bad about Kid Icarus WAS improved. It just wasn’t done in a Kid Icarus game. So, my new theory is that Kid Icarus went to video game heaven because it just didn’t offer anything that you couldn’t already get elsewhere from Nintendo. Why put the resources into rescuing a franchise whose core gameplay is already found in more viable titles? The only reason to even try would be if the game’s main reputation is anything but being “the janky one.” But even fans of Kid Icarus will concede that, among famous Nintendo-developed games, it’s “the janky one.” That’s why it died, and that’s why the 3DS game was completely different. Because it kind of had to be, because Kid Icarus as a concept was already dead and forgotten before I was even born. It’s the video game equivalent of an organ donor. Of Myths and Monsters isn’t a sequel. It’s a eulogy for a potential series that died, but in doing so, it might have saved others just by providing a road map of what not to do. Verdict: NO!
Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review is how I want to celebrate my site’s birthday AND my actual 36th birthday, which is on July 11. There’s seventy-six brand new reviews in this feature. Even the games I’ve already previously covered, I replayed and wrote new reviews of them just for this. Completing this feature took nearly three months and required hundreds of hours of gameplay, writing, replays, and editing. This isn’t my job, but it is work. I don’t want to ever try to make money off this stuff, so if you want to show your support, kick some cash to your closest food bank. If you’re an American, you can locate YOUR local food bank by using the resource at Feeding America. Everyone has to eat, right? I’m a big fan of the Epilepsy Foundation and Direct Relief as well. I’m also partnered with the good folks at AbleToPlay, who are creating a database for game accessibility needs. That’s all! I hope everyone enjoys my Definitive Review of Konami’s shoot ’em up library!
During the final Nintendo Direct that was dedicated to the original Switch, there was a surprise announcement from Konami: a new Gradius collection is coming this August. Gradius Origins will feature the first three Gradius games, Salamander 1 & 2, and a brand new game: Salamander 3. Not only that, but it’ll have every version of those games. Eighteen total ROMS, including some rarities. This sounds great, right? I thought so too, until I realized it’s only the coin-ops that are packed in the set. Gradius Origins is missing all the home ports, and plenty of other Konami arcade shmups closely related to Gradius are also not included. This is NOT the definitive Konami arcade collection, and frankly, it’s not even the definitive Gradius collection. Hell, even going by the ORIGINS name, it still leaves a lot to be desired. See, those home ports are often more playable than the coin-op originals due to them, you know, being designed for fun and not to swallow quarters.
(LEFT: Space Invaders by Taito. RIGHT: Space King by Konami) Like so many other companies that are prominent in gaming today, Konami got their start straight-up stealing the work of other people. For the last seven years, I’ve been advocating that gamers drop the word “clone” from their vocabulary, because the term has lost all meaning. If you want to use the word correctly, Konami’s 1979 bootleg Space King is a “clone” in the correct sense of the word, because they did not design it. They just stole it, and did a small ROM hack to it. This is what the industry was built on, by the way. A practice that started long before there were video games. Electro-mechanical games, pinball tables, and even jukeboxes were copied, component-for-component, painted to look similar or even identical, and then gained a market share by undercutting the price point of the brand names. Of course, the ones who had actual talent quickly figured out that was no way to gain a real foothold in the industry, hence why companies like Konami, Nintendo, and others eventually started making their own work.
Until Konami is willing to put out a more all-encompassing set (which is what M2 seemed to want), I’ll have to make one up. In order to future proof Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review, I’m going to do it like my McDonald’s Classic Video Games feature. For this feature, I want you to pretend that I’m reviewing a real compilation called Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection that’s being published to modern platforms. If such a set were real, with a lineup of seventy-six games, I think it would retail for $59.99 to $69.99, which means the goal is to create $60 to $70 in value. I’m setting the max value of any game at $15. At the end of this feature, I’ll mess around with various lineups to show how many different ways Konami could create better sets. Do I think this set, or any of the other configurations I’m going to come up with, will actually happen? Of course not. Sadly, the model Digital Eclipse and Atari have proven is highly effective isn’t contagious. Well, here’s the lineup for Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection.
The End (Arcade)
Scramble (Arcade)
Super Cobra (Arcade)
Pooyan (Arcade)
Time Pilot (Arcade)
Gyruss (Arcade)
Mega Zone (Arcade)
Juno First (Arcade)
Time Pilot ’84 (Arcade)
Scooter Shooter (Arcade)
TwinBee (Arcade)
Gradius (Arcade)
Finalizer (Arcade)
Jail Break (Arcade)
TwinBee (Famicom)
Knightmare (MSX)
TwinBee (MSX)
Gradius (NES)
Salamander/Life Force (Arcade)
Gradius (MSX)
Stinger (NES)
Battlantis (Arcade)
Flak Attack (Arcade)
Gradius 2 (MSX)
Life Force (NES)
Falsion (FDS)
A-Jax/Typhoon (Arcade)
Salamander (MSX)
Thunder Cross (Arcade)
Gradius II (Arcade)
Parodius (MSX)
Devastators (Arcade)
Gyruss (NES)
Gradius II (Famicom)
Nemesis 3 (MSX)
TwinBee 3 (Famicom)
Gradius III (Arcade)
Space Manbow (MSX2)
Aliens (Arcade)
Trigon/Lightning Fighters (Arcade)
Nemesis (Game Boy)
Parodius (Arcade)
TwinBee Da! (Game Boy)
Parodius (NES)
Gradius III (SNES)
Thunder Cross II (Arcade)
Bells & Whistles (Arcade)
Parodius Da! (PC Engine)
Parodius (Game Boy)
Gradius: The Interstellar Assault (Game Boy)
Crisis Force (Famicom)
Xexex aka Orius (Arcade)
Gradius (PC Engine)
Salamander (PC Engine)
Detana!! TwinBee (PC Engine)
G.I. Joe (Arcade)
Parodius (SNES)
Axelay (SNES)
Gradius II (PC Engine Super CD-ROM²)
Pop’n TwinBee (SNES)
Gokujou Parodius! (Arcade)
Gokujou Parodius (Super Famicom)
Parodius Da! (PlayStation/Saturn)
Gokujō Parodius (PlayStation/Saturn)
TwinBee Yahho! (Arcade)
Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius (Super Famicom)
Salamander 2 (Arcade)
Sexy Parodius (Arcade, PSX)
Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius: Forever with Me (PSX)
Solar Assault (Arcade)
Gradius Gaiden (PSX)
Gradius IV (Arcade)
Gradius Galaxies (GBA)
Parodius (PSP)
TwinBee Da! (PSP)
Gradius 2 (PSP)
GAME REVIEWS
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account, at least for the games themselves. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
SPECIAL NO! DISCLAIMER: If you’re a fan of bullet hells, a lot of the NO! verdicts are ones you can disregard (especially for coin-ops!). This feature is not written for fans of bullet hells, who don’t need my advice or anyone else’s on what to play. They know what they’re looking for. For everyone else, I hope you enjoy the games of Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection. The retro set we want but shall never get!
VALUE DISCLAIMER: The value I award any game in any collection, real or imaginary, should NOT be compared to the values I award games in other features. All values are only based on the games in the feature I’m working on. M.C. Kids NES being awarded $10 in comparison to the eight games in McDonalds Video Games: The Definitive Review is not the same as Gradius II NES being awarded $6 in comparison to the seventy-six other games in this feature. I’m not saying Gradius II is worse. I’m saying if there were a set of 76 games, it would be worth less in that collection than M.C. Kids would be in a set of 8 McDonalds games. If there were fifty McDonalds games I was comparing M.C. Kids to and it landed somewhere in the middle, I’d probably be inclined to give it less value. I also made multiple adjustments to values in my final edit of Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection. Around 40% of all YES! games had their value slightly changed from my initial placement. So please don’t compare the values in Konami Shoot ‘Em Up to any other feature where I assign “value” because the value is relative to the games it’s being compared to. Thank you!
IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
The End Platform: Arcade Released November, 1980 Developed by Konami Reworked by Stern NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Listing at Konami Wiki
Unfortunately for me, in this feature there’s going to be a lot of games that have regional differences great and small. But, I’ll mostly only talk about that when playing a different ROM changes the outcome of my verdict. Out of seventy-six games, it only happened three times, the first time being right off the bat. The End’s playability changes depending on the ROM you use. It turns out Konami had a thing or two to learn from Stern.
SPLIT DECISION – KONAMI ROM
I swear, I didn’t start this feature with a game called “The End” as a joke. Well, not entirely, at least. Also, my dad, who legitimately spent another couple hours playing Konami’s The End after I got what I needed, wants to note that he really liked it a lot and thinks I was too hard on it. He felt Konami’s version, because it’s so different from all other Galaxian knock-offs, is the superior version. He’s right about it being different, but just patently wrong about it being better.
Following the success of Galaxian, EVERYONE wanted their own version. I think even Texaco looked into it. This is one of the coattail riders Konami came up with, and hoo boy, does it ever suck. An absolutely uninspired twist that seems to want to visually link Space Invaders to Galaxian, as if Konami created the ultimate hybrid. They didn’t. The Galaxian side of the equation sees colorful aliens shooting at you while constantly swooping down to grab the Space Invaders half of the game: the shields. Instead of trying to directly kill you, the aliens hold you at bay with their bullets while trying to use the bricks to spell out END at the top of the screen, which is an automatic game over. Since you can’t shoot through the shields, I found The End to be too cramped and lacking in flexibility. Aliens carrying bricks score more points, but they attack too out of sync, and besides, there’s not enough room to safely get shots off when you consider their own return fire. You basically have to shoot when you can and hope for the best. Even if you could shoot through the shields, this would be a boring, derivative game. That’s probably why Stern completely reworked it for American release. Verdict: NO! but this review is not over.
SPLIT DECISION – STERN ROM
Stern’s version is much, much better, and it even eases you into the game in a way few gallery shooters do. The enemies don’t shoot at all in the opening wave.
All credit to Stern for turning one of the worst Galaxian knock-offs into a damn decent one. In their version, you’re above the bricks, eliminating the biggest annoyance of the Konami version and opening-up the playfield entirely. The enemies can now kill you directly by crashing into you, but that’s fine. That’s sort of the genre, right? It’s not exactly a bold choice. The bold choice was how Konami did it, and it just didn’t work because the game had no tension at all. Putting the player above the shields doesn’t just add tension, but desirable risk/reward factors that further enhance the excitement. You can absolutely let the aliens take the blocks, since they’re worth a lot more points if you shoot them down before they can bank them. There’s also strategy considerations. My best run saw my stockpile of bricks be reduced to two on the right side of the screen. This forced the aliens to go for those bricks, making it much easier for me to predict their behavior.
If you make it to the seventh wave, you actually get to shoot the UFO that spawns the aliens for bonus points. I only made it that far once legitimately. What happens after you beat it is kind of strange and nonsensical. You actually get most of the END blocks cleared, but then, one final attack wave happens. That’s where my best no-cheating run ended. Had I beaten it, even though the END blocks had already been mostly cleared, you start over with a fresh playfield, minus the lives you lost of course. Oh, and the second time around, it spawns twice as many enemies each wave.
Stern also added a large buffer between stages and gave the levels something resembling personality. Okay, so Stern’s The End is still little more than a run-of-the-mill Galaxian knock-off, but it’s fine. You’re almost certainly NEVER going to lose from having END spelled out. While it’s a real risk in the Konami build, that version’s gameplay forces you to watch helplessly while the word forms. In Stern’s build, trust me, you’ll game over long before that happens, especially thanks to the erratic enemy attack patterns. The best version is probably somewhere between the two builds, maybe with the ability to move up and down added. I suppose we’ll never know, but Stern’s build is clearly superior. So, why review The End in a Konami feature if some other company had to make it fun? Because Konami modified The End’s hardware and likely a good portion of the game code to give us Scramble. So, in a sense, The End was the beginning of the shmup genre as it exists today. In a roundabout kind of way. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Scramble Platform: Arcade Released March 17, 1981 Developed by Konami Included in Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection ($19.99) Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Wikis: Konami – Gradius
Golly, I hate getting that last target.
Previously, when I played Scramble back when Anniversary Collection launched in 2019, I didn’t like it at first. Oh, I certainly admired its contributions to gaming history. You know, like inventing a whole genre. Specifically, Scramble is credited as the first shooter with forced scrolling, first scrolling game with distinct levels, and also the first shooter named after a way of cooking eggs, many of which would make for good names for shooting games when you think about it. Poached. Fried. Hard Boiled. Sunny Side Up. Okay, maybe not that last one. Were these inventions inevitable? Of course they were, but Scramble is one of those rare trailblazing games that is still capable of being fun. I just needed it to grow on me. Is it fascinating that such a pioneering game still manages to rise to the level of tolerable? I think so. Is Scramble just tolerable? Again, I think so. What makes it easier is how clearly Scramble serves as the blueprints for Konami’s Gradius formula with two types of guns and targets optimized to accommodate them.
Even after several hours, I never became a good shot with the missiles. I was okay at best.
Scramble’s six unique levels aren’t really levels in the STAGE sense. Instead, they’re zones that seamlessly bleed into each-other. The only real consistent theme is “don’t crash your ship.” Seriously, even after six years of playing this on again/off again (I wanted to review Anniversary Collection but never got around to it), I still lost most of my lives, by a significant margin, to crashing. It’s actually kind of refreshing for this genre, especially since nothing is firing bullets at you. That’s what blows my mind the most about this title. Scramble, legendary founder of the modern shmup genre, has no bullets to dodge. Instead, you have to avoid surface-to-air missiles and, during the third zone, fireballs. All the while, you have to shoot enough fuel tanks to avoid running out of gas. This mechanic didn’t work for me at first, but eventually I realized that, although I never ran my tank empty, it did increase the pressure to actually hit my shots, especially with those damn missiles that I never got the hang of. You have to fire them well before you hit the target, and I never got very accurate at it.
I suppose the fireballs are bullet-like but they’re more of a prototype on the asteroid field trope.
In the first zone, you have to dodge the ground and rockets that launch upward at you. In the second zone, tiny, pesky flying saucers move up and down that should probably be worth more points but that’s neither here nor there. In the third zone, you have to dodge fireballs. The fourth zone is like the first zone, only very claustrophobic. The fifth zone is the one that I’m guessing gives most players the problems. It’s a flight through a series of tight squeezes where the scrolling is every bit as dangerous as the walls. The final zone requires you to only destroy one main target with a single shot. You can even die after shooting it as long as there’s enough of a pause between shooting the target and crashing that the victory message appears. Scramble only has one map that you replay over and over, and it gets old pretty fast. Unlike a lot of golden age games like Defender, I don’t think it holds up to all-day play in large part because of a truly dull scoring system.
The timing is pretty tricky.
The scoresheet awards 10 points per second you stay alive. Survival-based scoring doesn’t work for a shooter. Only for avoider-type games. Otherwise, isn’t survival already incentivized enough? If you’re not alive, you’re not playing or scoring. And that’s hardly the only problem with the rule sheet. The hard-to-shoot UFOs payoff only 100 points, which is potentially 200 points less than the randomly-scoring mystery targets that do not move and do not fire back. The value of the final target doesn’t increase every new wave either. It’s a flat 800 point finale, which isn’t very much even after you factor-in the survival scoring. It’s frustrating because the designers missed a golden opportunity for really dynamic scoring by incentivizing combos. The playfield certainly lends itself to it, and if it would make everything better because it would discourage mashing the attack buttons. Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy that, after six years of trying, I finally completed this review, but with that comes my realization I likely will never play Scramble again. Well, at least the coin-op. Sure, it’s still playable without the need for an asterisk, but it lacks that “one more round” quality that games of this era NEED in the 2020s. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Super Cobra Platform: Arcade Released March, 1981 Developed by Konami Alternative Version by Stern Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Listing at Konami Wiki
“Gentlemen, we’ve done it. With Scramble, we’ve invented the shmup!” “Sir, we forgot to make enemies that shoot at you.” “Well fudge.” Only he didn’t say fudge.
If Super Cobra looks almost identical to Scramble, it’s because IT IS Scramble, only with things shooting back at you. For 99% of the game, the actual gameplay mechanics are identical to Scramble. You have a gun and the ability to drop two missiles at a time that you must fire well ahead of the target. The majority of targets are on the ground in most levels, and not all the structures on the ground, enemy or otherwise, will actually activate and become a threat. Besides the look of what you’re piloting, the two games even look identical. Super Cobra is often called a “spiritual sequel” to Scramble, but the window between the release of Scramble and Super Cobra is so short that it could be measured in days, at least from what I found. According to Wikipedia and GameFAQs, both games came out in March of 1981, though neither my friend Dave nor myself think that can possibly be accurate. It feels like releasing these two games so back-to-back would cause market confusion. Super Cobra is much longer and much, MUCH tougher, to the point that it makes Scramble genuinely, no joke, feel like a tutorial stage for Super Cobra.
This is literally at the start of the Stern version. The helicopter you control is much bulkier than Scramble’s spaceship, and the level design of all versions builds heavily around that with some cruelly tight squeezes.
To start, the bases that you bombed just for points in Scramble are now anti-air guns in Super Cobra. And it’s not as if their bullets are just flying around randomly for you to weave through. They take aim at you, leading to most misses being of the “near” variety. The surface-to-air missiles from Scramble no longer travel straight up and down, either. At least some of them feel like they’re heat-seeking right at you. The enemies alone make this one of the more intense games of this era, but Super Cobra is just getting started. The fuel mechanic of Scramble was copy-and-pasted here, but because there’s so much more going on, hitting them is much harder, especially with the gun. I often relied on that in Scramble, but Super Cobra forces you to rely much heavier on the missiles, and I still never got good at aiming those damn things.
Instead of bombing one final target, in Super Cobra you have to grab a cargo box to score a bonus. It’s a VERY tight squeeze at the end, made tougher by the anti-air guns. I prefer this to Scramble’s finale, though. It just feels more satisfying.
It’s not just the ground forces shooting, either. Flying enemies do as well, while others are content to try and force a collision with you. Even the fireball sequence from Scramble returns here in beefy form, as “super fireballs” for lack of a better term have to be shot down as they attempt to end your run. Finally, the terrain poses a much bigger threat in Super Cobra. The shape of the copter is awkward, and the game takes full advantage of that with some ridiculously tight squeezes. Often, those squeezes are seasoned with enemies as well. Super Cobra is a maddeningly intense, brutal game. But, in a good way. I wasn’t in love with the reliance on narrow passages, but, as a score-chasing game, this works really well. Getting points just for survival in THIS game makes a lot more sense than in Scramble.
This feature was originally going to include even more games, including Atari 2600 ports of Konami arcade games. I did briefly fool around with Parker Bros’ port of Super Cobra for the Atari 2600. Not enough for a full review, but I think it would likely have gotten a NO! Mike Brodie made an admirable effort of converting a fairly complex game to the VCS, but having only one button made it awkward to play. You have to move downward to fire a missile, and there’s a lot fewer targets than in coin-op. Again, a good effort that passes as a port of Super Cobra, but it’s just not fun. I ultimately decided to also cut Konami’s in-house developed Atari 2600 games despite their historical significance as Konami’s first home video games, but they would all get a NO! It took a while for Konami to find their footing and start producing quality home games.
It’s almost unbelievable Scramble even exists when Super Cobra released soon after it and it’s so much more exciting than the original. Given the fact that both these games exist and were released so close together, I can’t help but wonder if there was a civil war within Konami over Scramble’s style of gameplay. As groundbreaking as Scramble is, it’s also not a very exciting game, and maybe that rubbed some people at Konami the wrong way, who took the guts of it and rebuilt it. Regardless, the two games are so similar that it’s kind of absurd they’re not packaged together more often. Konami Anniversary Collection left Super Cobra out of its lineup completely. It doesn’t feel like a different game, a sequel, or a spin-off. This feels like Scramble’s hard mode. In 2025, this would be DLC. Either way, I’m fine with Scramble, but I like Super Cobra a lot more. Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Pooyan Platform: Arcade Released September, 1982 Designed by Tokuro Fujiwara Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Wikis: Konami – Strategy
Pooyan is arguably the first game that went all-in on programming to present opportunities for high-yield combos, understanding that this makes a game especially addictive.
One of the neatest things I’ve noticed in my retro journey is that most companies that are juggernauts today started as trend-followers, until they had some kind of epiphany and began making original ideas or innovations. Hell, even the legendary Nintendo made a series of generic Space Invaders wannabes before Donkey Kong (one of these days I have to get around to doing a Nintendo before DK feature). In truth, Pooyan isn’t a “shoot ’em up” in the same way Gradius, Salamander, or Parodius are and probably doesn’t belong in this feature. But, it’s a turning point game in Konami’s existence. Along with 1981’s Frogger, it kind of feels like the “ta da” moment. Before Pooyan, they’d made plenty of games with shooting mechanics, but as much as I enjoyed Scramble and especially Super Cobra, they certainly lacked personality and charm. Pooyan is all personality and all charm, and it’s also a damn good coin-op.
I hadn’t lost a life up to this point and was pretty proud of myself. I only made it one level after this. When this sucker scales, it SCALES.
It’s such a simple idea, too: shoot the balloons. At the top of the ladder, a piece of meat appears that works like an anvil that you can lob and knock an entire string of wolves for a ton of points. That’s really it. Missing a wolf isn’t an automatic loss of life, either. Instead, what it does is mix a traditional gallery shooter with a cross-the-road element, at least in odd-numbered rounds where the wolves are jumping off the cliff and trying to reach the floor. In those rounds, any wolf you miss climbs the ladders next to your platform, filling them up one at a time. Once it has its place on a ladder, a wolf will randomly poke its head out to chomp the air, and if your pig happens to be occupying the space where that chomp happens, the wolf can’t be held responsible for its actions. It’s a brilliant twist that creates a shockingly busy playfield. The rare fixed channel shooter where you have threats in all directions. But, the game isn’t perfect.
I got down to the last one before I died here. The final wolf on every round is a “boss” that takes more shots AND missing him adds five more wolves to clear the round, the last of which will be another boss. I was about to game over, too.
In the second round and all even numbered stages that follow, the cross the road mechanic is gone, and instead the wolves float from the bottom to the top. While they do this, riderless balloons will run interference. You can survive missing five of the wolves, but if you miss six, you die from them having enough muscle to push a boulder onto you. As you make progress and the balloons take more shots, each shot causes the balloon to ascend slower. I think by time you reach the sixth round, the balloons take too many shots, and that’s before you even consider the extra-extra spongy boss AND all the balloons that will fly up in front of him. The amount of perfection required is absurd. Like this situation:
The circled one is a “boss” which has a flashing balloon.
After I ate the game over, I did rewind to see what I could have done to survive, and it practically requires clairvoyance. Or, just memorizing the patterns of each wave, I suppose, but it’s a LOT to memorize. I originally had a higher value on Pooyan, but then I hit a wall around the sixth round that tested my patience. Since building up to that level is genuinely fun, I can’t give it a NO! But, I think the odd-numbered levels are much, much more interesting than the second levels, which feel like just a run of the mill gallery shooter done from another angle. Consequently, Pooyan does become exhausting to the point that I can’t imagine this ever making its way into my regular rotation of arcade classics I fire up to kill a few minutes while waiting in a line or a car ride or a doctor’s office. It’s so close, but it doesn’t quite cross that threshold. As far as golden age games go, Pooyan is solid, but it’s a B-lister through-and-through. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Time Pilot Platform: Arcade Released November, 1982 Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Wikis: Konami – Strategy
The first video game from the man who would go on to produce such games as Street Fighter II. I’ve reviewed several games he directed/designed. The coin-op version of Willow got a NO!, while the vastly underrated Nemo got a glowing YES! In Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium: The Definitive Review, 1943 Kai, Hyper Dyne Side Arms, Magic Sword, Midnight Wanderer (part of Three Wonders), and Son Son got YES! votes while Black Tiger, Gun.Smoke, and Savage Bees got a NO! in votes. So, he’s got a pretty good record at IGC. Most people who reach the level of “legend” got that status for a reason.
Time Pilot is maybe the most basic game in this entire feature. Far more simplistic than even The End. There’s no power-ups. The levels all play out the same, more or less. It’s just a dog fight with a ship in the center of the screen and graphics that create the illusion that the ship is flying through the sky. The object is to shoot down various swarming enemies themed around five different time periods: 1910, 1940, 1970, 1982, and the far distant future of, ahem, 2001. Wait, did Time Pilot do 9-11? Not that the time travel theme matters at all. Enemies only take one shot to shoot down, except the bosses, which spawn after shooting down enough enemies to empty the meter at the bottom. In the last three levels, enemies begin firing missiles that get progressively tougher to avoid. And that’s really the whole game. For what it’s worth, there is a hint of elegance to Time Pilot, as you score bonus points for quickly taking an entire group of ships that are attacking in formation. That’s probably the highlight of the game, actually, and it was always satisfying when I saw the bonus points appear on screen.
I guess the way the pros play this (yes, there’s Time Pilot pros) is to farm the parachutes and deliberately avoid enemies, since there’s no cap on it.
Otherwise, there’s not a ton of depth to this. The time travel stuff is a complete airball because it just never feels like time traveling. It feels like the sprites are changing from one type of flying machine to another. The idea has legs and would certainly be much more viable in a modern 3D game, but a 2D canvas with no reference points or a cityscape cannot possibly make this work. Only the final level tries to look different, but you’re not fighting space shuttles. You’re fighting UFOs, and since it’s outer space and your ship looks the same, hell, it could be any year, right? Thankfully, the controls are solid and collision grace given to players for especially close calls makes Time Pilot fun, at least in bite-sized chunks. I wouldn’t recommend this as an $7.99 Arcade Archives title, and I wouldn’t even recommend it at 50% or 75% off that. Time Pilot feels like an Atari 2600 game with better graphics, and while I had a fun enough time with a game that’s simply about scoring as much as I could, it’s not even close to entering my regular rotation. Time Pilot is a little overrated, (well, depending on your definition of overrated, as I’ve honestly never heard anyone glow all that much about it) but it’s fine. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gyruss Platform: Arcade Released March, 1983 Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Strategy
Shooting the orange thing powers-up your gun. I honestly didn’t realize that in my first playthrough.
Gyruss will probably go down in Indie Gamer Chick history as being the NO! game that committed the fewest gameplay errors. I’m not even convinced any aspect that’s actually present in the game is done wrong at all. Gyruss, one of the most legendary games in Konami’s archives, is a gallery shooter done from a different camera angle. It’s sort of like Tempest in that the twist is enemies come out at you in a 360° cylinder, only without the cylinder being defined graphically. Players twist around the cylinder and shoot enemies that progressively increase in numbers. The actual shooting works just fine, with my only real knock is the lack of a nice crunch for made shots. Really, the action is solid.
Besides the one lone power-up, the only extra-mile is the typical gallery shooter bonus stage where enemies fly in formation. This is just a stripped-down Galaga played from a different angle.
So, why the hell did Gyruss bore me to death? Because it totally did. I didn’t even have a little bit of fun. I think that’s because it’s just a boring looking game. All the levels are nothing but stark, black backgrounds with only dots to represent stars, and in them, you shoot at fairly generic enemy designs. Granted, a lot of games from this era look like Gyruss, but they can make up for it with memorable enemy design (Galaga) or novel gameplay mechanics (like Time Pilot’s combos). I think the biggest factor was that there’s no risk/reward elements. While there is a fairly complicated phase/wave system, and clearing out all four waves will cause another wave to randomly attack for extra points, Gyruss is still a raw test of accuracy and movement. There’s nothing really to tempt you beyond that. No point capsules to chase. No combos. Gyruss feels like a gameplay proof of concept for a more ambitious title, and then someone in charge said “great! Ship it as-is!”
Another factor is that a lot of the time you’re firing at teeny tiny dots because the enemies are so far away from you.
Playing Gyruss reminded me of the story of Tempest’s development. Tempest originally started as a first-person Space Invaders knock-off. Atari’s designers had a habit of play-testing each other’s games, and after sampling the prototype, the consensus at Atari among his peers was that Dave Theurer’s first version of Tempest was really boring because it was just Space Invaders from a different angle. Gyruss feels like Galaga from a different angle, only without the memorable sprites, sound effects, or the risk/reward factor of the double ship. I can understand how some people could still hold Gyruss up as one of the best games of the early 80s. It controls great and has perfect collision detection. I don’t remember ever playing a game that is so well developed and all for naught because it’s just not fun. Thankfully, Gyruss’ legacy is saved by the superior NES port, which adds power-ups, bombs, and bosses. It proved my hunch that the coin-op is a glorified proof of concept. Verdict: NO!
Mega Zone Platform: Arcade Released March, 1983 Developed by Konami & Kosuka Distributed by Interlogic NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED* Listing at Wikipedia
*I’m not counting Xbox 360’s Game Room
Look, it’s a face!!
Mega Zone is so under the radar that it doesn’t even have a listing on the Konami Wiki. It’s never been in a collection. It’s not part of the Arcade Archives lineup. It never even got home ports, to consoles or 80s personal computers. The closest it’s come to any modern recognition is being part of the Xbox 360 Game Room service that I think roughly five people used, and I wasn’t among them. In a way, I get it. Mega Zone is a fairly pedestrian vertical-scrolling shooter, only with a tank instead of a spaceship. Some sites compare it to Xevious, but I think it’s more of an attempt to ride the coattails of SNK’s Vanguard, only without changing between vertical to horizontal levels. Which isn’t to say it’s completely straight forward. I didn’t even realize until after I’d completed a full run up to the gigantic face that’s basically a boss that there’s branching paths. If my buddy Dave hadn’t mentioned it offhandedly while ranting about how boring he thought Mega Zone was, I wouldn’t have even known this is a thing you can do. It turns out, the game clues you in where the spots where the forks in the road are. This look like this:
In my first playthrough, turning left at this junction sure looked like certain death, especially since the game actually does occasionally turn to the trope of using barriers to kill you via scrolling.
The other big twist is a Super Mario-like power-up that lets you grow bigger and increases your firepower. There’s these little dots on the ground and getting a dozen turns the next one into the power-up. That’s actually not the twist, though. The twist is activating this costs you a life, Galaga-style. Yes, really. I feel like you can cue the “that’s a bold move, Cotton” meme at this point. But, this does successfully give a legitimate sense of risk-reward. The collision is so accurate that I’d even call it sensitive, because there’s no blinking. You can go from powered-up to dead instantly, which means you’ve actually lost two lives for the price of one.
Now, here’s the good news: Mega Zone features some shockingly elegant attack formations by enemies. There always seems to be enough room to dodge both baddies and their projectiles. The dirtiest pool the game plays is with instakill walls that pop up right in front of you, and even then, there’s enough time to dodge. Mega Zone is a challenging game, but one that’s pretty thoughtful for this era. Okay, not giving any grace period when you take damage as the super tank is a load of crap, especially when you consider that some of the squeezes are going to be really tight. But, the controls are really well done and the collision boxes are accurate, so those tight squeezes are on YOU. As it should be. As for the gun play, rudimentary as it is, this is a totally solid shooter. I completely understand why someone would find Mega Zone dull. Besides the gigantic face, there’s not a lot of memorable aspects. But, I thought Mega Zone was fine. Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t a lost treasure that you’ve been missing out on for forty-two years now. But, Mega Zone doesn’t deserve its banishment to gaming’s cornfield and, if Konami ever does do a larger scale compilation, it would make an excellent +1 bonus game to complement the titles people actually remember and want. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Juno First Platform: Arcade Released July, 1983 Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Listing at Konami Wiki
I’m surprised they didn’t just call it “Protector” or “Offender” or something equally derivative. Shame we never got the sequel, “Anchorage Afterward.”
Juno First is, without hyperbole, Defender from a third-person perspective. Sometimes descriptions like that are an exaggeration. This one is so close it comes across as desperate. Juno First is also compared to Nintendo’s Radar Scope, the shmup that had to die so Donkey Kong could live, but it only looks like it. Radar Scope is Galaxian from a third person perspective and a hollow “defend the base” facade. Juno allows you to scroll up and down, which leads to the most exciting moments in the game: flying backwards to avoid enemy fire that’s hot on your trail. You also have to rescue humans, just like Defender. This has a scoring boost to it, as every enemy you kill for about six or seven seconds after getting a human increases in value by 200 points.
I feel like these are some weak-ass graphics.
I didn’t really like Juno First at all. It’s a really ugly game with forgettable enemy design. Juno First controls like a game set on a giant air hockey table and just doesn’t do enough of the scoring frenzies to make it engaging. Probably the biggest problem is the game is really frugal about the human drops, even though that’s really the only time the shooting aspect is fun. Imagine Pac-Man if you only got one energizer per maze. Even worse is they disappear too quickly. It just doesn’t feel like a game that’s equal parts challenging and fun. It’s one of the least inspired Konami titles I’ve played. Now, I love Defender. It’s one of my favorite golden age games, but this just isn’t anywhere on that level. Of all the games in this feature, Juno First is the one I spent the least time with. I didn’t like it, and didn’t want to play it. There’s no substitute for personality, and Juno First proves that. Verdict: NO!
Time Pilot ’84 Platform: Arcade Released in 1984 Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Listing at Konami Wiki
Despite its name and even the fact that it uses an upgraded version of Time Pilot’s engine, Time Pilot ’84 doesn’t feel all that much like Time Pilot. The time travel gimmick is completely removed, as is the variety of enemies. There’s one setting that gets color-swapped, which makes for a very dull visual experience. But, the upgraded gameplay I certainly like better than the original. You’re still trying to kill X amount of enemies to spawn a boss, but this time around, you have homing missiles that only work on silver targets. The missiles don’t hit anything if they don’t lock-on with on-screen indicators, which you have to be very close to the target to activate. Thankfully it only takes a single missile to take down the bosses, but because of the limited range, I found the only strategy that worked was to set a collision course with them and just hope I won the fast draw. Time Pilot ’84 has a higher emphasis on combo-shooting and also hides some high-yielding bonuses. Like if you see a group of eight silver targets, it’s a safe bet that taking out all eight of them will score a ton of points. I have no idea why they invoked Time Pilot when this doesn’t feel like a sequel at all, but baffled as I might be, I did have a bit of fun with this one. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Scooter Shooter Platform: Arcade Released in 1985 Developed by Konami NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED* Listing at Wikipedia
*I’m not counting Xbox 360’s Game Room
As long as enemies only hit the jet ski and not the human part of the sprites, you don’t die. You will slow down a little bit though. It’s almost like the hurdles crossed with a shmup in that sense.
Of all the games in this feature, it’s either The End, Mega Zone or Scooter Shooter that has fallen the deepest into the pit of obscurity. I think the edge for the title of “most forgotten game” has to be Scooter Shooter. It’s not on Arcade Archives (at least as of this writing) and has never been included in a compilation. It has never gotten a home port in any form except, like Mega Zone, it was on the Xbox 360 Game Room service. The End wasn’t, but The End was ported to the Arcadia 2001, whatever the hell that is. Some games are lost to history for a reason. But of the three ultra-obscure coin-ops in this feature, two got a YES! This is the lone game that walks away empty handed. Scooter Shooter is a very bizarre competitive shoot ’em up where two players race across a straight playfield shooting bland, basic shmup targets. When you reach the base, a fifteen second timer starts where you have to wait to enter. When each player has reached their base, you then have a showdown.
This might be the most confusing retro game I’ve reviewed.
You know, I played this several times and I’m still not entirely clear on the rules, nor did I figure out a point to not dumping players straight into the showdown. Because a showdown happens no matter what, and winning the race to the base gives you no advantage in the showdown portion of the game besides the game spitting out a ton of points (I think that’s what the “P” is). Where it gets REALLY lame is you have to wait for the other player to sit through their fifteen second countdown for their base, even if you finished and have been waiting for a while.
The second countdown is so lame. The countdown really only makes sense to give the other player a chance to finish. How stupid.
The levels before the showdowns are straight corridors with often cheap enemies. Cheap in placement, design, or both. This is really rudimentary stuff. But the showdowns actually did provide SOME fun for my family and I. They’re kind of smart in how they’re done. Despite being called “SCOOTER Shooter” the things you’re riding look more like flying jet skis, but shooting the vehicle does nothing. You have to shoot the person sticking out of it. Very smart design, because it prevents the game from degenerating into a mindless button masher won by whoever can press the button the fastest. Too bad they ruined it completely with stupid design.
Ruinous. The only way to fix it is to change it to something else by shooting it, but we tried making house rules and it wasn’t practical.
See that L circled in the picture above? It stands for LIFE and it restores the health of whoever gets to it. What an incredible coincidence that every single game we played of this was won by whoever got the L, or as my father put it “get the L for the W.” I think if we had played 100 matches there still would have never been a single exception to this. Darn shame about that, because janky and weird as Scooter Shooter is, it was heading for one of the most stunning YES! verdicts I’ve given. You would not believe how deflating that item was when my family realized how valuable it was, rendering everything that happens before it spawns entirely pointless. Even the bland shmup stuff before the showdown is elevated by the competitive side. One race was so close that my family was cheering. It was Three Stooges-like, but Three Stooges never had an element that sucked the air out of the room. We tried to implement “do not get the L” house rules but it just wasn’t viable because it drifts around the stage. Damnit, this sucks. This was a development choice so destructive it should be taught at game design schools, but for all the wrong reasons. Verdict: NO!
TwinBee Platform: Arcade Released March 5, 1985 Developed by Konami Included in Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection ($19.99) Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Wikis: Konami – TwinBee – Strategy
I lost count of how many times I said “wait, when did I lose an arm?”
Konami’s take on the Xevious formula that mixes vertical shooting and bombing ground targets was certainly good enough to launch a franchise. Playing this original version, it’s easy to see why Twinbee had such staying power. But, the first Twinbee was never fated to age well. Frankly, I’ve always been really bored by Xevious. While Twinbee is far more advanced, I’ve never liked the original Twinbee, either. Going more in-depth with it didn’t change my mind, though some parts of it I like now more than I ever have before. I have to admit that they clearly fine-tuned the bombing mechanic. It doesn’t require the precision aim Xevious or similar games, as Twinbee has a very ahead-of-its-time auto-targeting mechanic. The bombs scatter out and usually give you a lot of wiggle room, and that’s in addition to fairly generous collision boxes on the ground enemies. I don’t know what it says about me that my favorite part of the game is not having to aim. Probably nothing good.
The closest that Twinbee comes to a Konami-like set piece are these swinging gates.
But, and this will be considered sacrilege, I’ve never liked the iconic bells of the Twinbee franchise. Sorry, I just don’t think they’re fun, and just as often get in the way of my shots. That’s especially true in this first game in the franchise. You can tell in later games they put a lot more thought into matching the bell locations with enemy attack patterns in a way that enhances the risk/reward factors instead of interrupting the player. In this original Twinbee, I think the level design is built too much around having enemies placed where the bells will be when you’re turning them into the items. I don’t hate the bells, but I prefer normal item drops and their lack of several qualifying “buts.”
Unlike enemies, the bells don’t die after being shot once. Now, I get that blocking your shots is part of the design, but I often feel like it’s not so much risk/reward because of the enemy layout. Also I LOST AN ARM AGAIN?! For f*cks sake! I swear to God it catches me by surprise every time.
I don’t hate Twinbee (well, not exactly), but of all the early scrolling shooters by Konami, it’s easily the one that bores me the most. The enemies aren’t very memorable. The settings REALLY aren’t. I split my play session for the coin-op between two days and eventually did get good enough to reach the final boss, and yet, I don’t think I could pick half the bosses out of a lineup. They’re just not eye-catching, and neither are the basic enemies. Not that shmups need all the basic enemies to be that way, but after playing through stuff like Gradius or Salamander, I can eventually recognize enemies and know their attack patterns. Conversely, the more playful enemies of Twinbee come across as kind of samey.
I don’t like how the ambulance, which restores your missing arms, works. It just appears as soon as you lose your second arm, with a max of appearance per life. I’d much prefer some kind of pick-up that allows the restoration. Also this was during the run where I gave up on using the default settings and jacked-up my lives.
There’s just not enough power-ups to keep things interesting, and how the power-ups work isn’t very fun or balanced. If you get the green bell, which is what gives you the shadows that work like options, you cannot ever get the red bell that gives you a shield and vice-versa. In fact, the opposite item won’t spawn at all, so your decision to go for the shield or the shadow has to be made ahead of time, which is ridiculous on its face value. That’s before you even get to the realization that having the green bell is all but essential in the later levels, where you simply cannot make progress at all without the additional firepower. Eventually, I did reach the point where I could almost ace the game (my best run saw me not even lose an arm until the sixth level), but had I died even once, I don’t think I would have recovered. Look, the game even spawns you on top of strings of enemies!
Now granted, you get a small window of invincibility to move out of the way, but you’re also down to your basic gun and the lowest movement speed, while the enemies and their firepower are absolutely SPAMMING the screen. Even with the invincibility, I wasn’t long for this world. It wasn’t rare for me to go from having a no-hit run through three to five levels to dead and eating a game-over in a matter of moments. There’s no continues, either, not that it would help given the circumstances. In addition to all this, Twinbee as a franchise is always a bit of a pain in the ass with bullet visibility, and one where ground enemies you miss can shoot you in the ass even after they’ve been scrolled off the screen.
I went back and played this in early June as I was editing this feature, and it was kind of astonishing how easy it felt once I had the full catalog of games in this feature under my belt. On the EASY setting, I could cruise through most of the game by just aimlessly moving back and forth while spamming the fire button. When I bumped the setting back up to the NORMAL, the game still ate my ass.
Now, I’m sure TwinBee was brilliant when it first launched, but in 2025, it doesn’t hold-up. The closest I came to having fun was trying to chase a high score, but even that lost its luster when I realized how heavily the bells tilt the scoring. Once in a while, it was exciting trying to catch them to keep a combo going, but the consequence of this is that it takes the fun out of shooting the enemies. You know, the reason to play this genre in the first place. Sigh. I promise Twinbee as a franchise is going to score a few YES! verdicts in this feature. It’s in the same boat as the coin-op Gradius, up next: a really good proof of concept, but nothing more than that, at least in 2025. Verdict: NO!
Gradius aka Nemesis Platform: Arcade Released May, 1985 Directed by Hiroyasu Machiguchi Developed by Konami Included in Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection ($19.99) Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) To Be Included in Gradius Origins Wikis: Konami – Gradius
I feel like this famous set-piece, which is insanely difficult in the coin-op, will be a good gauge for how accurate the home ports are.
This is the one. Yep. The one that ends with a safe dropped on my head. Because Gradius is one of the most influential and beloved video games ever. But if I’m being honest, I’ve never been the biggest fan of this specific game of Gradius. As in the original game. I know, I know. Look, I’m a HUGE fan of the franchise, but for whatever reason, the first game never “did it” for me. Maybe because they were so focused on the gameplay that the spectacular settings and unforgettable boss fights that make the franchise so delightful weren’t in place yet. Gradius has hints of that with the amazing design on the original Big Core boss fights or the volcano pictured above. But this is also Gradius at its most generic.
“What about the Moai statues? That’s pretty memorable!” It would be, if they didn’t copy it nearly identically in Gradius II and then rerun it again with small twists in damn near every Gradius that followed.
Gradius’ item system is obviously its greatest contribution to the shmup formula, as there’s something satisfying about manually turning on your loadout with a currency system instead of just getting an item with a letter in the middle. It makes the whole Gradius franchise one of the ultimate “create your own strategy” arcade experiences. Future installments would allow for players to opt out of this and have power-ups handled automatically. For me, I think the speed-ups reach a point where I can’t control the ship anymore and prefer only a single activation. Two at most, depending on the game, but in the case of the original arcade Gradius, one is enough (Update: Actually, by time I finished this feature, I usually hung out in the two-to-three speed-up range). At times, the game resembles a Toaplan-like bullet hell, well before that was a thing. There’s moments where you’re reminded that you’re playing a coin-op and Konami really, really wants you off the machine, so the next person can pay for their turn.
Ahem.
And, in the case of the arcade Gradius, I think it over does the brutality. For what it’s worth, the first Gradius will be earning some YES! verdicts in this feature. Just, not for the coin-op. The difficulty, even on the lowest dip switch setting, is overwhelming. It’s not like Gradius is never fun. I wouldn’t be here if that was the case. But, Gradius coin-op is more like a proof of concept. A promise of better times to come. And a lot of the stuff that’s here did age gracefully, especially the icon of the franchise: the Big Core. It’s not the first “boss” in a spaceship game. Xevious had its iconic big ships, but it’s the first to be structured like a modern boss fight. Okay, so it’s disappointing that Gradius only has one model that gets reused five times after its first appearance. Even the coolest boss fight gets exhausting when it happens six times in one game. But, as the original “this is a big deal” space shooting boss fight, dude, the Big Core is just so f*cking cool. How can you not love it?
This might be the weirdest compliment I’ve ever given, but I want a Big Core MK I key chain. It’s key chain cool.
Hell, it’s so iconic that they could probably do a Gradius movie if the Big Core was on the poster. It’s one of the most underrated contributors towards making boss battles a staple of gaming. But, and this might be controversial, I really do think that and the Moai are all Gradius has going for it as far as memorable design goes. I played through the coin-op two or three previous times before working on this feature, and I was startled by how many aspects of the first Gradius I didn’t even remember. The little brains? Nope. The blue wall called The Nucleus? Actually, no I didn’t. I remembered the volcanoes, the Moai, the Big Core MK I, and the gigantic brain at the end. I didn’t even remember set pieces satirized directly in Parodius, a game I had just played. The Electronic Cage for example, which shows up in several games.
It’s a neat design, I guess. Maybe if they hadn’t outclassed themselves in every sequel and spin-off that followed.
The set-pieces just weren’t spectacular yet. They would be, but like I said, it’s best to think of Gradius as a stepping stone in the evolution of gaming. I can and have enjoyed those. I can tolerate Scramble. I enjoyed Super Mario 64. But, Gradius is held back by extreme difficulty and no instant respawns. I think those would be transformative. If this had been like Salamander, the YES! would have been all but assured. But, I couldn’t make progress once I lost my first life and my max-loadout was gone. Going into some of the set pieces without both lasers and missiles is too brutal. I never thought I’d ever reach the point where I could cruise through Castlevania or Contra without a game over. But, if I saw someone do that on the coin-op of Gradius, I would still be very impressed. If I practiced enough, maybe I could do that too, but I wouldn’t want to. It might be sacrilege to say, but Gradius is kind of boring at times. It’s why I think Gradius II is one of the greatest sequels ever. It’s never boring, and one of my favorite video games. I owe the original Gradius my gratitude for that, but I don’t owe it a YES! Verdict: NO! BAM, safe dropped on my head. Don’t worry. My ghost will complete the remaining feature.
Finalizer – Super Transformation Platform: Arcade Released December, 1985 Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Listing at Konami Wiki
Sigh. This should have been so much better than it is.
Imagine making a game where, instead of piloting just a normal spaceship, the power-ups allowed you to assemble a dual-wielding robot that could have a different kind of gun in each hand. That sounds bad ass. Like an idea you’d have to be an imbecile to screw-up. The team behind Finalizer – Super Transformation took that as a challenge and declared in one voice “AS GOD AS OUR WITNESS, WE ARE THOSE IMBECILES!” There’s no levels in the traditional sense. The only backdrop is a series of islands, and the only boss is one that some compare to the Big Core MK I but I think looks more like the first boss from Sega’s generic Master System pack-in Astro Warrior.
I guess I can see the Big Core resemblance.
As you play the game, items spawn that eventually transform you into a giant robot that can carry a shield or a gun. You can end up with two different types of weapons, such as a traditional spread gun, fireballs, or the ability to shoot fists that return to you like boomerangs. That last one is SO satisfying, by the way. The combat is really good even if the setting is dull and enemy design is forgettable. The problem comes from the fact that the game isn’t optimized for combat. The variety of enemies leaves a lot to be desired, and the ones that are here are as generic in appearance as it gets. But, at least you can shoot most of them. As if they were bound and determined to prevent fun by any means necessary, Finalizer regularly cuts to lengthy sequences where you simply have to avoid indestructible meteors or other debris. Yea, in a game where they gave you a giant robot that can shoot two different kinds of gun, they thought it would be an awesome idea to have you be able to shoot NOTHING!
None of those rocks can be destroyed by doing the fun thing. I tried different weapons and none of them worked. The only way to get them is through a horribly imbalanced mechanic.
Well, actually there is one way to destroy them. Like Twinbee, the item capsules can be changed by shooting them. In addition to the gun, one of them gives you points, one freezes all the action on screen for five seconds, and one is essentially a star from Super Mario that allows you to “crash” into enemies and rack up big points for five seconds. In theory, if you can string these together, you can cheese the game. But a lot of the time, those asteroid sequences don’t have ANY item drops at the start of them, so it’s moot point. Giving players awesome weaponry and then making sequences with nothing to shoot that feel like they last eons is so nakedly trollish that it just kind of makes me sad, because it ruins a perfectly fine game.
How I wish this would crash.
Finalizer really doesn’t want players to be the robot for very long. It plays dirty with projectiles and the meteor showers. It plays dirty with the items, which it’ll spawn in a cluster of enemies or meteors that all but encircle them. After a while, if you survive these sequences, the game will just spawn a pair of homing enemies on both sides of the screen to insure you get damaged down to the starting ship anyway. If the game had just focused on the combat and created even the most basic Twinbee or Gradius-like experience, Finalizer would have cruised to a YES! Instead, this became one of the easiest NO!s I’ve ever assigned. It’s the rare title that manages to be mechanically good, but still manages to feel like the development team resented getting the assignment and actively sabotaged it. It should be a cinch to make a decent game with this combat system. Hell, a GREAT game, because the gunplay is seriously very fun. But Finalizer isn’t a decent game. Not even close. Verdict: NO!
Jail Break Platform: Arcade Released in 1986 Directed by Oolong Sugimo Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives* ($7.99) Listing at the Konami Wiki
*The Arcade Archives version censors the naked women. Yes, there’s naked women.
Honestly, if I had to guess who made Jail Break, I would have probably leaned towards Sega.
Jail Break is one of many games in this feature that are, frankly, are not “shmups.” But, I mean, I’m never going to do “Run ‘n Gun Games: The Definitive Review” so I figure I should just knock all the Konami pew pew games out that I would never do as single game reviews or as part of a different review collection like this. Well, unless Konami put out a better arcade collection, but the Arcade Archives model seems to get in the way of that. Anyway, Jail Break is a 1986 game where you shoot guys escaping from jail and OH MY GOD LOOK AT THE BOOBIES!
Yes, I do have to censor nudity here or the search engine gods will banish me to the cornfield. According to my Mom “maybe you should reconsider using your mascot for censorship. It makes it look like you gave her bigger ones!” And winking ones too, Mom. What, your boobs don’t wink? Mine do. Usually after they tell me to burn things.
And it’s not just a one off thing. When you shoot bad guys out of windows or bathing in the water, sometimes a naked girl, nipples and all, is shown. This isn’t a situation where it’s ambiguous. It’s the female form in all its glory. So, that’s weird and OH MY GOD SHIRTLESS BATMAN!
What the hell is going on? Did I get the wrong ROM? Well, no. This is what the game is actually like. Hell, Batman even appears in the Arcade Archives version. Between the naked women and unauthorized appearance by the Caped Crusader, Jail Break kind of feels like a bootleg, doesn’t it? It’s especially strange, because it’s not like Konami hadn’t already reached the upper-echelon of game developers by 1986. They were established as an elite house of gaming with properties like Frogger, Gradius, and, you know, all the stuff you read above. Yet, this comes across like a game from one of those bootleg 500 in 1 consoles that replaces Mario with Goku or something. But, I think I get it, because if not for those anomalies, Jail Break wouldn’t be that interesting.
This is the gameplay in its entirety.
It’s not that Jail Break has bad action. Waves of enemies run onto the screen and you shoot them, and when bystanders run onto the playfield, don’t shoot them. All enemies take one shot to kill, and when you save an innocent, you get an extra gun. There’s three that you can swap between. The standard gun works fine enough. The rocket launcher pierces through enemies and can take out vans (and the drums that Batman hides in), and the tear gas seems to auto-aim for windows OR miss completely and feels like a prototype for Goldeneye’s Klobb. It’s all fairly generic, including the enemies who don’t feel distinct unless they’re hiding in manholes or driving in vans. There’s just not enough variety in Jail Break, and the stage themes don’t matter because the enemies and gameplay feel exactly the same level-to-level. Only the very end features a change in pace. Jail Break’s finale pits you against a handful of enemies who wheel out the warden, who is strapped to a time bomb.
If the warden let things get so out of hand that hundreds of people in jail (not prison, just jail) escape, arm themselves, and run amok causing mayhem, maybe this is nature taking its course and we should let them finish the job instead of rescuing him to allow this crap to happen all over again.
Really, the only difference between the ending and other boss waves is the timer and the pedestrian who you can’t kill. Previously, shooting innocents came with no penalty besides missing out on a new gun. During the finale, if the bomb explodes either by running out of time or shooting it, no matter how many lives you have left, it’s an automatic game over. Jeez, that’s pretty frickin harsh, especially for the way the enemies come out and move in formation around the chair. Now, I don’t love the automatic game over bit, but the way the finale is structured was the one and only time the game became exciting. They should have done more like that in Jail Break, because the rest of the game stops feeling fresh after just one stage, but there’s four to go that offer nothing new until the very end. Jail Break is proof that solid action gameplay isn’t enough if you don’t stage it in a way that keeps it fresh from start to finish. Come to think of it, I said the same thing about Gyruss. Apparently it took a while for Konami to get it. Verdict: NO!
TwinBee Platform: Famicom Released January 4, 1986 Developed by Konami Included with Switch Online Subscription (Standard) Wikis: Konami – TwinBee – Strategy
For the file size limit of the era, this doesn’t look too bad. Also, hey, first home port in this feature!
Twinbee on the Famicom is getting a NO! just like the coin-op, but for what it’s worth, it’s not the worst port. Give a little, take a little. In the “take a little” side of the column, the aspect I gave the most props to in the coin-op is nowhere near as good on the Famicom. The bombing mechanic is extremely stripped down. Instead of spraying a cluster of bombs and getting a large amount of grace, you drop one bomb at time and it has to be a hit. There’s little to no wiggle room, and thus it’s nowhere near as satisfying. In the “give a little” column, Famicom TwinBee is a lot more balanced overall. The playfield is wider, but there’s fewer enemies, so you never get a screen spammed with bullets. Speaking of which, the bullet visibility is much higher, making the Famicom port a much more effective defensive game. The bosses are significantly toned back too. Despite all that, I was just so bored playing this. The YES! verdicts are coming for Twinbee, but not yet. Verdict: NO!
Knightmare aka Majou Densetsu Platform: MSX Released March 29, 1986 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NO MODERN RELEASE Listing at Konami Wiki
No matter what anyone thinks, I don’t stomp on beloved classics for sport. It’s not fun for me to write reviews I know will piss people off. Thankfully, most of Konami’s MSX lineup lived up to their legend.
I’m not taking these reviews in sequential order, so actually, I already had played all the Gradius MSX games before booting up Knightmare. I knew of Knightmare’s reputation as one of Konami’s most beloved MSX titles, and the change of themes from spaceships to a knight in shining armor was a welcome one. But, despite how it might look in screenshots, Knightmare is a boilerplate auto-scrolling shmup, and unfortunately, one that doesn’t hold up to the test of time. I don’t even think it came close, as this is fairly slow-paced and, for the most part, pretty bland. And it’s not like it never does anything right. The basic idea is that you auto-scroll upward, shooting waves of enemies, but your bullets also reveal hidden item blocks. Most of them just score points, but you can also activate screen-clearing bombs or freeze the action. The latter isn’t so great, actually, especially in a game that already has a sluggish pace. On the other hand, I liked that some of the bridges across rivers have to be uncovered before you suffer death by scrolling. It’s probably the only time the game gets exciting.
On the other hand, the item system is a total failure. Similar to Twinbee, items constantly spawn that you can change by shooting. Every gun is available from the item drop, and getting the same weapon back-to-back buffs its strength. This was a terrible idea all around, especially since the guns aren’t remotely balanced. In my first playthrough, I assumed the double swords were the most powerful weapon. I was wrong, because the fire arrow not only kills enemies faster but pierces through them as well. It’s the piercing part that’s especially valuable, because the hidden items and bridges take multiple shots to unlock, so enemies not being able to interfere with your shots makes the game a breeze. The difficulty further plummets from the overabundance of power-ups that are in the caption below.
There’s far too many of the power-up drops. Seriously, there’s TONS of them, even late in the game. Like the weapons, these can be changed into four different buffs. One speeds you up, one gives you a shield that can absorb a lot of damage before losing it, and the third turns you transparent, making you both invincible to attacks AND able to shoot your weapon. The fourth is less than worthless, because it takes away your weapon and allows you to destroy enemies by touching them. As far as I could tell, you cannot uncover hidden items or weapons while this is active, which means late in the game when Knightmare leans heavily on hidden bridges, you will die from it. However, there’s no drawback to the transparency. It even vanishes your shield for the duration of the buff, then brings it back as it was after the timer finishes. What were they thinking with stuff? It’s just terrible design.
The only part of the game that I kept dying on was the second boss, where I’m not entirely sure what was killing me. He wasn’t firing projectiles at all, and there was nothing on the screen, but I was just perishing anyway. Since the boss looks like the grim reaper, I assume it’s some kind of death stare thing, but I couldn’t find a single reference to it anywhere online. I admit, I used emulator tomfoolery for this section. It wasn’t playing fair, so why should I? The other seven bosses are fine, I guess. Probably the highlight of the game. They’re basic bosses with little in the way of finesse, and the order of difficulty is all wrong. If you don’t count the boss that was apparently giving me fatal heart attacks via telekinesis, the third boss was far and away the hardest. So hard, in fact, that I was stressing the next couple bosses. For no reason, it turns out, because they were pushovers.
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Knightmare is beloved by a lot of MSX fans, and I can get how memories of it could be sweet. But today? What sealed the NO! for Knightmare wasn’t the lack of balance, but rather just how repetitive it is. When it comes to shmups, mediocre level design or lackluster settings can still be carried over the finish line by enjoyable combat and gameplay mechanics. Likewise, dull combat and subpar gameplay mechanics can be elevated by memorable settings and well-designed levels. Knightmare is lacking all around. All you have left is the facade of playing with a knight instead of a spaceship, a novelty which is fated to grow old fast. I’m sure this was a decent game in 1986, but all the problems with balance and enemy design assured that the past four decades have been less than kind. Verdict: NO!
TwinBee Platform: MSX Released May 25, 1986 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – TwinBee – Strategy
Well, (shrug) at least the Gradius games are coming.
Even though I didn’t like the coin-op or NES versions of Twinbee, I go into every review with an open mind. And in the case of Twinbee on the MSX, it has aspects I enjoy. Maybe it was lucky timing on my part, but if I died on the MSX version, I recovered my loadout with minimum fuss. On the other hand, any of the bosses that have shields made out of smaller enemies (such as the first boss) take much longer because the enemies respawn faster than you can shoot. It combines the same issues with the NES version, scaled-back power-ups and only getting to throw one bomb at a time, with the traditional issues almost all MSX games have, IE slice scrolling and sluggish speed. Okay, I probably wasn’t going to have a good time either way, but the MSX version is easily the weakest Twinbee game and a contender for worst game in this feature. Verdict: NO!
Gradius Platform: NES Released April 25, 1986 Directed by Hiroyasu Machiguchi Developed by Konami Included with a Nintendo Switch Online Subscription (Standard) Wikis: Konami – Gradius
A special edition of Gradius, known as the Archimendes Hen edition. It’s the same game, but it replaces the item boxes with ramen noodles. Ain’t that quirky?
Yep, Gradius on the NES is a lot more fun than the coin-op. I’m not just saying that because I just pulled off a no-cheating, one-death run on my second play-through during this session. It really isn’t that hard with autofire, especially since there were multiple moments where I legitimately can’t explain how I survived. Specifically in the one section of the game where the NES’ CPU can’t keep up with the on-screen action. The little brains? I for sure should have died multiple times against them and didn’t. For the life of me (heh, literally) I can’t figure out what happened, but I didn’t have any shields and it sure seemed like I got shot directly. Maybe one of my options took the bullet. Maybe it was related to slowdown, which really only happens during this part. Maybe it had to do with my own shots somehow cancelling out the bullets, which tracks with the fact that I pumped an entire screen’s worth of laser blasts into some (but not all) of the brains and they didn’t die. Either way, I know I didn’t dodge every bullet, so a single-death run wasn’t as impressive as I figured it would have been before starting this project.
I didn’t want to rewind since I was having a great run, but I sort of wish I had laid down a save state so I could go back and inspect this segment. Was I shot? I think so, but the game didn’t say so. I tried to replicate it later and nothing like what I thought I was seeing happened. Maybe it wasn’t as close. Maybe I was just “in the zone.”
Gradius had to make three major sacrifices in making the journey to the NES. The first is that a player can only carry two options instead of four. It’s just as well, because the second sacrifice is a smaller enemy count and dramatically toned-down set pieces. This has its positives and negatives. On the plus side, I don’t believe the challenge is ever unfair. Never. But, it completely undermines the excitement of major set-pieces. The iconic volcanoes aren’t so iconic here, having been reduced from holding on for dear life in the coin-op to parking in a safe spot and taking a nap on the NES. The third sacrifice is that vertical scrolling is removed from levels that feature it. I’m fine with this because it allows for a more fine-tuned, streamlined experience.
Were this a real thing, with gravity as seen in the game, imagine actually camping under this. It’d be pretty exciting, right? Am I the only one to imagine that? By the way, there’s warp zones in Gradius NES. I never successfully activated one, but I did get some of the hidden points and 1ups.
Gradius NES is probably the game that really blew up the Gradius format. I can’t prove it, except to say that Gradius sold a million copies on the Famicom alone, and while it wasn’t quite as successful as Twinbee, it assured that Konami would be sticking around. Without the burden of relying on cheap shots to keep the coins flowing, Gradius is transformed into a solid shooter. One that still has the same problems with set-pieces and memorable bosses. The Big Core MK I is awesome, but variety is the spice of life, and hell, the home port is even missing a couple segments. There’s no Electric Cage on the NES and you don’t even take out the final brain yourself. The game just sort of congratulates you after you reach it. It’s so awkward. If the coin-op Gradius is the proof of concept, the NES/Famicom Gradius is really just another evolution of it. “Yep, it works as a home game. We’re onto something!” And hey, Gradius NES was good enough to end the losing streak in this feature. Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Collection
Salamander Remastered as Life Force Platform: Arcade Released July 4, 1986 Developed by Konami Included in Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection ($19.99) Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) To Be Included in Gradius Origins Wikis: Konami – Gradius (Salamander) – Gradius (Life Force) – Strategy
I really wish they’d stop doing this type of thing in these games. It’s never exciting.
Regardless of which version you play, I’m not in love with Salamander. The basic idea is “Gradius, only instead of taking place in outer space, the game takes place inside a gigantic creature.” An idea so good that Natsume stole it for Abadox. Actually, they improved it. I found Salamander to be overall a little more bland in terms of setting and theme than I was expecting, but the gameplay is clearly Gradius, especially if you play the revamped version. I ended up playing almost six full play sessions before figuring out my final verdict on both versions. Apparently Konami had second thoughts on their original build, which was released in the US as “Life Force.” So they remastered it, with the updated ROM reaching Japanese arcades in 1987 under the name “Life Force.” My apologies for how confusing this whole thing is. So, to be clear, if you play Salamander or the version of Life Force which has the following title screens:
That’s the original version, which is the most playable version if you just want to see the ending. If you tinker with the dip switch settings and then flood the game with credits, you can start rounds of Salamander with as many as 63 lives. You’re going to need them. After a few practice games where I cheated my bony little ass off and memorized the level layouts and boss patterns, I decided to see if I could finish the game with those 63 lives. Mind you, it took me a TON of rewinding to figure out how to survive the first boss simply coming to life, before the battle even really started. Well, I did figure it out and started the actual no-cheating game session pretty well. Idiot that I am, I thought “hot damn, I’m awesome at this!” when, on my third play session with this ROM, I made it to the second boss without dying. Then I started dropping like flies, including fourteen lives alone to the fourth boss. FOURTEEN! Mind you, this was on the easiest dip switch setting!
Those aren’t bullets. They’re balls that ricochet unpredictably. They’re not all bouncing at the same angle, and that means there is basically no safe spot on the board. I’ve seriously never seen the likes of this. This isn’t a “challenge” at this point. A challenge suggests a survivable situation. This is being shook by the ankles to empty your pockets.
And there’s a few other shady sections of the game where I’m convinced that they’re unsurvivable. It’s pretty obvious that, at first, Konami didn’t plan to make Salamander fully part of the Gradius franchise but rather a “faster paced” spin-off. There’s no item bar in this original build. Instead, enemies drop the pick-ups, and they’re not always useful. Missiles and options get dropped the most, and by the way, when you die, your options linger on the screen for a while and you’ll have a small window to pick them up. For this reason, you never want to linger at the edge of the screen if you can avoid it, since you won’t have a chance to regain the options.
You’ll probably have all four options within one minute into the first stage. I wasn’t kidding when I said the game is generous with them.
But even if you do lose them, it won’t take long to get them back. Options are a much more common item drop than the two gun upgrades. The valuable laser or even the slightly less valuable ripple (making its debut) are too rare in my opinion. The laser, especially, is very valuable to have. If I could hold onto it, I could usually make it pretty far. When I lost it, that’s when my life counter started to look more like a stopwatch. BUT, I did finish the game in 34 total lives. So, if you simply want to see all Salamander has to offer without the use of rewind or save states, this is the version to play. On the other hand, if the title screen looks like this:
Then you’re playing the revamped version of the original coin-op that I’ll refer to as “Japanese Life Force.” The big difference is the item bar from Gradius is back, along with the power capsules, so you can choose your loadout at your own leisure. Well, provided you get enough item drops. Oh, and you can have a max of seven lives and NO continues unless you’re playing co-op. Despite that, in some ways, Japanese Life Force is the easier game. The first boss, for example, launches easier and is much easier to defeat. The original is on the left and the revamped version is on the right.
Salamander
Japanese Life Force
This is even more noticeable with the second boss. Again, original to the left, Japanese Life Force on the right.
Salamander/Life Force (1986)
Japanese Life Force (1987)
And the boss above that took me fourteen lives I instead beat without dying in my best non-cheating play session. Even considering those changes, in the sessions where I didn’t use rewind or save states, I only made it to the final level of Japanese Life Force once, and I can’t imagine I would ever be able to finish it. It becomes maddening at times, like this sequence here:
These two styles of enemy attack formations happen back-to-back, a sequence that lasts for over over a minute, and you’re very likely to drop multiple lives during it, as there’s really no place to hide for more than a second or two. While the second part of it seems easier with co-op, the first part sure isn’t. It’s like Konami said “arcade operators are going to be so pissed at us if anyone makes it this far. GET THEM OFF THE MACHINE, by any means necessary!” Needless to say, any hope I had of finishing Japanese Life Force without cheating ended in the above segment. One final “GET OFF MY MACHINE” moment happens in the final level with this:
And mind you, those panels in the background also kill you.
But even if I had gotten to the final boss, I wouldn’t have had enough lives to make it past the escape sequence, which looks like this:
This is high speed, and those barriers weren’t there a split-second earlier.
Hell, if the bosses didn’t self-destruct after X amount of time, I wouldn’t have made it as far as I did. For all of Salamander’s problems, I was able to kill every single boss. I think, at least. Come to think of it, I probably only got past that boss that I lost fourteen lives on when it self-destructed. But, if they did die via self-destruction, it happened while I was actively shooting them. That wasn’t the case with Japanese Life Force. This right here wasn’t my proudest moment, but what’s especially annoying was I had pumped as many shots as humanly possibly into this thing with all four options AND I had the laser. It’s not like I spent the entire fight rope-a-doping it. I beat the first boss about a second after it opened its eye. This boss, I wondered if my gun wasn’t getting through. Apparently it wasn’t, because this happened:
Not exactly the most satisfying way to beat a level. And that’s ultimately how I reached a unanimous verdict on both Salamander AND Japanese Life Force. For all of Gradius’ problems, it feels like it came from a place of inspiration. Salamander largely feels like a game that exists because they NEEDED a sequel to Gradius but didn’t know exactly how to go about it. Most of the settings aren’t that exotic or enticing, regardless of which version you play. It never feels like you’re inside a giant alien, except maybe the opening stage. Speaking of which, why would the first boss be a brain and the last boss be a giant eyeball? What is the point of an eyeball without a brain? Either way, the level design never rises above “average” and the vertical levels are pretty boring in general, regardless of whether you’re playing co-op or not, which is what I assume is the reason for the relatively conservative layouts. I get how Gradius can still be popular in 2025, but Salamander/Life Force never rose above being the “other” game in the franchise for a reason. Verdict: NO!
Gradius aka Nemesis Platform: MSX Released July 25, 1986 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
Oh hey! HEY! What’s this?
Believe it or not, this is the only release in four different Gradius/Salamander games that’s a port of the coin-ops. Salamander, Gradius 2, and Nemesis III on the MSX are all original games, and trust me, you’ll want to read about them. As for this first MSX title, like most games on the platform, Gradius scrolls by loading in slices. It’s pretty annoying and takes getting used to, but once you do, it becomes obvious really quickly why the Nemesis series on MSX is so legendary. Given the limitations, this is an excellent port that cuts fewer key elements out of the coin-op than the NES version did. You’re limited to two options and the Electric Cage is absent, but otherwise, it has everything the coin-op has. You even get to, gasp, kill the brain at the end. But, where it really gets bonkers is that MSX version has the most additions of any home port of Gradius, including a very memorable new stage that’s pictured above. It’s not entirely a smoke-and-mirrors rehash of the Moai stage, either. It feels new. There’s also hidden rooms, for example, if you bring your ship right here:
Then you enter a bonus room that’s similar in structure to levels you’ll encounter in Gradius III.
You cannot get through these without the double, so if you go into this stage with a laser, you need to give it up.
In addition to all that, the lasers and missiles come with second upgrades. Even after experimenting, I didn’t feel a difference in the laser’s second upgrade, but I think it’s supposed to fire faster. The missiles, on the other hand, do become noticeably more efficient. So, there’s a little more to Gradius MSX than you would expect, and it’s actually a genuinely good game. Probably equally as hard as the NES version, or maybe even a touch easier. While it spams the screen with more bullets at times, I was able to take down enemies like the smaller brains and the Moai statues much more quickly than I did in almost any other Gradius. It was the MSX version that made me realize what a grave mistake Gradius Origins is making in not including the home ports. The coin-op’s NO!, which likely will carry over to all the additional ROMs included in that set, means it earns $0 in value. Had they included the home ports, not only would it have put Gradius in the plus column, but they could have included some incredible special features comparing the versions. Alas. Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Moero TwinBee: Cinnamon Hakase o Sukue! aka Stinger Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released November 21, 1986 Directed by Kazuhiro Aoyama Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – TwinBee – Strategy
I’m actually surprised they themed the underwater enemies correctly. You’ll see why.
The game known as Stinger in America was the US debut of the TwinBee series. What a waste of time it was. If I didn’t know the story on it, I’d swear it was a rip-off of TwinBee. It feels nothing like a Konami game, and it certainly doesn’t look like one. It looks like one of those games by a second-tier AAA developer. I get that they were trying for a much more cartoonish look than they normally do, but there’s a major drawback: keeping track of enemies and bullets. Especially if you’re able to spam the screen with the Gradius-like laser gun. In the original TwinBee, I found myself saying “wait, when did I lose my arms?” a lot but it was nothing compared to how often I said it playing this game. Especially in later stages, it’s just too hard to see everything.
It kind of reminds me of the style of graphics seen in Mappy-Land, only that was a good game. By the way, the Japanese FDS build of this has a THREE PLAYER co-op. Huh. That’s a first. Sadly, I only got to play two player co-op briefly. I can’t force my family to play games with me. I mean, the judge was very specific about that. So while I can’t say I did play the three player mode, it wouldn’t have made a difference. It probably does explain the simplicity of this whole thing.
I take back every mean thing I said about the lack of memorable enemies in the original TwinBee. Hoo boy. Like, you’re flying through the Egyptian-themed stage. What do you expect the enemies to be? Sentient pyramids? Sphinxes? Mummies? Nah, clothespins, coat hangers, and clown shoes. What the actual f*ck, development team? Oh, and the boss of the Egypt stage? A goddamned giant saxophone. ARE YOU F*CKING KIDDING ME? Ancient Egypt, one of the most common tropes in video games and certainly one of the easiest to build a roster of enemies around, and the boss is a goddamn Saxophone that you fight AFTER you spent the level shooting down clown shoes and coat hangers? By the way, “Clown Shoes and Coat Hangers” would be a great name for a death metal band. Anyway, later stages do have better enemy design, but by that point, the mood had sort of been ruined.
Maybe they’re bolt cutters?
As you might have noticed, Stinger has side-scrolling levels in addition to traditional TwinBee vertical ones. In the side-scrolling levels, there’s no bomb button. Bombs are dropped on the ground automatically when you shoot your weapon. The other button is used to fire hearts that don’t hurt enemies at all and are only useful for juggling the bells, presumably through the power of love. It’s a curious thing, because your normal shots also keep the bells afloat and are more useful in general than the hearts are. However, when you switch to vertical levels, the heart button becomes the bomb button and the traditional targeting system returns. It’s a confusing decision for a confused game.
Speaking of confusing, you know how skulls are the universal no-no of gaming? Well, sometimes when you bomb a ground target, it leaves a question mark. Sometimes, touching the question mark leaves a skull. It freaked me out, but it turns out, a skull just means “nothing.” You didn’t get an item or points or anything. Seriously, a skull? In my first play session, I was trying to avoid them. I thought I’d, like, die or something.
Even stranger is that the game doesn’t alternate the two play styles, and the ordering is all wrong. Stages 1, 3, 7 are side-scrolling while 2, 4, 5, and 6 are normal vertical TwinBee stages. The vertical levels are easily the highlights of the game. TwinBee is meant to be a top-down game, and the gameplay of it, simply put, does not translate to a side view. Even with the bells, they don’t feel like TwinBee stages. Hell, they didn’t even draw the arms on the ship, which is just as well because you can’t lose arms in those stages. Wow. The side-scrolling stages are total disasters that have NO VALUE. They never have clever enemies or attack formations. They’re some of the most boring stages in this entire feature. I get that side-scrolling was the biggest thing in gaming at the time, but not every game should have it. And then there’s the bosses. There’s extreme strobing right before the fight starts, so I figure I should mention you should support my friends at AbleToPlay.
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I had to deliberately not shoot for a while to get quality photos of them. That’s because I was able to kill the majority of the bosses before they even fully spawned. No trick to it. No secret. I started unloading my firepower on them as soon as they started to blink into existence and that usually resulted in them blowing up before I even saw what color they were. BUT, if you allow it to spawn, they take more hits. It’s so damn weird. It feels like it was meant to be a secret method of beating them, but I didn’t do anything fancy at all. I was just already firing when they started to appear. Who wouldn’t? Why would anyone design bosses that have this built into them? I swear, there’s positive reviews coming for this franchise, but the second TwinBee game is an absolute bore. Verdict: NO!
Battlantis Platform: Arcade Released July, 1987 Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE Listing at Konami Wiki
“People liked Space Invaders a decade ago, and times never change! What if we took Galaga or Space Invaders and replaced the aliens with barbarians and vikings?” And that’s really what Battlantis is. It’s also a game clearly optimized for co-op. If playing by yourself, unless you shoot absolutely perfectly, you’re going to find yourself in plenty of unsurvivable situations. Battlantis is a gallery shooter where the basic concept is you’re using what looks like a minigun (I think it’s supposed to be a crossbow but it looks like a minigun) to fend off an invading hoard. If enemies reach the castle walls, they’ll begin to pull themselves up. If they get onto the castle, you have to make believe your character is incapable of turning his body 90° or even just holding his arm out, because there’s no way to kill the enemies once they’re on the same plane as you. Well, unless you have an item that shoots to the sides, which I got once in my entire solo session. Too many basic enemies take multiple shots to kill, and this is before you factor in the three shields that start every level that block YOUR shots.
The three “shields” are presumably a practical joke. You can’t shoot through them and enemies are usually (not sometimes, USUALLY) placed directly behind them to impede your ability to make progress. What a stupid game.
Naturally some enemy projectiles fly up and over the shields, because “lulz.” Unless you’re playing co-op, there’s little in the way of relief. Battlantis is stingy with power-ups to begin with, all of which run on a relatively short timer, and often the ones it does give you are only useful for taking out three or four normal baddies at most. One of the game’s main tricks is to have enemies arrive on opposite ends of the playfield, assuring one of them will kill you. The point of video games is beating overwhelming odds, but sometimes the odds cross the line from “heroic” to “actual madness.” Battlantis isn’t a total wash, as the game is MUCH more manageable with two players, which also negates the insufferable tempo of the single player experience. It also features boss fights that are enjoyable enough. Actually, the bosses are a lot more balanced than the levels that lead up to them, because the actual combat is a sluggish bore that is never, ever fun. Any lord that would leave one guy with a crossbow to single-handedly defend against these numbers is a lord that deserves to lose his f’n castle. Verdict: NO!
Flak Attack aka MX 5000 Platform: Arcade Released August, 1987 Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Listing on Konami Wiki
It just doesn’t look exciting, does it?
Clearly trying to rub some of that glow off of Top Gun, Konami created this shooter that has the worst name AND worst alternative name. Then again, they’re generic names for a generic game. Now, don’t mistake that for a BAD game. Flak Attack is fine, or at least four out of five levels are. Oh, and like Ghosts ‘n Goblins, you have to beat the game twice to get the ending. I hate that sh*t, but it is what it is. Despite the fighter pilot motif, it’s probably best to think of Flak Attack as TwinBee if it had a personality lobotomy. You have two forms of attacking: straight ahead and bombing the ground. Unlike TwinBee, you earn power-ups by killing enemies. Quite a few enemies, actually. Both the gun and the bombs have separate meters that slowly fill up as you take out targets. It’s actually an effective incentive to not miss any baddies, but I think it takes too long for the meters to fill up, especially for the bombs. I didn’t get my first upgrade for them until the second level. Mind you, the meters are emptied between levels, too.
These lightning bolts are complete and total bullsh*t, happening during lulls in the combat and increasing in frequency during the final three levels of the second loop. There’s no warning for them. There’s no methodology to anticipate or dodge them. Even calling this a “GOTCHA!” feels wrong. While I’m sure if you play this enough you can memorize the safe zones, I don’t really care. Who would play THIS GAME that much? So, this is straight-up cheating and the one thing I cannot forgive Flak Attack for. So, if there’s no ability to rewind in the emulator Flak Attack is with, the verdict changes to NO! just for lightning bolts.
The big twist with the traditional scrolling formula is that, when you reach the boss, the scrolling stops, the ship’s sprite shrinks and you enter a Star Fox-like all-range mode. The bosses all require you to bomb them instead of shooting them. Take my word for it: you’ll want to avoid the speed-up icons, which are the only items dropped that aren’t tied to the meter. I never felt like I was moving too loosely in the main game, but when I entered the all-range mode, yeah, I felt the speed ups. Your bombs have a relatively short range and so you have to be a little too close for comfort to attack the bosses. But, they are pretty dang fun battles.
“ALL RANGE MODE!!”
The BS lightning bolts aside, Flak Attack is a perfectly decent vanilla game. At least until you get to the fifth level, where bullet visibility becomes a MAJOR issue. I blew up several times without realizing what was getting me because they decided the background should be a series of silver pipes. I’m fine with visually busy backgrounds as long as the bullets stand out. When they don’t, I have a problem with it.
Between the lightning bolts, other random explosions (that’s what the pink circle is in the above picture), the low visibility, and the slowness of upgrading your weapons, you’d swear this was a game that was sabotaged by the development team. It’s kind of a miracle that Flak Attack rises to the level of decent, but it does so despite itself. Even though it has the personality of a cotton ball, Flak Attack isn’t a bad little game at all. The enemies explode with a nice pop that makes the combat satisfying enough to never bore. Okay, so the game needed a bigger variety of enemies, and it probably needed more upgrades than it gives you or maybe a lower penalty for dying. It’s not worth the $7.99 Arcade Archives price. In fact, I wouldn’t say this is a game anyone should seek out just to own it. But, if something like my fictional Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection existed, Flak Attack is the ideal game to pad the game count by one. Players DO NOT need games like Flak Attack, but prestige retro collections do. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Collection
Gradius 2 aka Nemesis II Platform: MSX Released August 22, 1987 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
Oh baby! I knew this feature would be worth doing!
Don’t let the name fool you. Besides being a part of the Gradius series, this is NOT the Gradius II most people are familiar with. In fact, not only does Gradius 2 (note the use of a number instead of Roman Numerals) predate the coin-op game that would go on to be known as Vulcan Venture, but the more commonly known Gradius II isn’t based on this, either. Gradius 2 on the MSX is an entirely original member of the Gradius franchise, and it’s excellent. Seriously, it took me a while but I finally get to review an MSX game that solidified that console’s reputation for quality curios. See, Gradius 2 isn’t just a series of new Gradius levels and settings. That’s part of it, and what levels are here are fantastic and worthy of the franchise. Some of them work as sort of prototypes for future Gradius II/III levels, but even those play radically different. Does this look familiar?
Yea, I’ve got a lot of firepower.
Well, it might look like levels from Salamander/Life Force or Gradius II, but it’s totally different. You’re not dodging massive blasts of fire. It’s actually more like a cross between that stage and the volcanoes from the first game, but it absolute works, and it even stands out on its own with these:
There’s also several unique, original twists on the main design of the Big Core MK ship, but the biggest twist of all is what happens when you finish them. In my first playthrough, I was like “why do they take so long to explode after you beat them? Gosh, it really hurts the pacing.” But, it turns out that after you defeat a boss, before it explodes, you can fly into it to acquire new weapons that you can spend your item points on. You do need to defeat the bosses quickly in order to earn one. 30 seconds or less for one upgrade, 15 seconds or less for two.
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There’s also some risk/reward factors to consider. As you acquire more upgrades, the item bar becomes longer. Of course, this means that it can take longer for you to get enough item points to regain a full load-out if you die. Or, you don’t even need to die. The shield is always the last item on the bar, so every new addition to the bar is a +1 for how many item points you need to light it again. The new weapons, including wide-angled lasers, are likely overpowered. I became an unstoppable tank for large sections of the game. But, it’s fun, and that’s all I’ve ever cared about. In addition to all of that, there’s new capsules that act as temporary boosts that do things like make your options spin around you or turn your ship into a drill. This really is a fantastic game.
You’ll want to make sure that the version you’re playing, if you use the flamethrower-like weapon, fixes a bug that stops you from being able to shoot these barriers. Otherwise, you will die. Hell, I died here several times anyway.
There’s only one major knock on Gradius 2. The true final level can only be reached after completing two cycles of levels, and how it’s handled is a bummer. After you beat one cycle, you have to replay the stages in reverse order, meaning the start of the back-half forces you to re-beat stages you literally just finished. If that doesn’t sound fun, well, it’s not. The only virtue to this is that the levels are shorter the second time, but it still sucks the way they set it up and I wish they hadn’t done it like that. Otherwise, Gradius 2 is like the ultimate expansion pack of the first MSX Gradius. It uses the same engine and has a similar appearance, but it feels grander than you would think its hardware limitations would allow. And now I’m really annoyed that Gradius Origins doesn’t include these. If they aren’t hidden in the collection somewhere, I’m going to shake my fist so much. Verdict: YES! – $6 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Life Force aka Salamander Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released September 25, 1987 Directed by Shigeharu Umezaki Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius – Strategy
There’s moments of brilliance and high tension in Life Force. I wish the game could maintain it. Also, please note that only the Famicom version allows for three options. Two is the limit in the US port.
Life Force has a very serious pacing problem. While the NES version doesn’t necessarily utilize the dirty tactics of the coin-op, it still has most of the problems of the original. The setting is boring. The enemies are (mostly) uninspired. If this were released in 2025, it’s a safe bet Life Force would be DLC for Gradius, and not even amazing DLC. Also, the US version has the thirty lives code from Contra (apparently the LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT part doesn’t matter) so after familiarizing myself with the Japanese version, I decided to see if I could finish the game in a single pack of 30 lives. The counter started at 29 and finished with 16, but that doesn’t count all the extra lives I found or earned along the way. And, I felt the experience was a little underwhelming.
The NES version surely doesn’t scale right. Easily the hardest part in the entire game was this right here. It didn’t help that I died right before it and lost my loadout, so I had to go into it with my peashooter. And in the home version, the bosses don’t feel sorry for you and die on their own.
Easily the highlight of the game is the bosses. They’re a big improvement over the coin-op and the only reason why my verdict wasn’t as simple as it should have been. They’re all pretty fun to fight, and despite the game being only six levels, there’s a whopping three new bosses to battle in the home version. There’s also some set pieces I enjoyed that are exclusive to the NES game. A speed zone in the fourth level. An Egyptian theme that starts halfway through the fifth level. Which obviously means the game abandoned the whole “flying inside a giant creature” theme it’s supposed to have. I mean, seriously, you just suddenly enter a structure that looks like this:
“Now entering the Testicle Temple.”
And it’s like……. okie-dokie?! I guess the people previously eaten by the giant space creature you’re blowing-up from the inside decided to make the best of a bad situation and built a temple to thank the gods before they became poop. “Or maybe the giant space creature ate the temple whole!” my father proposed, but I dunno. Seems like a good way to get kidney stones to me. Also, the boss of that stage is King Tut, who shows up constantly in games despite the fact that Tutankhamen was, to put it mildly, physically and developmentally disabled. Okay, fine, that’s actually not Tut himself. You’re right, because it’s really his death mask. You know, the thing he needed because he f*cking died at the age of 18 from, well, everything. This includes goddamned bone necrosis. Do you know what that means? It means his skeleton died before the rest of him did! Holy crap! He certainly lived in constant, inescapable pain and suffering until dying at the age of 18, presumably after speaking his final words, which records show were “oh thank the gods.”
Good boss fight, don’t get me wrong. And yes, the mask isn’t actually supposed to have the likeness of Tut, but rather a mix of Tut and Osiris. Well, maybe not. They almost certainly, no joke, repurposed a mask that was made for previous pharaohs and gave it to Tut instead. So, the most famous object of Ancient Egypt was probably regifted. Who knew?
But the Tut battle is also indicative of a bigger problem. As you enter the boss chamber, it takes nearly a full minute for the actual battle to start, and all but a single second of that is spent waiting around. The ceiling starts to collapse one brick at a time, but you only have to dodge one brick during that entire sequence, then wait out the rest. It’s boring. There’s several extended sequences with no enemies and no bosses. It’s not like the setting or scenery is interesting, either. It’s just a lull in the action. That’s why I really struggled with this verdict quite a bit, just like I did with the coin-op.
The original bits are pretty memorable, and Life Force absolutely needed them.
Not even the co-op helped because it just made the game even easier. Originally, I had Life Force NES down as a NO! In a genre defined by white knuckle action, Life Force on the NES just doesn’t offer enough of it. But, NO! didn’t feel right, either. Ultimately, I think there’s just enough highlights to push Life Force over the finish line for what might be my least enthusiastic YES! in a long time. That’s almost entirely based on the bosses, the NES-exclusive parts and the fact that it should take under a half hour to finish. Before writing this feature, I was certain I’d like this more than the NES Gradius. I was wrong. Life Force is a massive step backwards from Gradius and is, at best, barely okay. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Falsion Platform: Famicom Disk System Released October 21, 1987 Developed by Konami Utilizes the Famicom 3D System Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RELEASED Wikis: Konami – Strategy
Thank you to my friend David Medina, who has experience with the Famicom 3D System, for helping out with this one.
What you’re seeing above is a paused single moment of Falsion, only the sprites themselves are slightly out of alignment. It’s the shutter effect of the Famicom 3D System, which is such a non-entity in gaming history that I completely forgot it exists. “It is very similar to the Sega Master System 3D glasses except it has a rubber strap that will fit on anyone’s head. Like the Sega glasses it has LCD shutter technology. Each side flashes rapidly so the blurred images on the TV creates the illusion of depth” says David Medina. Only seven games were made for it, and only two of those were converted for the global audience: The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner and a game known as Highway Star in Japan that has a more famous NES name: Rad Racer (which I’ve kind of covered as part of Nintendo World Championships 1990 in Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review). That’s the game that the dweeb plays with the Power Glove in the feature-length Nintendo advertisement The Wizard.
Am I fighting the Phoenix Suns over here?
Falsion never made the jump over, and it’s easy to understand why. I didn’t get to play this with the 3D effects, which, if the above screenshot doesn’t make plainly obvious, is literally the only thing the game has going for it. Even if I had the means to do the 3D, I couldn’t. I have epilepsy, and 3D media is a strict no-no. For that reason, I originally had a wishy-washy non-review here. While editing this feature, I felt icky about my Falsion non-review. “Come on, Cathy. You know the difference between a good game and a bad one, even without imaginary depth perception.” So, yeah, Falsion is a terribly boring game, and I’m going to guess that’s true no matter how you play it. It’s just a bland After Burner/Space Harrier wannabe where, if you have an expensive and underutilized accessory, you can see layers. Ooooh, layers. Well, that totally makes up for having graphics that look like this:
That’s embarrassing.
Okay, so even though it offers the option of 2D gameplay, reviewing only the 2D version isn’t TOTALLY fair to the game, which heavily relies on the 3D illusion for the gameplay to make logical sense. You can’t trust your senses or your instincts playing Falsion without the glasses. Like, take a look at this screenshot:
I can pass directly through those sprites and not die, because they’re actually closer to the camera than I am. The problem is you can’t really tell where any enemies are in relation to your position if they come from any angle but the horizon, where you can see their approach. So, playing Falsion in 2D mode requires brute-force memorization of the enemies and their patterns. Now, some people like that style of shmup, but I don’t. I like instinctive, reactive gameplay. Granted, it’s not hard to memorize the enemies or anything, because Falsion helpfully repeats attack patterns, usually via mirroring their position on the screen, to the point of exhaustion. When I actually played the game from start to finish, it became really clear really fast that Falsion has very limited appeal as a video game. It’s a novelty, and nothing more. The enemies aren’t memorable in design or clever in their attack patterns. It’s really basic, and that was almost certainly to accommodate the 3D gimmick. Even the boss fights are pretty damn boring (and you can’t pause the game during them for some reason).
David (not to be confused with regular IGC consultant Dave Sanders, designer of legendary pinball table Alien and my go-to arcade guru) actually has played this with the Famicom 3D System. “If you played Space Harrier 3D for SMS with the glasses before you get the idea how the 3D effects work. Unfortunately you will need an older CRT monitor to be able to see the effects. The 3D System goggles will not work with any flat screen. While it’s a cool little gimmick these days it’s nothing worthwhile that would make one without a CRT shell out big aftermarket prices for one just to stare at the game like you’re hallucinating with sunglasses on. The game is easily playable without them.” He would have given it a YES! Safe to say we’re not in agreement, but I thank him for helping out! You know, I have some pretty damn cool friends.
While I agree with David that Falsion is “playable” without the glasses, I certainly wouldn’t give it a YES! and I’m fairly confident that would be true even with the 3D effects. I don’t think the game is cynical or anything. The development team’s heart was in the right place, but the technology just wasn’t there for the amount of depth and layers they wanted to achieve. I think with 3D glasses, this would probably have a slight touch of the uncanny valley to it. There would be no shadows, shading, and the limited colors mean the sprites aren’t detailed enough to truly pull off the illusion of depth. It would be like having popsicle stick puppets in a shoot ’em up. None of the backgrounds are particularly interesting, and as noted above, some of them are downright embarrassing. I think most people would get over the 3D effect quickly, because Falsion is just not a fun video game, with or without depth perception. Verdict: NO! But, if a collection changed it to red-cyan 3D and included glasses, I’d probably award some kind of bonus value for going the extra mile.
A-Jax aka Typhoon Platform: Arcade Released December, 1987 Developed by Konami Included in Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection ($19.99) Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Listing at Konami Wiki
Golly, it looks fun, doesn’t it?
Everything you need to know about how much A-Jax/Typhoon wants you to enjoy it can be summed up by how weapon drops behave. A red helicopter flies onto the screen that you shoot to create the power-up. You then have to shoot that to change what it is. So far, so commonplace. The problem is the power-up drifts towards the side of the screen, and it doesn’t take long to become out of reach. Just to prove that, yes, the designers were deliberately being pricks, later levels usually spawn enemies firing missiles that occupy the space right in front of the helicopter. It’s basically telling you “no, you’re really not getting one of the later power-ups. At the very most, you can get one of the early ones in the sequence. Maybe!” It’s such trollish design, but that’s the A-Jax experience. A possibly amazing game that comes across as a giant middle finger to players.
The crappiest thing about the sheer amount of self-sabotage on display here? There’s a damn good game in here! Awesome level design. Very enjoyable boss fights.
I’m not naive. I get that we’re now firmly in the era of “coin-ops don’t make money if a player can last a long time on a single quarter.” Fine. But there’s situations in A-Jax that sure seem unsurvivable unless you preemptively move into the right spots. Unless you want to put time into memorizing the entire layout and how to manipulate things like the enemy spawns or the item drops (which change locations depending on where you’re at on screen), you’re not going to last. Hell, there’s even situations where I think you can only survive if you go against your shmup instinct and not shoot the formation of enemies swooping in to kill you. When you kill them, they launch their missiles immediately, giving you no room to dodge. I guess that’s a novel approach to risk/reward, but there doesn’t seem to be much of the “reward” side of the equation. And by the way, all that criticism is only against the 2D sections. Because three times in the game, this happens:
It looks like a cutscene in that screenshot, but actually these are the “3D” levels, and they’re really good, especially the bosses. I’ve seen plenty of examples of the “gigantic boss is actually the background” trick that classic games had to rely on, so when I say the trio of 3D bosses in A-Jax are some of the best examples of that method done in a way that’s totally convincing, I hope it means something. The 3D stages in general are very short, but memorable and exciting. The difficulty drastically scales back for them, too. It’s almost like they remembered that the whole point of video games is for the players to have fun, not for the sh*thead developers to treat players the same way sadistic kids armed with firecrackers treat bullfrogs.
I was genuinely surprised that a game like this gives you unlimited heat-seeking missiles. That almost never happens in these types of games, but I’ll be damned if the combat isn’t SO satisfying.
So why are there only three of the “3D” stages, and more importantly, why are the stages ordered differently depending on which region’s ROM you’re playing? Dave shot down my original theory that it was a budget thing. He thinks this was meant to be a showcase for Konami’s new high performance, low cost 8-bit arcade system without over-saturating the technology or gameplay style for a hypothetical future game. As proof, he cites the fact that the international version starts with a 3D stage, while the original Japanese version opens with a 2D stage. But then a new theory came into being: Sega launched After Burner in July of 1987, five months before A-Jax released. With all due respect to A-Jax, despite the fact that it had a five month head start, After Burner looks a lot more futuristic and cutting edge. Mind you, I really liked the look of A-Jax’s 3D stuff, but it’s much slower and far less intense than After Burner. My gut instinct says the dev team was, at least in part, following the trend and the three stages are what they could whip out in four or five months. Either way, they’re the highlight of the game.
The 2D bosses are good, too. Unlike the stages themselves, there’s predictable rhythms that make them enjoyable. Still very difficult, but not to the point of being demoralizing.
Part of me wishes that Konami had recognized how entertaining those 3D stages were and just sh*tcanned the 2D aspects. I’d rather have five or six sublime levels that last a minute or two each than the mean-spirited 2D levels. The other part of me wishes they just hadn’t gone into this with such a mean-spirited attitude to begin with. The 2D levels could be sick if they toned them back dramatically. What really sucks is A-Jax never got a console home port during the era, which would have certainly toned back the difficulty like every other Konami home port. This is not a NO! verdict that I want to give out. There’s moments of brilliance in A-Jax. There’s also moments where I literally couldn’t see what was killing me due to the screen being so spammed with bullets. There’s no instant respawning when you die. A-Jax is like building an amazing water slide and replacing the water with honey: it takes all the fun out of the experience and just makes a mess of things. Verdict: NO!
Salamander Platform: MSX Released December 26, 1987 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
This is only loosely based on the coin-op.
Darn it. After Gradius 2 on the MSX, I really thought these MSX versions would run the table on YES! verdicts. Especially since this version of Life Force has permanent upgrades, just like Gradius 2. They’re acquired differently here, as you gain upgrades every fifteen “E” items you collect. These are found by destroying key enemies along the walls, and they turn you into a death machine. Seriously, the corkscrew lasers had my jaw literally drop when I first saw them. Look at this:
You’ll also note that there’s a max of four options in this game, a first for MSX.
And there’s whole new bosses and levels, and some unexpected twists. Like, levels will scroll horizontal AND vertical, without your ship changing directions. You fly sideways when it happens, and it’s unexpected and kind of cool. This seems to check all the boxes that Gradius and Gradius 2 did, but those games kept up the pace as best as the MSX could handle. I don’t feel Salamander did at all. You move forward too slowly, but the challenge isn’t adjusted for it. I’m not even sure they used a modified version of the engine built for Gradius, as Salamander feels smaller, slower, and a lot less intense. It’s kind of silly at times, too. Like you can’t get the full experience without plugging a copy of Gradius 2 into the second cart slot. This would no doubt get corrected for a modern release, but there’s also a nonsensical bit where you can play the three middle levels in any order, but you have to play all three anyway. That’s not a positive, because they had to halt scaling to make it work. There’s no sense of increasing stakes.
The final boss is HUGE and fun to fight, but getting to it isn’t exactly thrilling.
Unlike a lot of NO! games, Salamander MSX isn’t a total stinker. The bosses are fun, as Gradius/Salamander bosses usually are. But, the game crawls along at such a sluggish pace that I did the unthinkable for this franchise: I was hitting the fast forward button on my emulator. I wasn’t dying from it, either, which is an especially damning indictment on its design. I could push the game forward, which is 3x to 4x the normal speed, for a second or two and not catch a stray bullet in the process. It’s not like I was doing this once or twice in early stages. I found myself still doing it on the last stage. The settings and themes weren’t that interesting and the level and enemy design is very dull, but even if they were better designed, inching forward as slowly as this version does would render them boring anyway. That should not be possible, ever. I’m heartbroken because I really thought I was in for a treat, but the MSX Salamander is simply too poorly paced to be all that fun. Verdict: NO!
Thunder Cross Platform: Arcade Released in 1988 Developed by Konami Included in Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection ($19.99) Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Wikis: Konami – Gradius
Oh baby! Now this is what I’m talking about!
This is the most obvious split decision I’ve ever made. No game has regional variations quite as far apart in quality as Thunder Cross. Well, and Xexex too, which I’ll get to later. For Thunder Cross, the Japanese build is one of the most inspired, enjoyable games I’ve played in the last year. A game that fundamentally wants to be an elite, popular game. And then it was sent overseas, where it apparently caught scurvy along the way. So, I have another split decision. Traditionally, I do the NO! version first, then follow it with the YES! variation. For Thunder Cross, I have to flip it around because it’s so unfathomable that a sublime game was DELIBERATELY transformed into a mediocre one. I want to spell out to my readers what a needlessly destructive design decision was made with Thunder Cross.
SPLIT DECISION – JAPANESE VERSION (aka ROM SET 1)
“I’ve got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart!”
With Thunder Cross, Konami seemed to realize that the little options that players acquire are damn fun to have, so why not base an entire game around them? They’re frequently dropped until players get the max of four. Okay, so what’s the big deal there? Two amazing twists turn Thunder Cross into the best game in this feature yet (which will last until the start of the next review). The first twist is that, when you don’t have an option-specific power-up, the button for the options adjusts how spread-out they are. You can stretch them the length of the screen, or have them fly close by the main ship. It works wonderfully, too! Feels naturally intuitive and takes a minimum amount of gameplay to adjust to. Of course, you won’t get to use it that much because of twist #2: option-specific power-ups. Those flame throwers in the above picture? That’s one of them. There’s two more: some very generous bombs (they’re called napalm but they’re not) and lasers.
Weirdly, the lasers are the least satisfying of the three, by quite a margin too. They cut through everything but not in a way that offers a nice “POW” to it, for lack of a better term. I wasn’t a fan. The napalm and flamethrowers? The smile never vanished from my face. Now, they’re limited usage based on ammo and not a set time limit, and the catch is you lose the ability to space out the options until you run out of ammo. Presumably the game would be too easy if you could still do that. But, the good news keeps coming from Thunder Cross: it’s not stingy with drops at all. Even better is that the basic guns are just as fun as the option’s gun, and picking up the same gun twice in a row gives you an even more effective version of it. The vulcans are gigantic bullets that you can fire at a fairly high rate. There’s a laser, which isn’t to be confused with the gigantic lasers the options can equip. And then there’s my new favorite gun ever: the boomerang gun. It literally shoots boomerangs. That sounds delightful, but it gets better: THEY RICOCHET! OFF EVERYTHING! Enemies! Walls! It’s f*cking awesome!
Now, if there is a problem with Thunder Cross, it’s that the enemies and bosses are nowhere near as inspired or memorable in their design as the Gradius franchise. If they had looked or sounded half as interesting as what Gradius II is about to have (and it’s up next), this would be the new favorite to finish #1 in this feature. While I won’t argue anything looks bad in any way, Thunder Cross’ sprites are very generic. I just beat the game a few times and I still don’t think I could pick a single basic enemy out of a lineup, and the bosses aren’t much better. Here’s the first boss.
I mean, it’s not the worst by any means. But it feels like something that could be cut and pasted into any space shmup, doesn’t it? And other bosses are kind of in the same boat, as are the settings and enemy sprites. If not for the stellar gameplay, Thunder Cross would be so generic that it could practically be called Spaceship Video Games: The Video Game. All the personality is limited to the gameplay, and it speaks to how well done the gameplay is that Thunder Cross is oozing personality. It’s this strange juxtaposition of bland settings and bland character design that pops to a degree it shouldn’t because it’s impossible to be bored playing this version of Thunder Cross.
This is the final boss. I’m actually kind of embarrassed for Konami on this one.
Some games are all-in on themes. Thunder Cross is all-in on a shoot ’em up experience. It’s such a generous game that it’s almost hard to believe it’s a coin-op. You respawn instantly when you die. Items are plentiful. Hell, the reason I kept dying is because the options are so visually distracting that I lost track of my ship. That’s not a joke, either. There was the occasional moment where the special weapons of the options were so big and covered the screen to such a degree that it caught me off guard when my ship suddenly blew up. There’s a BIG learning curve to anticipating when you’re being fired upon. Otherwise, this is probably one of the best of its breed I’ve played. I didn’t play these games in the order they’re listed here. At this point, it’s been a couple weeks since I played Gradius II, which has been the front-runner for best game in Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection ever since. If Thunder Cross had even a single memorable set-piece, this could have overtaken it. It’s probably one of the most forgettable good games ever made, but I suspect I won’t remember it within a year. Sure is fun while it lasts, though. Verdict: YES! – $12 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection but this review is not over.
SPLIT DECISION – US VERSION (aka ROM SET 2)
Seen in this pic: a fully powered ship in the OTHER version of Thunder Cross.
Take the previous review that already hurt badly for personality. Remove all the power-ups but the vulcan bullets. And I do mean ALL the other power-ups, including all three special guns used exclusively by the options. Hell, they even removed the ability to space-out the options. The only kindness offered is starting with two options right off the bat, plus players have the ability to drop three bombs (which are just the napalm bombs from the Japanese version) every stage. You can’t even add to that. The end result is a version of Thunder Cross that has no pulse at all. No personality. No thrilling gunplay. This thing is dead. I poked at it with a stick and everything and it’s not even twitching. Call the coroner because Thunder Cross has been murdered!
The “giant ship as a level” trope is utilized here, and it was a lot of fun in the Japanese version. It’s an unfair slog in the US version because of the lack of useful bullets.
Why on Earth would they do this? Apparently Konami had an institutional policy of beefing-up the difficulty for American releases. I guess this wasn’t just done for NES rental proofing like seen with Bayou Billy (which I reviewed in this feature). My father pointed out that arcade games are just a smaller scale form of rental so technically we could still call this a form of rental-proofing. The Japanese game is probably the easiest Konami shmup to grace arcades up to this point thanks to the wrecking ball strength of the guns. I don’t know if the only way to juice the difficulty was to strip out all the fun items, but it was probably the way that required the least amount of effort. They also added some cheap ass enemies, like ones that fire what sure seems to be unavoidable homing bullets that resulted in an automatic death every time, at least for me. Thunder Cross in Japan is one of the best shmups Konami has done. This version is one of the worst, and it feels like it was done with malice. I’ll never understand it. There’s no way to spin this in a logical way. For that reason, I declare this to be Konami’s dumbest move of the 1980s. Verdict: NO!
Gradius II: Gofer no Yabou aka Vulcan Venture Platform: Arcade Released March, 1988 Directed by Hiroyasu Machiguchi Developed by Konami Included in Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection ($19.99) Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) To Be Included in Gradius Origins Wikis: Konami – Gradius – Strategy
What an opening stage! Wow!
I’m so mad at Gradius II. I mean, I love it, but it’s to blame for this definitive review. I only wanted to get some screenshots of the Crab encounter and a few other comparison shots for use in a review of Parodius Da!, the satire of Konami shoot ’em ups that’s still to come in this review. But, the Crab comes at the end of the game, which means playing through the whole game, which made me want to review every Konami shmup. I don’t know if the first Gradius or Gradius III would have done that to me. It’s not simply “more of the same” because the pacing and scale is historically good. That screenshot above of the first stage? It’s so grand in scale that it feels jarring for an opening level. Flying around suns while shooting fire dragons? That feels like a mid-to-late game trope. Putting it right at the start would come across as desperate in a lesser game. What a ballsy call starting Gradius II with this was. It’s putting your cards on the table and saying “imagine what the rest of the game will be like!”
I’ll whine about close-quarters encounters in a lot of these reviews, but this one works because it doesn’t trap you in one tight spot too long. Remember: tempo, not timing. It doesn’t matter when you do this kind of thing in a game, or how long it lasts, as long as the game maintains a consistent sense of urgency. Gigantic spaceships that carve out a tiny little space for you to hide in while the ship slowly lingers on the screen is not the way to do it. THIS IS, because it feels more open, even if it’s just an illusion, thus maintaining the sense of tense urgency.
Gradius II is a sequel that knows it’s a sequel. It’s the same base game, only with more loadouts (thus more player flexibility) and different set pieces. BIGGER set pieces. It also takes it for granted that people playing Gradius #2 probably are fans of Gradius #1 and don’t need to see the same kind of introductory stage or set pieces from the first game. It’s a space shmup. Really, set pieces, settings, and bosses are all you have, so go big or go home. The only aspect of Gradius II that feels like a close approximation of an already existing Gradius stage is the Moai level, which was also the lowest point of the game for me because it felt kind of like a rerun. A little bigger in scale, maybe, but I would think you really have to do more than that to stand out, especially in THIS game. Compare the picture on the left (Gradius I) to the one on the right (Mario is Missing. No wait, it’s Gradius II).
Gradius
Gradius II
The Moai stages aren’t going to evolve all that much past that initial version in future installments of Gradius, either. Thankfully, the rest of the game is overflowing with memorable levels and some damn good boss fights. You can tell that everyone had ideas for the bosses, because the game ends on a massive boss rush, but not a boring “rematch the ones you already beat” boss rush. You fight not one, not two, but SIX bosses different from the ones you’ve already encountered in a row. Some are original designs while others are callbacks from the original Gradius and Salamander, but you didn’t already fight them in this game so it doesn’t count. I have no objection to bringing back old bosses from previous games in a segment like this, especially since this isn’t the actual finale of the game. Hell, the way they do it, it feels exactly like the final desperate act of a villainous enemy force staring down defeat. This was so successful the boss rush became a beloved staple of the franchise. This is also why I hate boss rushes that just repeat the same bosses you already did. Be like Gradius, developers!
What I especially love is after fighting the iconic Big Core from the first Gradius (this after beating the Big Core MK II in the previous level), the game surprises you with one last new Big Core encounter, the boringly named Covered Core, to close one the best boss rushes in gaming history.
I didn’t even mind the debut of one of the most pesky little bastards in the history of the medium: the Option Hunter. It’s an indestructible nuisance that shows up behind you and, after giving you a couple seconds to take evasive maneuvers, it lunges forward and snatches your options, potentially taking all of them if it hits the one closest to you. While touching it doesn’t kill YOU, once it has your options, they’re gone. You have to get new ones. This is the textbook definition of “keeping you honest” since you have to be hyper-aware of their lingering threat. If I had any one knock on Gradius II, it’s that the timing of when it appears isn’t elegant. If you’re going to create something like this, don’t tie it to when the player activates four options. Base it around the level design. They should have watched play testers, selected three or four segments throughout the game where players are more likely to go into cruise control, and stuck the option hunters there in order to keep players on their toes.
The option hunter is behind me here. These will eventually become annoying in the franchise, but for now, they’re fine and work as intended to add tension and stakes.
It goes without saying that Gradius II is one of the best shoot ’em ups ever, and in that regard, it’s almost boring to talk about it. It just doesn’t do anything wrong. Unlike some later Konami games, it never even feels like a bullet hell, at least on the default settings. The challenge is spot-on if you have experience and skill, but an average player can probably also get good at the genre just through practicing at Gradius II. It’s the right kind of challenge to be an excellent trainer game, even more than the original. What fascinates me most about Gradius II is that it’s the perfect game to educate game designers on how to do fan-pleasing sequels. Why? Because it’s such an uncomplicated game that it doesn’t require a close examination, yet the lessons you can glean from it are universal to gaming as a whole.
Well, I never said it was ALL original. Original in the “it wasn’t in the first game or Salamander” sense but not in the “yeah, we all liked Alien and Aliens” sense. It could also be said to be kinda like R-Type, but I stand by my “we all saw Aliens” comment.
Anyone working in the industry who is developing a video game sequel, regardless of the genre, should play Gradius and Gradius II back-to-back in order to get an idea of how a sequel should scale. Or how to start a sequel. Or how to feel more extravagant without betraying the settings and theme. Or how to feel fresh while actually changing very little that made the first game successful enough to warrant a sequel in the first place. The only question I had was “does Gradius II make my short list of perfect games?” Pac-Man, Portal, the modern Tetris formula, the tiny but flawless NES indie Böbl, and the pinball table Attack From Mars? It’s certainly close. At first, I thought the Moai stage should be disqualifying. But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, besides repeating the previous game, that stage doesn’t do anything wrong. While I continue to think about it, there’s one question I don’t need to ask: whether or not Gradius II is the perfect sequel. It is. Verdict: YES! – $15 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Parodius aka Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth Platform: MSX Developed by Konami First Released April 28, 1988 Never Released in North America NO MODERN RE-RELEASE Read the Original Indie Gamer Chick Review Wikis: Konami – Gradius
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Now that I’ve closely examined the Gradius/Salamander franchise, I appreciate the original MSX Parodius more. Oh, I still don’t think it’s a very good game. It could be, even without changing things like some of the level design or basic enemy design. Parodius is a fun, quirky game rendered a total snoozer by how damn spongy bosses are and how long some of the set-pieces are. Take the above segment. You fly into a small corridor and the ceiling caves in on you. That should be exciting, but after a minute the thing is still raining blocks on you, and it’s not exciting anymore. The sh*tty thing is, they should have already known the “stop scrolling and dodge the falling blocks” concept doesn’t really work as a thrilling set-piece because they tried it in Life Force for the NES and murdered the pace right before a wonderful boss fight. Well, this segment is like if you had to repeat THAT prelude to the King Tut fight twenty times in a row. Octopus Saves the Earth needed someone in charge to say “lose the falling blocks” or “cut that boss’ health by 75%.”
Disappointing final boss, too. This looks like the design of a mid-tier boss.
Appreciate was the wrong word. I admire that Parodius is a satire that also tries to stand on its own as a fully-realized original shoot ’em up. That’s in contrast to the first “major” Parodius game, Parodius Da!, which largely just reskinned set-pieces from other games. I’m sure there’s an argument as to which way is a parody and which is a satire. I’m pretty sure a true parody is actually more like what Parodius Da! does. Either way, this MSX original really isn’t cynical. There’s heart and soul to Parodius, and it just isn’t as fun because of pacing problems that go beyond normal MSX technical limitations. Sadly, one of the last reviews of this feature is a PSP remake of it, only it just eliminates the slice-scrolling without actually touching the gameplay issues. I’d love to see this remade entirely, with re-balanced bosses and maybe removal of the white bell segments in the final level, which I don’t really think work all that well. I’m happy I replayed Parodius to make sure I got it right the first time, and I did: really close to being a YES!, but not quite good enough. Verdict: NO!
Devastators aka Garuka Platform: Arcade Released September, 1988 Developed by Konami NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Listing at Konami Wiki
See that little firecracker going off in front of me? Yea, that’s how far your standard bullets travel. It’s like playing an action game that replaces guns with a Roman candle that’s halfway to being a dud.
For all the nasty things I’m about to say, keep in mind that Devastators is getting a YES! It’s fine. It’s also got more problems than a math test. Now, I’m writing this review about a week after completing the re-review of Konami’s coin-op G.I. Joe (which I’ve already reviewed at IGC) which I played co-op with the kids for this feature. When I showed them this, sans the title screen, all three said some variation of “you didn’t tell me G.I. Joe had a sequel/was a sequel!” Devastators and G.I. Joe clearly shares a connection, though oddly enough, the original 1988 game offers a far more nuanced offensive game and a much, much stronger defensive game. It’s also a perfect example of how sometimes a game’s audio/visuals can override your senses and make the experience feel different than the actual gameplay suggests it should.
Co-op is for sure the way to play this as the enemies attack formations are clearly oriented for two players on opposite sides of the screen.
You have to manually scroll forward and the sense of speed or progress is, well, let’s say “less than energetic.” For that reason, Devastators feels like one of the slower run & gun games I’ve played, but is it really? The actual tempo of the action is on par with any other run & gun game, with tons of small enemies to gun down broken-up by more dangerous vehicles or lookout towers. Even though that tempo is constantly upbeat, it still feels like you’re barely crawling forward. Perception is reality, and so a game that’s basically non-stop running, dodging, and shooting still feels like it’s drag racing tectonic plates. It’s also extremely repetitive. The closest it comes to a set-piece is a level where you’re navel-high in water, but it doesn’t change the feel of the game. Plus, the immersion doesn’t quite click when rockets take out most helicopters with one shot, but not the bosses that are often not much bigger or as armored as the choppers are.
See the gigantic explosion in the water? That’s not a rarity, nor is it limited to the water stage. These massive blast sprites are arguably the biggest flaw in the game. Needless to say, it screws with visibility and makes deaths come out of nowhere because a not-insignificant portion of the playfield is being blocked by the BOOMs.
Now, if you can tell yourself that the slowness is an optical illusion (and I cannot stress enough: IT IS an illusion) and Devastators is paced correctly, you’re in for a solid but unspectacular twenty to thirty minutes of action. You have a default gun and most enemies function as little more than cannon fodder. Basic baddies die from a single shot, Contra-style. Ones in yellow uniforms drop either a form of grenades that are used for the normal enemies or a rocket launcher that targets only vehicles (including bosses) or other structures. Item drops are above average in terms of generosity, but special weapons are mapped to a single button. This causes problems.
Okay, fine, not ALL the designs are bland.
Which type of weapon you use depends on whether the game locks onto a target or not, but the locking on is too fickle. This is especially noticeable in co-op, where it seems to always take longer for the system to decide which player is targeting which thing. It’s all done automatically. Konami was very wise with basing boss fights largely around them. Some games have bosses so spongy it’s tolerable. Devastators hits the sweet spot. Just right. It’s a damn shame it’s so unmemorable in design, but the gameplay is solid. Okay, so suspension of disbelief is out the window. Like, it’s a boat. Shouldn’t a rocket that obliterates a helicopter with a single shot do the same to a hovercraft?
The second-to-last boss is just guys in cars. Womp womp.
Maybe the greatest challenge is the timer. You can only really stop a few times to take out the enemies, and if you’re playing single-player, you really do have to keep moving forward. If time runs out, it’s game over regardless of how many lives you have. This probably further contributes to the sensation of slowness. So does the act of firing the rockets since the sprite fully animates pulling out the launcher, aiming, and firing. You can die in the space between pressing the button to fire and the rocket actually launching. Thankfully, the explosions are VERY satisfactory. When the lock-on for the rockets happens, I always smirked just a little.
The smoke bombs/dynamite/whatever the fudge they are (pictured above) work a LOT better on the enemy clusters than the grenades. Really, as overzealous kaboom sprites as they have, the grenades really aren’t that effective, at least before boss fights.
Okay, so Devastators isn’t going to change your life. You won’t sit around thinking “golly, I wish I had heard of this game sooner.” It’s fine. Nothing special, but also a damn cathartic use of twenty to thirty minutes. I thought it was pretty decent. The kids were nowhere close to me on that and thought it was barely okay because of that perception of slowness. Worth a look? Yep. Should it be in Arcade Archives? Absolutely. Is it a game you should buy on day one when it happens? Nope. Wait for a discount, but then get it. It’s one of those games that’s as basic as an undressed salad, but it has a sense of moxie that elevates it. Now if only it had a sense of pep in its step, it might have been one of the all-time underrated coin-ops. Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gyruss Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System First Released November 18, 1988 Developed by Konami NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Wikis: Konami – Strategy
I feel like standing up and cheering. Wow, what a difference a few years makes.
I approached the NES Gyruss with a sense of cautious optimism, which is a wishy-washy way of saying I thought it might be one of the most boring games in this entire feature. I knew that Konami reworked the coin-op by adding bombs and bosses, which was the source of the wary hope. I also knew it retained the 360° playfield that takes place on stark black background and the same core gameplay, which is why I thought I was in for a world of suck. Thankfully, it became pretty clear pretty quickly that Gyruss on the NES is a vast improvement over the arcade version. The game cuts a much better tempo, with mini-bosses and genuinely challenging big bosses. The enemies have a nicer snap to them when you blow them up, and their designs look so much bigger and more detailed, which makes the whole premise that much more exciting. It’s, dare I say, kind of immersive.
Excellent sprites, too. These are enemies that you want to fight. They’re memorable.
Now remember, the coin-op has basically perfect game mechanics, and it just didn’t add-up to a fun game. Those perfect mechanics made the trip home. Gyruss plays great, with excellent shooting action and accurate controls. The worst part of the coin-op also carries over: the setting is still boring, and there’s no getting around it. A plain black background with dots to simulate forward movement is exhausting after so many stages. There is something resembling a set-piece right before you fight the last boss: you have to avoid a series of fireballs. This sequence is fairly easy and goes on too long, especially since it’s the prelude to the big finale. Maybe the final boss was playing 4D chess and trying to put me to sleep.
Bombs are more like power-shots that obliterate everything in their path, including the modules on the bosses.
That one fireball sequence is the only part where the pace dies. The rest of Gyruss NES has a peppy tempo, though if you play the Famicom Disk System version like I did, you will have to suffer through a few load times in exchange for getting a proper ending that’s exclusive to the Japanese build. The remarkable thing is the pace is kept-up despite adding more levels, bringing the total to forty. Each planet is divided into three waves, with the first wave being third-person cylindrical Galaga, just like the coin-op. But then, the second wave introduces a mini-boss like arrangement of pods that continuously release enemies until they’re defeated. At first, the third and final wave of each planet feels like it’s going to be a slightly more intense rehash of the first wave, but after slaying the last enemy, a boss appears.
A couple of the bosses feel like they’re straight out of Gradius, including the final boss.
The boss battles serve as legitimate highlights and actually do put up a fight. Most of them have a similar structure: blow up all the modules, with each level adding another module to the core structure. They’re almost all fun to fight and certainly good enough that you want to keep playing just to see what the next one will be. There’s one single dull boss: a trio of ordinary looking spaceships that you fight at the same time that just kind of didn’t do anything for me, but thankfully, it’s a one-off whiff. In addition to all the excellent bosses, levels have unique enemies, though they’re not totally successful in making the stages feel unique. The black void setting prevents that, of course. While the potential of the coin-op’s mechanics is finally realized thanks to this NES port, I think we’re still waiting on the best version of Gyruss. Apparently the Xbox 360 had better backgrounds, but that doesn’t help me much today.
Does that not look like a Life Force boss? Or maybe like the brains from the first Gradius?
I’m really grateful for the NES Gyruss because it proves how valuable unique settings for each-level are. Even if they’re not interactive, it’s still important because those facades create a unique experience. There are so many games that let you take the role of an intergalactic fighter pilot. There has to be thousands of them. Some of them play badly. Gyruss is fortunate enough to play splendidly, especially on the NES, but that alone doesn’t help you stand out in a crowded field. Having awesome gameplay is great and obviously should be the most important thing, but it’s not everything. As good a time as I had playing the NES Gyruss, I’m not entirely sure I’ll remember it a year from now. It’s a game where the setting feels like it’s still using a placeholder. Imagine Gradius if every stage was a stark black void. That’s what Gyruss actually is, and it’s not better for it. With that said, I really enjoyed playing this port because of its excellent space combat punctuated by enjoyable boss battles. It’s just a better game than the coin-op. The only thing that’s frustrating is this could still be an all-timer if someone could craft an inspired backdrop for it. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gradius II Platform: Famicom Released December 16, 1988 Directed by Shigeharu Umezaki and Setsu Muraki Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius – Strategy
Screenshots for NES games are going to look a bit janky going forward due to how Konami got around hardware limitations. In motion, it’s flickery but in a way you can adjust to.
Gradius II is one of the most technologically advanced games on the Famicom. This is likely the reason it never came out in the United States, as it utilized the special VRC4 mapper chip. For the unwashed masses, the Famicom/NES was designed to play a nearly arcade-perfect version of Donkey Kong, and to a lesser extent Donkey Kong Jr and Popeye. That’s it, and hell, by time the original Mario Bros. came out, the Famicom was already incapable of making it look like the coin op, causing a massive downgrade in graphics and animation. But, Nintendo kind of knew that the Famicom would also be future proofed, only it wouldn’t be by the inhouse hardware itself. It would be expanded via the in-development Famicom Disk System and by the ability of Famicom cartridges to house more advanced chips and sub-processors. This is GROSSLY over-simplifying things, but in a nutshell, it’s the guts they put in the carts themselves that beefed-up the native capability of the NES. Thus a platform designed specifically to play games that looked like this, and ONLY this:
Could instead, with additional chips housed within the cartridge, look like this:
Wow!
By the way, the left and right games in that second set of pictures never came out in America. Crisis Force and TwinBee 3 (coming up in the feature) and Gradius II both used the complicated VRC4. So did Konami all-star stink bombs Wai Wai World and Wai Wai World 2. Neither of those came out stateside either. Now, the cost and complexity isn’t the only reason why these games never came out in America. Life Force used the VRC3, and IGC favorite Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse used an even more complex special chip, the VRC6. Why did they come out in America but all those others didn’t? The general consensus seems to be that Konami determined a sequel to Castlevania was worth the time and effort to convert to the NES because it would sell well in America, but the other games would not, and that was that.
Gradius II’s character design, even for the exclusive bosses, is striking. By the way, nothing like this boss really shows up at any point in the franchise ever again. Allegedly, it’s the same boss as the giant face in the NES version of Life Force, but it doesn’t feel like it at all. There’s twelve total bosses. Thirteen if you count the finale, which (per tradition) doesn’t fight back.
Whatever their reasons were, I think they made a BIG mistake passing on Gradius II. Unlike the first game, this one could have been marketed towards cutting edge NES graphics. Let’s say it didn’t release until March of 1990, a month after Super Mario 3 released in the states. I think western audiences would have rewarded Konami by making Gradius II, arguably the best looking 8-bit Konami game on a Nintendo platform, a million-seller. You can’t go off of JUST the sales of the first Gradius. Not when the sequel looks THIS good and would have been so easy to market from a visual standpoint. Especially the bosses, which would have looked great on the back of a box, or even in TV ads. We’ll never know if Konami made the right call, and the devil’s advocate in me is shouting that this would have been a relatively expensive gamble and some key aspects might have needed to be removed entirely. Notably, the voice call-outs when you activate power-ups? Those would have likely been cut. But, one way to look at it: what was a better prospect? Gradius II or an action game based on a short-lived roller derby show?
This is the slowest version of this sequence so far.
Gradius II on the Famicom is a fantastic game, but it’s a fantastic game with two major problems.
MAJOR PROBLEM #1: Constant Slowdown. And it’s not a nothingburger. In a game that constantly pushes the limits of NES sprites, along with allowing players to use four options at once (my jaw literally dropped), slowdown is constant throughout the game. Unlike sections of Gradius 1, Life Force, or Contra on the NES, it doesn’t always lend it an unintentional “bullet time” quality. That only works if you’re dealing with tight squeezes, regardless of whether they’re environmental or enemy projectiles, but in Gradius II for Famicom, it happens because of massive sprites that fill the screen. Remember the memorable crystal asteroid segment in the coin-op game? Even though it’s VASTLY scaled-back on the Famicom to the point that the threat is minimal (especially if you have a full load-out), the game chugs along to the point that excitement is sapped out of it.
The Famicom is basically saying “I think I can! I think I can! I think I can!”
MAJOR PROBLEM #2: Imperfect Collision Detection. The collision detection isn’t sprite-perfect. While the box isn’t so inaccurate that it completely ruins the game, it’s hard to intuitively know how close you can get to some of the obstacles. “Inconsistent” is the word I’d use to describe the collision. You’ll feel it right from the start. On the left, I’m alive, and on the right, I’m already dead and exploding. Spot the difference, if you can. Did you figure it out?
The game couldn’t draw the solar flare as fat as it was meant to be, so it killed me because the NEXT frame, the one that would be lethal, would be the true representation of the danger element. When you straddle the cutting edge, you’re bound to get nicked once or twice. Take a look at this screenshot, where the tiny solar flare that killed me isn’t drawn at all, until it suddenly is.
I’m really not convinced either of the shields are accurate, especially the forcefield that surrounds you. There were a couple times where I escaped a barrage of bullets and my shield was still depleted despite nothing hitting it. I suppose it was close enough that I’ll concede the possibility there was a grazing shot. And yet, in some sections, it seems to be pretty close to perfect. Enemies bullets? I never remember a single one that felt like it was shady. How about solid walls? Nope. If anything, Gradius II is extremely generous about them. Take a look at these two screens. On the left, I’m barely dodging relatively large bombs, and on the right, most of my sprite is enveloped by the floor, but I’m dying from neither.
This tells me that most of the things that feel like “collision” issues aren’t so much the ship or bullets, but the large-scale objects. The fires in the opening level. Boss sprites. Large energy blasts. It’s not nothing, as there were plenty of times I said “hold on, that shouldn’t have killed me” and games like this sort of need to be perfect. Gradius II, like Gradius I, doesn’t instantly respawn you, and besides that, you lose your loadout. The good news is you don’t have to be a God at Nintendo to finish this. It even uses the exact same thirty lives code that Contra does at the title screen. And Gradius II is certainly a game worth playing on the Famicom. It changes a lot from the coin-op, including new bosses. Well, “new” being relative, as they’re copy-and-pasted from Life Force. But, it feels fresh, even if you played the sublime coin-op. It even has double-upgradable lasers/ripples and, after getting your fourth option, you can activate it a fifth time to get ten or so seconds of the options circling around you.
Hell, you can even blow up the walking robot in this one. I’m pretty sure the NES version is the only one that allows this. Oh, it’s tough to do it. It takes a while to get in front of it. If you have four options and you’re feeling bold, you can try to drape them behind you, giving you enough reach to zap the core when it walks towards you.
While its technical hang-ups are frustrating, Famicom Gradius II is also such a dang fun game. Like so many home ports on this list, Konami can’t argue that it’s redundant to include the Famicom game when the coin-op is in Gradius Origins. As someone playing these games often back-to-back with the arcade counterparts, trust me, they don’t clash. They complement each other. It’s impossible to argue that the Famicom version isn’t historically significant. New technology had to be invented to make Gradius II on the Famicom possible. That seems like a big deal to me. Depending on how you feel about the first Mother game (Earthbound Origins or whatever they call it these days) it’s probably the biggest Famicom-exclusive game, and for my money, it’s the best one too. Verdict: YES! – $6 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gofer no Yabou: Episode II aka Nemesis 3: The Eve of Destruction Platform: MSX Released January 27, 1989 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
You really might think during the first level that this is a direct lift of Gradius II, but it’s really not.
The final game of Gradius trilogy on the MSX not only assures that the franchise gets a clean three-for-three sweep, but I walked away thinking “they really should remake these as if they were arcade games.” Getting the negative out of the way first: there’s occasional moments of slowness, though never to the degree Salamander on MSX featured. I only found myself fast forwarding cut scenes. Don’t get me wrong: Nemesis 3 isn’t as perfectly fine-tuned for MSX as Gradius 2 was (obviously not counting the “now do it again, only backwards” part), but it does a solid job. It also drops the “flying into the boss core to gain a new weapon” feature from Gradius 2 in favor of hiding upgrades in the game. Nemesis 3 is a space easter egg hunt, and this time, it’s not optional. Oh, some of the weapons are, and they’re pretty well hidden. I only found three in my play-session. Unlike Gradius 2, there’s no guides online for this one. So when this happened:
I wasn’t looking for it, didn’t expect it, and never figured out exactly what it did until after the game was finished. It turns out, it unlocked the good ending. Yea me! I did get two new guns, but there were SO MANY I didn’t get, and I wouldn’t have even thought to look except after beating nine levels, I was told I needed to find three maps that were hidden. I’d found none of them and had to replay them. Thankfully it’s not a full restart and you only have to replay the levels with the map pieces. The verdict might have turned out differently, otherwise. BUT, you do have to keep redoing them until you find the maps. By this point, I’d played enough home versions of Gradius that I sort of knew the logic of how they would be hidden, so once I knew I was looking for stuff, it wasn’t that hard to find them. If you don’t have the patience to search, spoilers for their locations, and the location of the Extra Shield System (which unlocks the good ending) are located after the first picture in the slideshow below.
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The other big difference is this is the only game in the Gradius MSX trilogy where you choose your starting load-out. You get four configurations to choose from, and after picking them, you even get to choose how you want your options to behave. I don’t recommend doing what I did in my first run and having them circle around you. What was fun and novel as a temporary power-up in previous games became an annoyance when it came to lining up shots. Thankfully, all this added content isn’t going to waste like it would have with Salamander. This is going to be a game you want to replay, with so much hidden stuff that isn’t THAT hard to find once you get a feel for the logic of it, along with excellent level design and memorable boss encounters. Maybe it’s just the placebo effect, but I think this even controlled the best, with the speed boosts scaling better than ANY version of the Gradius item bar I’ve seen. This is a really outstanding game.
Nemesis 3 finished as my favorite MSX game in this feature. Hell, I think it has to be a serious contender for the best MSX game of all-time, and maybe the best game in the genre to never get an official American release. It’s easily one of the best shoot ’em ups of the 1980s. Seriously, we’ve reached the point where not including the MSX games in Gradius Origins is an actual gaming tragedy. This game is a little over six months older than I am, but in thirty-six years, it’s never gotten a US release in any form. None of the MSX Gradius games have, and it’s long overdue. It’s tragic that Konami is throwing its hat in the ring for a big prestige collection like Gradius Origins but leaving the home games out, especially the MSX games that most people have never even seen, let alone played.
The bosses stand out in a big way. This isn’t just a series of reworked Big Cores you’re battling (not that there’s anything wrong with that). These are bosses that are also set-pieces.
Maybe they’ve got plans for another collection that includes all the home games, or maybe they’ll do them as DLC. I’m not fine with that anymore. These MSX games are good enough to be more than just bonus features. They deserve better. I didn’t know about them before this feature, but they’re downright legendary among MSX fans and hardcore Gradius fans. It didn’t take long for me to understand why. That might be the most profound thing I can say about the MSX Gradius trilogy. None of these are optimized for MSX2 or MSX2+, mind you. Well, there’s an MSX2 reworking of Gradius 2 that was bundled with a Salamander collection. In fact, it’s the final review of this feature. Not that it matters, because none of these games are celebrated by Konami today. That’s a horrible miscarriage of justice. These three titles should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the games in the franchise, and if they did, they would still manage to stand very, very tall. Verdict: YES! – $10 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
TwinBee 3: Poko Poko Daimaō Platform: Famicom Released September 29, 1989 Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – TwinBee – Strategy
Who would have guessed the final game of the NES Twinbee trilogy would be one of the more complicated verdicts in this entire seventy-six game feature?
After the first couple stages of TwinBee 3, I really thought this would waltz to a NO! and I would be glad to be done with the Famicom run of this franchise. For all its strengths, the Famicom hardware just couldn’t do TwinBee as a series justice. The first level exemplified that. That opening stage in TwinBee 3 is an epic disaster. Somehow it’s both too conservative in terms of appearance, enemy attack patterns and level pacing while also trying way too hard to be quirky and aloof with its enemy design. It’s one of the most awkward failures I’ve seen on the NES. I want to especially single-out the use of colors, because the greens and sky blues make for such a boring shooter. Truly boring, to the point that it’s kind of exhausting right from the start.
And it’s not like TwinBee 3 had done nothing right. From the very start, I recognized that the bombing mechanic was as generous with the aiming and collision boxes as the original coin-op had been. This is also the first of the Famicom games that does damage to each arm instead of one shot costing you the ability to drop bombs. So it’s an upgrade in the sense that you’re getting a more arcade-like experience. But it didn’t help because the opening stage is a slog, and the second stage is only barely better. Good sprite work. No excitement. I was so grateful the game only has five levels. At this point, with the exception of the boss fights, TwinBee 3 felt like a game saturated in flop sweat.
This is actually the fifth and final level, and once again, we’re back to a boring green/blue backdrop, only with even less details to the terrain. What were they thinking? That’s exactly one extra color than just having a blank screen behind you. If that’s what it takes to be able to have detailed enemy sprites, maybe you should rethink your priorities. Honestly, as dull as an all-black background can be, at least it’s not an eyesore. A green-blue checkerboard crosses the line into obnoxiousness.
But then, something weird happened. Well, actually, let me go back just a little bit, because the first and second bosses were very memorable. These could have been Parodius bosses for how wacky they are. BUT, unlike the levels themselves, it doesn’t feel like a lampshade-wearing class clown trying too hard. Okay, maybe the first boss a little bit. I mean, look at it:
Ohhhhhkay. But regardless, the bosses were legitimate highlights. In fact, I’d go as far as calling them elite-level Konami shmup bosses. Well, at least for home consoles of this era. Now, here’s the weird part. After the second boss, the level design started to work for me. Enemies and attack patterns found their teeth, while the personality also started to feel less forced and more inspired. Strangely, the third level feels more like an opening stage to a TwinBee game, right down to the setting.
I remember liking this a lot more than the picture would suggest. Maybe I was just happy to be away from the blue. Sometimes blue makes for a terrible backdrop in 8-bit shmups. Oh, and see how my ship is on fire? If you find the right item under a bomb target, the next bell will be on fire, and catching it gives you a free pass to the boss. In my second play session, I deliberately avoided them. If you’re going to have an item like that, just have it spawn the f*cking boss.
The fourth level was good too before the game cratered with yet another bore of a final level and the weakest of the five bosses. Okay, so maybe the verdict wasn’t that close because TwinBee 3 bores more often than not. But, its highest highs are far more impactful than its lowest lows. I can’t stress enough: the first four bosses are very fun to fight, and they’re cleverly staged, too. The second one is themed like a concert. The third one is a dragon, but instead of fighting it, you’re fighting the plaque on its teeth. No kidding, but it totally works and should make any “top 100 bosses of all-time” list. TwinBee 3, when it hits its stride, is just so oozing with originality and personality that you can’t help but be charmed.
The fourth boss isn’t quite as unique as the second and third bosses, but it’s also a delight to fight. These muddied the waters of my verdict somewhat. So, I focused on the core gameplay to make the decision. TwinBee 3 doesn’t offer a radical upgrade over previous games. It’s so short at only five levels that it feels like an all-vertical expansion pack for Stinger. The boss graphics look fantastic, and some of the enemies sprites are pretty good, but the backgrounds are mostly uninspired. The combat hasn’t advanced at all, either. Besides the generous bomb blast radius, the best thing I can say about TwinBee 3 is it seems to have put more thought into making the three-way valuable instead of a gun to avoid. But it’s just not enough. I also disagree with Dave that the sacrifices made for TwinBee 3’s co-op mode are what wrecked the core gameplay. No, I think this game is so clearly a victim of the limited Famicom technology, even with the legendary VRC4 (the same memory mapper that made Gradius II Famicom possible) that it kind of hurts my heart. TwinBee 3 is far and away the best of the Famicom TwinBees, but I’m very happy to be done with this phase of the series. Verdict: NO!
Gradius III Platform: Arcade Released December, 1989 Directed by Hiroyasu Machiguchi Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) To Be Included in Gradius Origins Wikis: Konami – Gradius – StrategyWiki
Gradius III’s fun pretty much ends right after this boss, with the exception of a couple stellar boss fights.
Well, we’ll always have the arcade Gradius II. The coin-op version of Gradius III gets off to a scorching hot start, but when it wants your game to be over, it really wants it. The arcade game has a variety of ROMs from different regions, but across all ROMs, even on the lowest setting, Gradius III is just punishing to the point that it’s boring. It’s also a game that’s so uniformly affected by slowdown that it’s kind of jaw dropping. In rare instances where I had to not shoot anything and reposition myself on the screen, I would also be startled by the movement speed of all the stuff on screen suddenly moving like any normal game. Now granted, there’s so much slowdown in the seventy-six games in this feature that it’s like I was reviewing games inside the event horizon of a black hole. But Gradius III is certainly among the worst.
At least the Moai level feels fresh, which is more than I can say about this level in Gradius II.
In theory, the slowdown should make the game easier, but Gradius III’s problems aren’t JUST the amount of bullets or enemy attack patterns. I felt that the collision detection wasn’t always predictable or intuitive. When you have sections of the game that look like this:
Notice that my nose is touching it but I’m not dead. The trickier thing to judge is the sides.
Your collision better be absolutely perfect, and Gradius III’s isn’t. The box is certainly not pixel-perfect, and at this point in the existence of the franchise, with large-scale danger elements like the malicious soap bubbles above, you want to be able to intuitively know what’s safe and what isn’t. Some segments are worse than others. During the boss battle of the Moai level, the heads spit out inflatable Moai bullets. In addition, even getting near the statues seemed to cause my ship to explode even when my sprite wasn’t touching them.
You’ll notice I’m dead in this picture.
I’m not going to go too in-depth with Gradius III’s coin-op because it’s universally agreed that the Super NES version is superior. Here’s the thing though: I’m having fun and hopefully you are too with this imaginary 76 game collection of Konami pew-pew-a-thons. But in reality, a Gradius collection that’s literally being marketed as “the definitive” Gradius collection will NOT include that famous and acclaimed SNES port. I have a problem with that. So far in this feature, coin-ops have taken a beating compared to their home console little siblings. I don’t dare to presume that I should speak for every gamer, but I think fans of this genre should be outraged by the illusion of value Konami is presenting. You’re getting “all” the arcade ROMs, but those ROMs are less fun versions of the games.
This might be the most maddening, tedious, frustrating boss I’ve ever fought in a shmup. When it opens itself up to being vulnerable, it also has a very strong vacuum that sucks you into it. You cannot resist the pull and might not be able to get any bullets at all into it. I only won this fight when time ran out and the boss self-destructed. It was NEVER fun either, despite the impressive visuals and memorable theme and design. What a disaster Gradius III turns into.
Eighteen ROMs for seven games. That’s Gradius Origins. But the ROMs that have the highest appeal? Those are missing. Gradius III has a lot of fans, but most of those fans are fans of the Super NES game, even though it cuts a lot of content. But even the deleted content is mostly a plus. The biggest loss, in opinion, is the memorable battle with the dragon on the fire level. Awesome fight, but only the second half of that battle, where it becomes the typical dragon MADE of fire is present in the SNES game. On the other hand, the Moai boss, which was as cheap as cheap gets in the coin-op, is rendered into a typical enjoyable Gradius boss on the SNES. Easily the biggest win in the deleted scenes department is a tedious sequence where you avoid blocks that dart at you unpredictably that might genuinely be the most boring moment of any Gradius game.
This is the dodging section in question. Those giant ice cubes will suddenly change course directly at you, and even after reloading the save state and trying to figure out a pattern, I couldn’t predict every one. I’m sure there’s a method to the madness, but my problem is more about how long this sequence goes. It’s one of those things where it continued so long I started laughing. Not because it was funny, but because someone thought it was a good idea. Then I stopped laughing because it was STILL GOING! It refused to end, to the point that I honestly questioned whether I was playing it wrong and I was supposed to be doing something else. Nope. Just dodge these until the cabinet you’re playing on suffers catastrophic CPU failure.
When the best part of a port is that it deletes sequences from the original, maybe that’s a sign the original is in dire shape. Gradius III has fans, but very few are fans of the coin-op. When I reviewed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time for the SNES, I wasn’t as experienced then as I am now with retro games and was certain it had to be one of the first home ports that was superior to the coin-op, and I got several “what about Gradius III?” replies. And they were all correct!
This is the best aspect of the coin-op that was deleted. It’s really everything you want in a boss fight: a visually striking, challenging, incredibly intense encounter that gives you a sense of accomplishment when it’s over. That last part is especially impressive given the fact that the fight continues with another form. This isn’t in the SNES game, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t include that version, which now that I’ve played it, I can confirm is superior in every way that matters most.
It’s baffling to me that anyone would make a game like coin-op Gradius III even for arcades. If you think of the arcade game as an advertisement for the home game, at first it seems to make a little sense. Players can’t sit and plug quarter after quarter into a machine and expect to beat a game this difficult, but the promise of a home version played on your couch, with unlimited credits and more generous gameplay can be quite enticing. Does it really make, though? In the case of Gradius III, if I had played the coin-op before the SNES game existed, I would’ve had no interest in the home game. I think Gradius III’s packaging in Gradius Origins might be the most damning indictment that Konami doesn’t understand their own catalog anymore. Verdict: NO!
Space Manbow Platform: MSX2 Released December 21, 1989 Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
My first ever MSX2 review brought the goods in a big way.
Space Manbow is often considered to be either a spin-off or the second game in the Thunder Cross series because it was actually intended to be a port of that coin-op before Konami got cold feet and made an original game. It’s actually got a mechanical fish theme to it, as both your ship and the bosses all resemble various aquatic life. Thankfully, as an MSX2 game, it’s far more advanced, as you can see from the very impressive sprite work. Mechanically, while the scrolling still feels a bit on the jerky side, it’s much improved over all the previous MSX games in this feature in the sense that it feels like you’re moving forward and not loading an entire new screen every split second. It even has a convincing parallax scrolling effect. But, gameplay is king, and Space Manbow is a solid space shooter with mammoth bosses and some damn inspired level design.
Manbow is very impressive looking. Seriously, now I wish the Gradius games had gotten full MSX2 ports.
The gameplay is more of a traditional shmup without the Gradius item bar. Besides speed-ups, missiles, and options, the game only gives you two types of guns via item pick-up. The twist is that you can power-up those guns by collecting energy points. Energy gradually fades out if you don’t keep collecting it, but if you can keep it above eight points, whatever weapon you’re using becomes stronger. I was pretty annoyed by the fact that the energy doesn’t stop draining in the pause in action between the end of a level and the start of a boss fight. The bosses are well staged as they emerge and they’re certainly worthy of an over-the-top introduction, but from a gameplay perspective, it’s dead air that’s actively costing you. Manbow also goes through extended stretches where it doesn’t provide any enemies with the potential to drop the power points. In fairness, once I maxed out, I never dipped under it.
One of the more exciting set pieces has these little machines that draw boxes on the screen, and you have to get out of the box before they finish, or you will die. It’s like reverse Qix! I’m normally not a fan of tight crowding, like you see in mega-ship type levels. But this idea was well thought-out and worked really well. Genuinely exciting.
Okay, so I wish there were more guns, but I’m always going to want that with this genre. Besides, Manbow has a few more twists, my favorite of which is related to the options. In Manbow, you can change which way they’re aiming with the press of a button. What’s really impressive is despite the fact that these are items that you have to pick up, they weren’t afraid to lean heavily into level design optimized for this. Manbow isn’t limited just to left-to-right scrolling, but with the options being able to shoot in four directions, there’s no time to catch your breath during the actual stages. Manbow is easily the most up-tempo of the Konami MSX shmups. There’s also a handful of scrolling-based traps, some of which penalize you for moving too soon, while others penalize you for waiting too long. Like with these spinning blades:
If you enter them too soon, you will die because you can’t see that it’s actually a pair of them, synced in a way where there’s no room to dodge until the screen has scrolled enough. Again, that’s fine, because the important thing is this type of design isn’t overdone. I really can’t say enough good things about Space Manbow. Yea, I wish it gave players more guns, or maybe just more tiers of upgrades for your weapons. But, there’s more than enough great game here to make up for the limited arsenal. The setting and graphics are original enough. The bosses aren’t too spongy. Most important of all is that, for the most part, it has pitch-perfect timing of when to introduce a set-piece.
This is it for MSX games in this feature. I wanted to use this opportunity to thank all the MSX fans out there who have found IGC over the last year. You’ve all been great, and I’m really happy to have found the MSX. I’m not done with it yet. Not by a long shot. I might not have a very big platform here, but I’m going to continue to use my platform to call for a modern GLOBAL celebration of MSX. Come on, Atari! Call Konami! An MSX collection with all the bells & whistles of Atari 50 has “award-winning Gold Master Series release” written all over it. Imagine the behind the scenes stories!
Space Manbow is apparently one of the most sought-after games among MSX fans, with copies regularly fetching hundreds of dollars. I was skeptical, but the more I played it, the more I kept redoing my initial value estimate and eventually coming to the conclusion that Konami could slap on a $9.99 price tag as a solo release, $2 more than any of the Arcade Archives releases in this feature cost, and it’d be worth it. I still favor including Space Manbow in a collection, but Konami, you’re sitting on a goldmine with this one. Believe the hype, folks. This is outstanding! Verdict: YES! – $10 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection And if you care about these things, I still give the slight-slight-slight edge to Gradius 3 for “Best MSX game.”
Well, this was an unexpected result, especially considering that I literally just reviewed this. By the way, this was the last review written for this feature. Or second-to-last since I re-wrote Falsion almost completely.
How to make this Aliens review different from the one I just posted? Well, that was strictly based on a single co-op session with my nephew. This time, I played solo, though I did decide to stick to the same ROM from the previous session since the other ones require you to press a button every time you fire. In this game? That’s asking for your hand to grow sentience and strangle you. Now, what’s especially strange is that I called the co-op experience “empty calories gaming.” I stand by that, but I can’t help but wonder if my nephew and I went into this with the wrong mindset. Neither of us could stay alive during our session and had to constantly press the start button to load another credit. In the review, I estimated it would take $5 in quarters per player on the default setting. Playing solo, I just legitimately beat the game without cheating in under $1. Okay, I bumped the life count up and set it to “EASY” but I still did it.
It really annoyed the hell out of TJ that there were so many non-canon aspects of Aliens, even though he understood that they had to pad this thing out. An action arcade game based on the best parts of the 1986 film that actually lend themselves to a game like this would be about a minute long.
Playing this solo didn’t exactly feel like a totally different experience. If the co-op was mindless fun, the solo game is a more deliberate, slower, less chaotic fun. I was wrong about the enemies having no attack patterns. I think that happened in co-op because enemies got confused targeting us, as if they were so excited to have double the meal that they didn’t know what to do with themselves. And who among us hasn’t been there? Well, when playing single-player, there’s very basic attack formations and patterns that are pretty easy to clock. The same goes for the bosses, only two of which I found to be “problematic.” In addition to the spongy and cheap last boss, there was this thing:
And my problems with it were situational. It turns out the homing missiles are a lousy gun to bring into the fight, because they’re so slow and its vulnerability window so small that I couldn’t get more than a single hit at a time on it. As soon as I lost a life and was left with the default machine gun, the fight ended about thirty seconds later. Honestly, I ended up admiring the level and enemy design a whole lot more this time around. It helps that I was actually able to play around with the weapon drops. I let TJ have the majority of them when we played, and I never really got to use the robot suit. This time, I did, and the game did revert back to “mindless fun” for a couple minutes.
Weirdly, it’s not fun to use the suit at all during the final boss. It just gives it a bigger target to swing for. I recommend just using your machine gun until the airlock opens. You HAVE to get in the suit to beat the game because it follows the movie.
Aliens is one strange cat. This might be the first time that a 90s Konami arcade game is better in solo than in co-op. Which isn’t to say Aliens is bad in co-op. My YES! verdict remains intact. But, it’s just pure mayhem. As a solo game, where it’s you and you alone against the hordes of aliens, this is actually a pretty dang decent white knuckle action game. It’s still not the deepest game by any stretch. But putting forth a good faith effort to beat the game on a single credit was actually quite exhilarating. When I made it past the first level without taking a single hit, I literally paused the game to tell my friends that this feels like the ideal way to play this game. So if you’re playing this in an arcade and someone tries to join you, tell them “get away from here you bitch!” I did a thing there. It’s from Aliens. You get it. Verdict: YES! – $6 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Trigon aka Lightning Fighters Platform: Arcade Released February, 1990 Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Listing at Konami Wiki
I was told “don’t play this one single player” but what if I don’t have a second player who can stay alive long enough to test the cool stuff? Then what?
There’s a lot of games in this feature that benefit from co-op. Mostly because you can respawn instantly, which turns a lot of games from likely unbeatable to, you know, beatable. Trigon though, is tailored specifically for co-op, and not because there’s a really cool mechanic that requires a second player to work. It’s because a lot of enemies and bosses take so many bullets that I’m not even sure a single person can shoot them enough to authentically defeat them. Trigon is one of those games where, if you take too long fighting a boss, the fight just ends. In this game, they don’t self-destruct like in Gradius, but rather they just sort of drift to the bottom of the screen and you eventually scroll past them. It’s as if you put up such a pitiful fight that it made the act of trying to kill you just too awkward. For my one and only full single player run, I’m pretty sure I only beat four out of the nine big bosses. I’m not counting rematches, either. During the boss rush in stage eight where you replay several previous bosses, I didn’t knock out a single one until the end of the level, when it gave me a new boss to fight.
I don’t even know if it’s possible to time-out against the 8th boss. This time I saved up the max six bombs. I unloaded all six of the f*cking things into it and still had to shoot a few more times to win the battle. I even tried to conserve the bombs, but there were a few situations I’m not sure how it’s even possible to survive. I tried cheating and couldn’t find a way of dodging this boss’s attack.
But it’s not just bosses. There’s big enemies you encounter during the levels that have similar sponginess. For the mid-level big bads, I had to rewind so that I was shooting them the moment they spawned onto the screen. Any deviation from shooting them as soon as they appeared likely meant they wouldn’t die, and this is with full power-ups and a drone that only appears in single player. Against the big bosses? Even with heavy use of rewind and save states, I couldn’t pump enough bullets into them to OUTRIGHT win. Maybe the game knew I had epilepsy and was sparing me since the screen flashes red when you win? Considerate of it, I guess. But really, does anyone want to play a game where you can sit and shoot a thing that much and still not win? The bosses would be exciting if the fights didn’t last as long as they do. Even the bosses I did manage to defeat were boring because the fights keep going long after the excitement wears off. But, this is even true of co-op. Look at this boss:
IT’S SO COOL! A bunch of smaller ships form a bigger robot. It’s an evil Megazord! Neat! But like so many other bosses, there’s no elegant attack pattern to it. Trigon, even on the easy toggles, is sort of a bullet hell, especially in stages that follow this one. The big hook with co-op, the titular “Trigon” itself, is a drone that stays between the players, who have to cooperate to aim it. You can see it in the pictures above, shooting the big blue bullets. It’s actually really fun to use, depending on which of the four guns you get. Well, except one problem: if one player dies, the Trigon is lost. What would have been interesting is to make it a permanent perk of co-op. Instead, it’s an item you pick-up, and they were pretty stingy with distributing it. I’ve been playing tons of shoot ’em ups, but nobody around me has. They couldn’t stay alive unless I cheated.
The bombs are fun. The Trigon item is fun. Nothing else is fun.
That’s the catch-22 with teamwork-based co-ops: if both players aren’t equally as good, you probably won’t be able to have all that much fun with the co-op mechanics. I didn’t even get to finish Trigon co-op because neither my father nor TJ wanted to sit and play a game where they had to continuously mash the fire button. There’s only two basic gun upgrades. Only one of them has autofire and neither of them are fun, novel, or imaginative. I offered to turn autofire on by the emulator, but they declined, and I know why: because they wanted to be done with Trigon. That’s because Trigon is very, very boring without that drone, which again, they don’t give you nearly enough AND IT’S LITERALLY THE NAME OF THE GAME! I didn’t even get to try all the Trigon weapons. There’s four. They were like “peace out” before I even found out what the third was. That meant I had to gut it out in single player.
There’s no way my father or TJ could have survived this stuff anyway. This is with the dip switches set to the easiest setting, mind you. By the way, in the US version called Lightning Fighters, there’s no Trigon in single player. In Japan, you can get one that auto-targets and effectively clears out weak enemies. But me and the Trigon giving bosses everything we had still wasn’t enough five out of nine battles.
Of all the games in this feature, Trigon is the game I had to cheat the most to see what the ending looked like. No other game is close, in fact. For most other games, I’ve reached the point where, if I jack-up the life count, I can actually do pretty good when I try to win legitimately. I could never do that in Trigon. In single player, when you die, you’re reset back to a checkpoint. YEESH! It’s not even worth the effort, either. Trigon is so difficult and enemies are so spongy that it’s just exhausting more than it’s actually entertaining. Sure, it’s awesome that one of the bombs is a dragon that curls around the enemies, but the game is kind of stingy with bombs, too. Plus, the settings, basic enemies, and guns are uninspired and dull. I think the reason the evil Megazord stood out was because it felt like the first imaginative thing that happened. Well, besides the Trigon itself, which should have just been automatic when two players were on. I think I would have given this a YES! had that been the case. It’s not like it was so powerful that we just shredded everything, either. It wasn’t THAT powerful. When you have it, the co-op is genuinely original enough to be fun. But Trigon: The Game really doesn’t want you to have Trigon: The Item. Or fun, it would seem. Verdict: NO!
Nemesis aka Gradius Platform: Game Boy*, Game Boy Color† Released February 23, 1990 Designed by Naoki Matsui Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
*Super Game Boy version included in Konami GB Collection Vol. 1 (Exclusive to Japan) †Game Boy Color version included in Konami GB Collection Vol. 1 (Exclusive to Europe)
Man, Konami got every possible early Game Boy title right. Well, except Castlevania. Read my two-in-one review of Castlevania Adventure and Operation C.
Don’t mistake Nemesis as a Game Boy port of Gradius. Only the first level feels like a close adaptation of previous games. Even then, it’s a fairly tame version that only replicates the Volcano set piece and the typically expected Moai stage. The other levels are completely fresh, in feel if not in intent. Nemesis offers everything you would expect from Gradius in terms of items, basic enemy designs, and level design. But right from the start, Nemesis offers big changes. You can turn on auto-fire before beginning the game and you can skip to any level you want. I’m not sure why anyone would bother skipping levels, since the whole game takes maybe twenty minutes to beat. Maybe. You certainly won’t need to skip for the challenge. Nemesis may be the easiest Konami shmup ever.
All credit where it’s due to Konami, because Nemesis looks fantastic and I smiled joyously whenever I saw the new boss designs. They’re HUGE, but the graphics are so rich and detailed, especially on the Game Boy. There’s Super Game Boy and Game Boy Color variants. For God’s sake, don’t play them. The graphics were clearly made for the black & white screen and, much like Operation C, the choice of colors for the Konami GB Collection re-release distract from the experience instead of adding to it. It’s always gaudy looking, especially the eye sore backgrounds. Take a look below. One of them looks like a genuinely intimidating boss encounter that’s actually pretty frightening to behold. One looks kind of close to it but not as cool. The other looks like a lesser NES game. (The Japanese versions of Konami GB Collection Vol. 1 – 4 are not GBC, but rather Super Game Boy-enhanced.)
Game Boy
Super Game Boy
Game Boy Color
But do yourself a BIG favor and play the standard version. In black & white, it earns the title “Nemesis” with its graphics. That specific version, ultimately a tiny little slice of portable Gradius, is actually pretty dang good. Even with spotty collision detection, which is probably the biggest knock on the game. I died a couple times and had to rewind to see what got me, but it’s never a deal breaker because you should have plenty of dodging room. Plus, once I had the shields, I cruised through the game like I have with no other Gradius game before it. The only part that came close to being “hard” was a few timing-based traps in the final level that involve gigantic moving barriers.
Look at those graphics. What a truly gorgeous game.
Actually, I liked Nemesis even more than Operation C, making this the best Game Boy title I’ve played so far. I suspected it would lose that title before this feature was done, and I was wrong, though the sequel does tie it. To be clear, Nemesis is NOT going to provide thrills at all to those who seek a challenge. Even with the difficulty buffed up, which you have the option to do, this game is a cinch. The shields, especially, are some of the most effective in the franchise. I don’t actually seek a challenge from these games. I want epic sci-fi settings, the occasional set piece, and enjoyable boss fights. For twenty minutes, Nemesis mostly delivers the goods, and also provides one of the best looking Game Boy titles. Seriously, the graphics are so good, in a way you don’t expect from this platform. Konami was better at this than Nintendo, at least when the Game Boy first came out. I still wish it was longer, but if a game leaves you wanting more, that’s usually a very good sign. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Parodius Da! Shinwa kara Owarai e aka Parodius: From Myth to Laughter Platform: Arcade Released April 25, 1990 Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
This thing is basically the meme culture before memes were a thing.
Let’s get this part out of the way first: the whole “parody of Gradius” thing isn’t that difficult to pull off. The spaceships and bosses in Gradius or Life Force could be drawn as literally anything and the game would be the same, and they just so happened to draw them as spaceships. If Konami had wanted it to be a biplane or a submarine, they could have done that. Taking that premise a step further, a different developer might have very well just made this as a boilerplate Gradius-style space shooter AND THEN put a code in the game that unlocks “silly mode” that is, more or less, the game being reviewed here.
One of the tropes of shmups I never loved is the gigantic ship/tight squeeze segment, and I think Parodius has an especially weak one. It’s not that tense, developers! There’s no choice for the player. There’s one safe zone, and it’s so tight that there’s no action in it.
Is it that hard to imagine? Parodius, in many ways, feels like it’s just an excuse to squeeze more out of the Konami formula without flooding the market with games called “Gradius” or “Salamander.” All I really care about is that there’s extra games with that engine. I love the engine of Gradius and Life Force. I love how the items work. I love the load-out options. I like that they do exciting, tense set-pieces. With so much to love, it’s a safe bet I’ll still love them even if they replace the typical walking robot with a showgirl. Even the music is basically the same. Look at the Crab from Gradius II and Chichibinta Rika, aka the showgirl from Parodius. The only difference really is when it happens. The showgirl shows up very early, while the Crab is the final set piece before the last boss.
The Crab (Gradius II)
Chichibinta Rika (Parodius Da!)
And if that’s setting alarm bells that some of the humor won’t land if you’re not a Gradius megafan, well, you’re right. In fact, a lot of Parodius relies heavily on a player knowing not just Gradius but the Konami brand as a whole. But, don’t let the parody aspect cloud your expectations. Parodius is a really fun shmup. It’s certainly not perfect, as the fun of the solo experience doesn’t last the full length of the game. Parodius shows its arcade nature with BRUTAL difficulty, at least on the NORMAL tab. It’s safe to say that Parodius eventually becomes a bit of a bullet hell in the late stages, and that’s fine. I tried swapping to the EASY dip switch to see if I could feel the difference, and I think it was marginally noticeable in the early stages with the amount of bullets and the bosses. But, if I’m not mistaken, that still vanishes by the last third of the game, which was the part that I needed toggled relief from anyway.
Like this part? Maybe it’s because I picked the octopus and it’s more optimized for this section (it’s basically the Life Force/Salamander load-out) but this was much easier on the EASY toggle than on NORMAL.
Although the level themes are delightful and having every major Konami load-out (Gradius/Salamander/Gradius II/TwinBee) adds a lot of replay value, I still don’t recommend playing the arcade version solo. If you’re by yourself, stick to the home ports, which tone back the bullet count significantly. I did attempt a few solo games of Parodius for this feature, and as far as the arcade game goes, the fun as both a shmup and a novelty game doesn’t last. The problem is that, when playing by yourself, you don’t respawn immediately when you die. You’re taken backward to whatever was the last checkpoint you reached. In later stages, especially one specific segment, this is a brutal punishment.
This is the part in question, which is a direct parody of an equally maddening segment from the original Gradius. Those umbrellas (which are based on the Kasa-obake ghost of Japanese legend) flood the screen. This screen doesn’t give you a good idea of how brutal it gets.
As a co-op experience, Parodius really is just another Gradius/Salamander game, which is fine. Those are awesome, and Parodius is more of the same. However, I think it’s a little too close at times, with several bosses and set-pieces being direct reskins of Konami shmup staples with no surprises. Even the last boss is just the brain from Gradius reskinned as an octopus that plays identically, more or less, to the Gradius original. As fun as Parodius is, it doesn’t quite stand on its own. Parodius Da! is an all-star game. A highlight reel. A clip show. The best thing I can say about it is that they really did seem to take the best parts from previous games for reskinning. I’m guessing that’s why a port of Da! will score the highest value of any Parodius game later on in this feature, even after the technology gets better. If you’ve never played Parodius, expect a lot of awesome action and fun sprites. Don’t expect much in the way of new gameplay. And if it seems like I’ve left anything out, hey, I have five more versions of this to play, some of which are better than the coin-op, and I need to have stuff to discuss for them, too. Verdict: YES! – $5 in Value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
TwinBee Da! aka Pop’n TwinBee Platform: Game Boy*, Game Boy Color† Released October 12, 1990 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – TwinBee
*Super Game Boy version included in Konami GB Collection Vol. 2 (Exclusive to Japan) †Game Boy Color version included in Konami GB Collection Vol. 3 (Exclusive to Europe) That’s not a typo. Konami GB Collection Vol. 2 – 4 are ordered differently in Europe.
Game Boy
Super Game Boy
Game Boy Color
Well, congratulations are in order because TwinBee’s losing streak in this feature is over. TwinBee Da! isn’t amazing or anything. It’s a perfectly fine bland shmup that’s elevated by incredible graphics and smooth shooting. It’s certainly a lot harder than the Game Boy version of Gradius was. There’s a lot more bullets flying at you, and because of the smaller playfield, the bells are a lot harder to juggle and transform into power-ups. But, “harder than Nemesis” leaves a lot of room for interpretation, because like most other Konami Game Boy games, TwinBee is still pretty easy compared to other versions. The odds are never overwhelming thanks to the limitations of the Game Boy. Hell, you wouldn’t know there are limitations just going off these graphics. I really think this is the best looking TwinBee game yet. Black & White looks great on it, doesn’t it?
It might be harder than Nemesis, but it’s certainly not as good. This might be the most memorable boss in the game, but all the bosses feel kind of samey.
Not only do most of the bosses feel mundane and predictable, but the game ends on an extended boss rush that didn’t do anything for me at all, which is unusual for Konami shoot ’em ups. In Gradius, the boss rush sequence is usually the highlight of the game, but TwinBee Da’s designs are too limited to effectively pull it off. Hell, even the last boss doesn’t feel THAT different, only bigger. Thus, this becomes the rarest of Konami shoot ’em ups: a shoot ’em up where the levels outshine the bosses. This can be owed largely to the effective balance of gun and bomb targets. The bomb auto-targeting system is really well done, giving you a lot of wiggle room that you absolutely need with the compact screen. Again, is it amazing? No, but it’s not boring for most of the twenty-five minutes it lasts. I just wish it had stuck the landing a little better. If only this were remade. For, say, the PSP. One can only dream. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Parodius Da! aka Parodius: From Myth to Laughter Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released November 30, 1990 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Wikis: Konami – Gradius
This is actually the entrance to a hidden level, but at first, I couldn’t get through it. Finding the door is the easy part. I remember blowing this hole open in my initial playthrough. But when I actually went for the hidden stages, I tried and failed to get through it probably around twenty times. It turns out, you have to shoot it open well before the scrolling reaches it, which is tough with characters like TwinBee. Not in love with that design.
Parodius is a bit glitchy. There were a few “WTF” moments during my initial playthrough, but I didn’t think much of them until I did one last check during my final edit of this feature. I replayed most of the games during one final “sweep” and for Parodius NES, I did something that caused enemies who entered a certain part of the screen to spontaneously combust, and it even kept bouncing a bell. It lasted pretty deep into the start of the stage before going away. It also vanished if I died. (Shrug) It’s certainly not commonplace, as I only know for certain it happened twice when I did five or six full play-throughs, with a couple other parts I wish I had rewound to examine further. Still, nothing like this happened in any other game, so these moments stood out. While making my final check of Parodius, I also realized that it’s still damn good looking for an NES game. That’s even considering how much they had to scale back for the Famicom.
Arcade
Famicom/NES
But, those amazing graphics come with a hefty cost. In addition to constant flicker, Parodius suffers from slowdown on a scale I’ve not previously experienced in this feature. I thought Gradius II on the Famicom was hard-up, but it was nothing compared to this. When you get a full fleet of options, Parodius genuinely feels like the game could crash at any moment. It’s absolutely not to the game’s benefit, either. The famous showgirl sequence? On the Famicom/NES, it lasts a whopping THREE-AND-A-HALF MINUTES! If that was three-and-a-half minutes of non-stop action, that would be one thing. But it only makes three roundtrip passes the entire time, meaning six total times you have to time your movement to dodge the limbs. Even if you trimmed a pass, this would have lasted over two minutes. That’s insane for a shoot ’em up set-piece! WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!
No hesitation that this is the worst part of Parodius on the NES was, and maybe the single most boring section of any game in this entire feature. This version of the indestructible avoider has no excitement because it drags on forever. It went so long that I wondered if they had changed it up from the coin-op and there was something I was supposed to be shooting. The crab in the Famicom Gradius II was like that. Only, this isn’t like the crab. This was mind-numbingly intolerable and an all-time low point for the entire genre. A genuinely braindead moment that should be scaled-back by 75% at least.
The good news is, I overall liked the NES build of Parodius, which dumps the worst level of the coin-op (the graveyard, sorry fans) and adds a carnival-themed stage. It’s certainly not a perfect build. In addition to the self-inflicted visual problems that I must do for my photosensitivity (I have to play in a well-lit room, which causes some visibility issues), the game is just generally very flickery, especially if you’re playing well. I had to remind myself constantly as I played this that this is one of the most remarkable technical achievements on the entire Nintendo Entertainment System. It uses the legendary Konami VRC4, the same memory mapper used in the Famicom port of Gradius II, though it seems somehow less obvious in this game. If there isn’t some graphical anomaly happening on screen, you must be having a bad game.
The Moai ship is equally slow and tedious. Unlike the iconic showgirl, I really think this level should have been deleted entirely for the Famicom. I get that it’s one of the famous highlights of the coin-op (I disagree but whatever) but common sense says the Famicom can’t do it justice. Well, maybe not. The only good part of Wai Wai World 2 was a version of the gigantic ship trope, and that was done really well. Apparently it CAN be done, which is actually a damning indictment on this specific build. Maybe a ROM hacker should cut that sequence out of Wai Wai 2 and paste it over the Moai ship.
For all the problems with flicker and speed, Parodius on the NES is pretty dang decent. It’s certainly not as difficult as the coin-op, even on HARD. I think there’s a small chance if I really focused enough, I could ace the game, or at the very least, finish it without a game over. If you lose a life, you’re reset to a checkpoint, BUT, you’ll quickly get your loadout back because the game drops a ton of roulette power-ups. If your timing is true, you should be able to quickly get back to the level of speed, firepower, and options you had when you died in under a minute. It helps a ton that there’s a lot less bullets flying around than in the coin-op. Sometimes hardware limitations work for the player, and Parodius NES is the proof.
There’s some exclusive bosses to the NES version, too. Like this duck that looks like one of Scrooge McDuck’s nephews trying to cosplay as Mega Man. His name is Woon Botton, which made me giggle.
The game is shorter than the coin-op, but the stages that are omitted really are no major loss. To make up for the smaller experience, they’ve added a whole new level, the amusement park, which is a very strong level with many memorable segments. Oh, and it also include a hidden path that takes you into a very, very short version of the deleted graveyard scene.
Sadly, the hidden graveyard is the only one of the four hidden stages that contains its own unique boss fight, which is a small twist on the original female ghost. It’s barely even a real twist, since it starts as a smoke cloud and then plays kind of the same, only the model is different. Still, it’s a nice little bonus. So are the other three hidden stages, for that matter. Even cooler is, completing them allows you to switch to one of the other three characters, something I wish other games in the series would have utilized in order to beef-up the strategy.
Entrance to the hidden graveyard.
The rest of the game is every bit as solid as the NES ports of Gradius and Life Force, except for the sheer amount of slowdown. Remarkably, if you play on one of the higher difficulties, Parodius still manages to be a fairly up-tempo game. Well, besides that one low-stakes segment with showgirl and the ever present problem with the gigantic Moai ship, which really only has one good version of it to speak of (it’s the PlayStation version). I wouldn’t mind seeing the reworked Famicom levels and exclusive bosses included in a modern remake. With no slowdown, they’d probably turn out pretty amazing.
Here’s the last NES-exclusive boss: a Moai viking ship. It’s actually a sub-boss that takes place before the robo-duck I showed you above. Like the showgirl, it’s an indestructible avoider, only it actually fits the amusement park theme. Its attack pattern is directly modeled after the famous pirate ship flat ride, in that it just sways back and forth several times. On HARD difficulty, it’s a genuinely intense encounter because the basic enemies that fly onto the screen shoot at you. I thought this worked pretty dang good as a set-piece, and my only knock is putting it right before the stage’s boss. This should have been a mid-stage segment.
The bosses are, of course, the highlights of the game. Despite being smaller, they’re almost as fun to do battle with as their arcade counterparts. So, while this is nowhere near as good as Gradius II on the NES, Parodius is a solid 8-bit shoot ’em up. I guess I sort of get why they didn’t bring this out in America (which doesn’t explain why it got an EU release) but it’s a damn shame it didn’t get a full global release. While I don’t think it’s amazing or anything thanks to the inevitable ravages of age and that heartbreaking slowdown, I think it’s a safe bet that Parodius would still be fondly remembered as one of the all-time greats on the NES. Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Ultimate Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gradius III Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released December 21, 1990 Directed by Hiroyasu Machiguchi Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius – Strategy
The SNES version of Gradius III has a lot of hidden bonus stage-type rooms. But, if you find them, you don’t fight the bosses and skip directly to the next stage. That’s like winning a trip to Disneyland only to find out you’re not allowed to get on any rides.
Jeez, I thought the coin-op Gradius III had a lot of slowdown, but Gradius III on the SNES takes the cake. I mean, it takes it very slowly. If you have all four options and a full loadout, I’d conservatively guesstimate 90% of the game suffers from slowdown. It led to multiple frustrating deaths, too. I’d be fighting a boss and blow them up while dodging an active bullet only to have the CPU wake from its coma. This caused me to steer straight into the bullet because my movement, which I was basing around the practically omnipresent slowdown, suddenly wasn’t affected by slowdown. This kept happening, too. I figured I should get that out of the way first because, other than those moments of hair-pulling bullsh*t, I had a lot of fun with Gradius III on the SNES.
Both the coin-op and the SNES game offer you to customize your loadout, like so. I had a lot of fun experimenting with different arrangements. Good stuff. No notes. Wish more games in the franchise allowed it.
Despite the leap to 16-bit platforms, the same type of changes made to the 8-bit home versions of Gradius coin-ops still apply to Gradius III on the SNES. The enemy count and bullet count have been dramatically shrunk, which in turn dramatically shrinks the difficulty. Segments and boss battles that couldn’t be done within the limits of launch-window Super Famicom have also been removed or altered. So a fight that looked like this in arcades:
Now looks like this on the Super Nintendo:
For all intents and purposes, it’s a totally different boss, with a different strategy and cadence. It’s addition by subtraction, for sure, including the stages that were cut. Oddly enough, the third person sequence from the coin-op that you would swear was made for the SNES’ Mode 7 effect is missing entirely. Missing, but not missed, along with every other sluggish part of the arcade game. However, the new content is not entirely welcome either. The cube dodging sequence is gone. Awesome. There’s a terrible speed zone sequence. Not awesome. The Shadow Gear boss (left in the below screens) that I hated in the coin-op is gone. Awesome. The replacement (on the right) is a poor substitute AND you have to fight two of them back-to-back. Not awesome.
Shadow Gear (Arcade)
Shadow Gear MK II (SNES)
Every step forward Gradius III’s home port makes over the coin-op is also typically accompanied by a smaller step backwards. Thankfully, that means Gradius III on the SNES still ends up well ahead of the coin-op. It even has plenty of replay value. While the bonus rooms do nothing for me, mostly because my favorite part of these games is fighting bosses, people who want replay value will have those to look for. The collision seems better. Gradius III on the SNES is a typical solid home version of a Gradius game. I don’t think I loved it quite as much as others did. I certainly don’t think this is a “legendary” game. It’s fine. There’s a sense of “been there, done that” that I assume is there because Konami’s goal was simply to buff the audio-visual experience, and mission accomplished. A better looking version of one of the NES Gradius games is hardly a bad thing, but this wasn’t the creative leap I was hoping for. Either way, the exclusion of this version of Gradius III from Gradius Origins is a crime against gaming. Verdict: YES! – $6 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Thunder Cross II Platform: Arcade Released in 1991 Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Wikis: Konami – Gradius
I’m about to say a LOT of mean things about this game, so here’s something cheerful and positive: this is the best version of the famous Gradius set piece known as the Electric Cage I’ve played so far. Of course, like all bosses in Thunder Cross II, the battle goes on too long because they increased the hit points for bosses across the board.
The sequel to Thunder Cross is little more than a seven stage expansion pack to the good version of the original game. One that was made mostly of ideas deleted on the drawing board because they weren’t good enough for the original game. No split decision needed this time. There’s no American ROM that removes all the best parts in favor of flavorless space warfare. The gameplay centered around the four options returns. You still have the ability to spread the options out or close them in, exactly as before. The badass guns, including the boomerang, return, along with the special guns used by the options. Also returning are the ultra-generic settings and bosses, only this time, the bosses are way more spongy AND they’re seemingly designed around trying to keep the fight going until the time runs out and you win by default.
This is the first boss, which died of boredom before I could kill it. See, it has a small hit box and arms that constantly shield it. Who the hell wants to actually WIN boss fights anyway? Players want tedious, sluggish-paced fights that are won by forfeit, right?
Even the mini-bosses are a complete f*cking slog. A lot of Thunder Cross II’s problems are tied to co-op, but the sponginess of the bosses isn’t really all that affected by it since only X amount of shots can actually land thanks to the bosses blinking. I tested this theory and determined that co-op maybe shaved a second or two at most off the bosses, though granted, my partners kept dying during them because, you know, they haven’t spent the last two months playing shoot ’em ups as much as me. But like, look at this boss:
This is NOT a big boss. It’s the second level’s mid-stage boss.
This thing just sits there and sucks up your bullets like they’re nothing. Well, it’s a two-piece boss, since each individual half is its own sprite that needs to be destroyed, but come on. It’s a MID-STAGE BOSS, and without hyperbole it can absorb more bullets from a full load-out than the overwhelming majority of final bosses from other games in this feature. Consequently, I wouldn’t really describe most of the bosses or even mid-bosses as being truly “fun” to battle against. Many of them become reduced to repetitive, mindless grinds.
This thing doesn’t actually move all that much. Once you blow up the gun, it awkwardly floats forward a little bit, then remains stationary while its tail pokes at you. It’s laughable.
There is one thing that didn’t make the journey to the sequel. Go figure it would be my favorite super weapon, the flamethrower. Oh, there’s still an “F” weapon, only now, instead of streams of fire being shot by each option like in the original Thunder Cross, you just shoot big fireball-like bullets that aren’t anywhere near as satisfying as the cutting flames of the first game. In fact, they don’t really feel that different from the gigantic laser beams now. They kind of behave the same way, and with that, the sense of uniqueness is gone. Goddamnit, Konami. I swear your developers could f*ck up an order for a glass of room temperature water.
So that sucks, and then Thunder Cross II further goes out of its way to make the special guns less desirable to pick up. I died more than once from barriers because the special guns simply couldn’t shoot fast enough to punch through them before I crashed. These are the “co-op or die” parts that Thunder Cross II leans heavily into. If you’re playing co-op, you should get through them easily. If you’re flying solo though? There’s no way of knowing if you’re coming up on a barrier that you can only make it through if you’re able to spam the normal weapons. Like this part:
These pipes are an example of everything wrong with Thunder Cross II, because if you power-up the drones, unless you make literally the perfect choices with perfect timing, you won’t get through them.
A lot of this seems to be another byproduct of Thunder Force II being optimized for co-op. Now, to the game’s credit, there’s a few boss designs that are SLIGHTLY more memorable this time around. This even includes fighting a giant robot gecko at one point. And by the way, for all my whining, we’re still talking about a sequel to one of the best arcade shmups I’ve played. Thunder Cross II is still capable of being a lot of fun between the boss battles. Most everything that had me dazzled about the first game returns, even if it feels like they nerfed the weapons. I still don’t think Thunder Cross II is anywhere near as good as the original. Again, today this would be a low-rated DLC pack, which is why I’m awarding it less than half the value of the first game. But, you don’t have to be a shmup superfan to have fun. That’s all I really care about. Bad DLC to a great game is usually still okay, right? Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Detana!! TwinBee Bells & Whistles Platform: Arcade Released February, 1991 Directed by Masato Ohsawa Developed by Konami Sold Separately on Arcade Archives ($7.99) Read the Original Indie Gamer Chick Review Wikis: Konami – TwinBee
Before I get to the review, I have to pass along the most heartbreaking trivia of this entire feature. The director of Detana!! TwinBee, Masato Ohsawa, passed away on January 2, 1991, just a month before the release of his game. According to MobyGames, this was his only directing credit. The only other game he’s verified to have worked on is the coin-op version of Jackal/Top Gunner. Detana!! TwinBee is an excellent game and should have been a breakthrough for him that led to a legendary career. What a tragic loss for gaming. So, everyone please take a moment and lift your most handy beverage in a toast! 🍺 To Masato Ohsawa: a gifted creator of games taken far too soon. Thank you for a truly fun video game that I’ve enjoyed thoroughly for five years now! You have not been forgotten! Cheers to you, Masato! 🍻
Hey, I promised you that TwinBee reviews would become glowing, didn’t I? The above shots are an example of Detana!! Twinbee at its most clever. A boss that you have to shoot the paddles to rotate its base around to expose its vulnerable spot. Okay, so that boss is probably the high point of the game, but I was so charmed that my socks landed two counties over. I don’t know if my opinion has changed all that much from my original 2020 review of Bells & Whistles. My #1 issue five years ago was bullet visibility. Now that I’m much, much more familiar with the genre thanks to working on a feature devoted almost entirely to shmups for the last couple months, yeah, the problem is actually worse than I realized before. It’s not even just enemy bullets, either. The enemies themselves, especially ground targets, get lost in the fog of war.
Detana!! TwinBee
Bells & Whistles
By the way, the left screen is Detana!! TwinBee and the right from Bells & Whistles. It matters, because Bells & Whistles is a one-button game that maps bullets and bombs to a single button. At first, I thought I preferred that, until I realized that constantly dropping bombs whether there are bomb targets actively on the screen or not made the visibility problem even worse. I even tried playing with a CRT filter over the screen, which does help for some games but it did nothing for this one.
When playing in co-op, if one player bumps the other from behind, it shoots these five HUGE projectiles. If anyone else in my house was even average at shmups, I think this would have been so powerful as to nearly entirely cheese the game. Except, nobody in my family wanted to do this because it totally looks like the ships are, well, humping each other. I assume this was deliberate.
The visual loudness is not a nothingburger issue and it significantly muffles the potential of Detana!! TwinBee. This could have been a Gradius II-like contender and instead I had to play it multiple times just to figure out what the value would be. How do I quantify the value of a game where the biggest problem, by far, is that it’s often hard to tell what’s going on? Oh, and if you think THIS is bad, try playing in co-op, especially in Bells & Whistles. Holy smokes. The targeting system of the bombs isn’t perfect, either. Despite scattering several of them, sometimes they felt like they hit everything BUT the one thing I needed to kill.
In this battle against the final boss, I assure you that I’m being shot at right now. I know, it’s hard to tell.
Detana!! TwinBee is still a YES! without question. The enemy attack patterns and boss fights are, simply put, awesome. The settings, despite the massive drawback that comes with them, are among the best facades created for a shmup of this era. The quirky personality never feels forced, either, something the NES games struggled to pull off. But the niggling little annoyances keep its potential constantly in check. Like the uncanny timing of the clouds that contain the bells, almost always synced with enemy attack waves that the bells will inevitably interfere with. The giant ship boss is a little on the tedious side, and I couldn’t see what was going on at all with the final boss pictured above.
Oddly enough, I never found myself saying “I wish this had more guns” like I had with previous TwinBee games, even though this doesn’t really add much in the way of new guns. It has a second ship and a big charge shot. I guess that’s good enough.
Don’t mistake my whining about visibility as a deal breaker. I just played three full games of Detana!! TwinBee, a game I’ve already reviewed once at IGC. I never got bored, and I’ll be playing a couple more rounds when I begin reviewing the PC Engine port, which was the only console port this entry in the TwinBee series ever got before the compilation era. I’m not dreading it at all, either! I’m looking forward to it! That’s because the base arcade game is fantastic. I don’t know what the solution to the loud visuals could be. Visibility problems seem like the price you have to pay for having backgrounds that feel both cartoonish but also vibrant and alive. My TwinBee running gag of “wait, when did I lose an arm?” has never been more in effect as it was playing this, the second arcade TwinBee. But, I still had a ton of fun, and that’s all I’ve ever cared about. Verdict: YES! – $8 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Parodius Da! Shinwa kara Owarai e Platform: PC Engine Released February 21, 1991 Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Wikis: Konami – Gradius
I think I was making a face like that when I experienced the slowdown when the music switched over.
Oh dear. I played Parodius on the PC Engine after playing Gradius, Salamander, and Gradius II. When I say that PC Engine fans will be very happy with the final results of Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection, trust me, I mean it. But Parodius is a terrible start for one big reason: the game skips when new music gets loaded. Now, if they had timed that right, no problem. Gradius II does the same thing when you switch stages. But Parodius does it while the bullets are flying. This caused me to die a few times, especially late in the game when the pre-stage enemies really become prevalent. It just throws your timing completely off. Who wants to play a shmup that does that, especially when there’s better options for the same game?
This is the bonus stage that can be selected off the main menu. The SNES version has the same thing, only its version is much more fun.
And it’s not like the occasional lock-up in the middle of the action is the only problem. This is the only PC Engine-based game in this entire feature that had levels deleted from the coin-op. Two whole levels, in fact, including the famous Moai Battleship. Sometimes removing stages is a positive, if you make up for it. I’m not even a fan of the stage or the gigantic ship trope in general, but I’m also deeply in the minority on that. Besides, even the NES and Game Boy versions had it! As if to rub it in, miniature versions of the Moai ship appear in the “bonus game” that was added. A high score challenge that apparently has three hidden bosses if you can score high enough. Even cheating I couldn’t get a single one of these hidden bosses to appear. I even tried again once I finished this feature and the best I could do was the graveyard’s boss. I hate that this is the first PC Engine game in this feature, because Parodius on it just isn’t a good effort, especially compared to the other four games that are coming up. Verdict: NO! And by the way, this is the only version of Parodius Da! to get a NO! Ouch.
Parodius aka Parodius Da! Platform: Game Boy*, Game Boy Color† Released April 5, 1991 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
*Super Game Boy version included in Konami GB Collection Vol. 4 (Exclusive to Japan) †Game Boy Color version included in Konami GB Collection Vol. 2 (Exclusive to Europe)
Game Boy
Super Game Boy
Game Boy Color
Unlike the TwinBee Da! and the two Gradius/Nemesis games on Game Boy, Parodius is a direct port of the coin-op. I’m not sure what to think about that decision, either. On one hand, holy smokes, what a remarkable achievement that the final product is indeed a close approximation of the arcade game. At eight levels long, Parodius is the longest of the four Game Boy titles in this feature, and by quite a bit. If you go by the average total play time, it’s double the length of the others. The two deleted levels are not missed, and the third stage is heavily altered in the Game Boy version, functionally making it a new stage that can make a case for being the best in the entire game. They also censored this version less than the NES game. The sumo wrestlers’ butts show. The showgirl isn’t dressed more conservatively. This is a PORT in all caps, and if I had to venture a guess, I’d guess this is probably the most true-to-the-arcades port in the entire library of the black & white Game Boy. It’s absolutely mind-blowing what they accomplished here.
The new third level feels like it was meant for Nemesis. It doesn’t feel satirical in nature, and even the boss is a direct remake of the famous Golem boss from Salamander that isn’t tongue-in-cheek. I’m not complaining, mind you. This stage was excellent.
On the other hand, this is the rare high quality game that was still destined to age poorly. Well, actually hold on, because that isn’t putting it right. Game Boy Parodius plays splendidly and I’m giving it a YES! without even needing to think twice about it. If you go off the raw gameplay, this should comfortably be the #1-ranked Game Boy title in this feature. It’s certainly more fair than the coin-op as well. Like the other four Game Boy titles, it’s borderline too easy on the default settings. But I also concede that, if Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection were to really happen, there’s not a lot of reasons to play this over the other games. “Aged poorly” is a bad way of saying it. What I meant is “rendered almost entirely obsolete.” If not for the new version of level three, literally everything in Parodius would be a downgrade over other versions of Parodius offered in Konami Shoot ‘Em Up.
Despite amazing graphics, remarkably true-to-arcades level design, bosses, and gameplay, much of the charm is unquestionably lost in Parodius. Parodius should be a colorful game, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen. Unlike the two Nemesis games, Parodius doesn’t benefit from the black & white graphics because it’s not trying to feel foreboding. It’s trying to be funny, so while it still has a lot of personality, everything comes back to “there’s better options.” If they had used the formula to make a Young Frankenstein-like black & white satire, it might have aged better.
This wall mini-boss in the Pachinko level is exclusive to the GB build. I feel like such a sh*theel for not enjoying this more. There’s a part of me that’s so happy for Game Boy owners of the early 90s that such a genuinely quality coin-op port. And heartbroken for American Game Boy owners, who were, yet again, hosed by the lack of Parodius releases in our part of the woods.
At the time this came out, Parodius certainly had to be a contender for best overall Game Boy title. It’s that well made, but it’s not 1991 anymore and you’re likely not stuck with only a Game Boy. Now, had this been 1991, I’d give victory to the Game Boy version of Parodius over its NES counterpart. It loses less, has a better tempo, and a LOT less slowdown. But in 2025? As fun as Parodius on the Game Boy is, its only real value is as a companion piece for better ports. It’s a shame that such a well-made game is now reduced to only a historic curio, but sometimes, that’s just how these things work out. Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gradius: The Interstellar Assault Nemesis II: The Return of the Hero Platform: Game Boy*, Game Boy Color† Released August 9, 1991 Developed by Konami Included with Switch Online Subscription (Basic) Wikis: Konami – Gradius
*Super Game Boy version included in Konami GB Collection Vol. 3 (Exclusive to Japan) †Game Boy Color version included in Konami GB Collection Vol. 4 (Exclusive to Europe) I didn’t play the Game Boy Color version. It was so ugly it hurt my eyes.
Game Boy
Super Game Boy
Game Boy Color
Huh. I just realized this will be the final 8-bit Gradius game I do for this feature. Oh, not the last you’ll read, but I didn’t play games in order. I’m having an emotional moment over here. What a fantastic experience this whole thing has been for me. And the second Game Boy Gradius is actually a worthy follow-up to the first game. Okay, so the level design isn’t quite as uniformly solid and there’s a few slow going moments. But the best levels in Interstellar Assault easily surpass the best levels in the original. The above screenshots are all taken from the coolest opening segment in the entire series up to this point: a high speed chase with a Big Core on your tail. That’s not a boss. THAT’S THE ACTUAL START OF THE GAME! There’s a lot of boldness squeezed into these five levels.
Somehow the graphics are even better this time around, too.
The gameplay is, more or less, the same as the previous GB Gradius. There’s loadout options at the start this time around to choose how you want your missiles to work, and sometimes the stages are bigger than the screen itself. It also doesn’t try to copy as much from previous games. There’s not even a Moai stage, which is pretty unusual by itself. The most important thing is the bosses are genuine highlights and some of the best in the entire franchise. Thank goodness for it too, because a couple of the levels gave me the vibe that they had run out of ideas. The last level especially, before an excellent final boss sequence, is kind of lame for the grand finale.
The f’n Big Core in this one has f’n volcanoes growing out of it! That’s objectively badass!
With the final stage, I’m going to assume the designers put all their chips on the table into the final boss. That’s because there’s a memorable chase sequence that takes place after that battle that sort of serves as the real final boss. So, the game begins with you being chased and ends with you being the chaser. Love it. Smart. It certainly makes this game stand out more than it would given its small stature. Interstellar Assault feels like the first game that leans deeply into immersion via telling a story. A story NOT limited to just text or the opening and closing credits. But it does it so well I kind of wish they’d done more that type of thing up to this point. So, Gradius II GB isn’t as consistent as the previous game, but it’s still fantastic for what it is. I can’t really pick one of the two Game Boy Gradius games over the other. They’re short, at about twenty minutes a pop, and they’re much tamer than most Gradius games. Interstellar Assault has adjustable difficulty, and veterans might want to beef it up, but all fans ought to check them both out. Verdict: YES! $5 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Collection
Crisis Force Platform: Famicom Released August 27, 1991 Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE Listing on Konami Wiki
This is the good stuff.
One of the more legendary Famicom exclusives, though it wasn’t supposed to have that status. Konami planned a global release of Crisis Force, but by time it finished production, the SNES had been globally released and “high tech” for the NES wasn’t “high tech” anymore. The shame is, this would have made a fantastic swan song for the Nintendo Entertainment System. A sprite-pushing, intense, and often clever shoot ’em up with a ship that can transform into three (really four) different forms. Okay, so the basic enemies and a few of the bosses are slightly generic, but the action never lets up.
When the enemies aren’t generic, they POP on the screen. One of the best looking 8-bit home console games.
Unique to Konami shmups, you don’t have one-hit deaths in Crisis Force. Well, as long as you’ve upgraded your gun. Gun gems alternate between blue and red. The blue gems are more traditional shmup guns that fire bullets and I’m not sure why it’s even an option. In my first play-through, I honestly thought the blue gems were a challenge element to be avoided, because the gun capsules with a red gem in the center give you these huge lasers. From there, you can change the shape of your ship on the fly to shoot three different ways, and you’ll need it. They tailored many enemies and bosses to linger near the bottom of the screen, requiring you to swap over to a gun that shoots sideways or behind you.
Even though there were options to shoot behind me, I usually opted to shoot sideways because it was easier to line-up and I could get more rounds off without having to dodge out of the way. I even used this strategy for the last boss too.
The other big twist is that if you collect five red items, you transform into a mega ship that is essentially invincible and has massive firepower. This ship works on a fast-moving 99 second countdown and taking damage while using it subtracts the time you have. I actually reached the point where I didn’t like using this. It was exciting the first time I got it, but it became less fun as the game went along, especially since it’s harder to dodge things and you can’t change shape or use bombs while in the form. They could have removed this entirely and lost nothing.
The bullets you fire with this thing are huge, but so is your sprite, and there’s a lot of tight squeezes in Crisis Force.
Crisis Force isn’t perfect. There’s a LOT of flicker and slowdown and some of the stages feel samey. Some of the bosses don’t feel like epic encounters, which I wouldn’t complain about if not for the fact that there’s some jaw-dropping boss fights with imaginative sprite work, like seen here:
So when the boss is simply three volcanoes to cap off a stage where you’ve already flown over several identical volcanoes followed by a relatively small Aztec-like rock, it kind of takes the joy out of it, you know? Or even having the final level feature a whopping six mini-bosses before you fight the final boss (seen on the right in the above pair of pics)? That’s the seventh level in the game. Wouldn’t it have been wiser to distribute those mini-bosses across the entire game? I’m guessing they were going for a Gradius-like boss rush, only one that has small buffers between each mini-boss. Except the designs for those mini-bosses are largely weak, as is the theme for the level. It makes Crisis Force’s finale come close to being a bit of a slog.
Oh, it’s not a deal breaker by any means. Up to this point, Crisis Force had near-perfect pacing and enjoyable level design. I really think Konami made an error in judgment by choosing to release something like Contra Force or Monster in my Pocket over this. The excuse of “well, the SNES was out” holds no water unless they felt Crisis Force only had value as a technological showpiece. What a terrible decision, because Crisis Force is a very good video game. I get that it would have been riskier due to requiring specialized chips, but Konami was still supporting the NES and it feels like they left a lot on the table by not rolling the dice on this or Gradius II. I don’t get the choices they made at all. Do you think NES owners in 1994 would really have more fun with Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighter than they would with Crisis Force? It doesn’t even make sense from a business standpoint. US gamers get hosed yet again. Verdict: YES! – $6 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Xexex aka Orius Platform: Arcade Released October, 1991 Directed by Toshiaki Takatori Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives ($7.99) Listing at Konami Wiki
This gun, like many guns, is not in the international versions. Japan only.
Another split decision coming your way, because there’s massive regional differences. Like with Thunder Cross, the international versions strip out so much content that I feel I have to do the Japanese version first. Both games have identical level themes and some of the most imaginative enemy designs and bosses in shmups. Xexex/Orius is clearly meant to be Konami’s answer to R-Type. Both versions give players “The Flint” which is like a shield that you can separate from your ship, similar to R-Type. It’s ALWAYS there in some form. If you scroll off the screen, it’ll return to you even if it has to pass through walls to do it. It can absorb every single form of an enemy bullet and even be used as a battering ram. It’s a lot of fun. But how it behaves when you launch it, along with Xexex/Orius’ variety of guns and boss attack patterns changes depending on which ROM you’re using, and the difference is a lot more complicated than Thunder Cross to say the least.
SPLIT DECISION – JAPANESE VERSION
Downright criminal this was never ported to the SNES or Genesis.
Before I drool all over the Japanese version of Xexex, let me get the one maddening negative out of the way first: a relatively small segment in the final stage that made me have to think a lot harder about whether or not this was among the top games in this feature. It’s the typical compactor section, only taken to an extreme I’ve not seen before. A VERY tight squeeze and small safe zones, the final one of which even resorts to using a bit of trickery to fool you because the screen is scrolling one way while the contraption is moving another. Unlike the international builds of Xexex/Orius, you do not instantly respawn in the Japanese build. If you have a lot of speed-ups, this is practically impossible because you can’t hope to move accurately enough, even feathering the D-pad/control stick. I died twice without any boosts at all. This is literally the last thing you do before the final boss, and it’s just dirty pool. If the final boss hadn’t been relatively easy, I might have penalized it a lot more.
Now, with that said, holy mother of God, why does nobody talk about this as one of the greatest shmups of all time? It’s WONDERFUL! Actually, I get why. Like Thunder Cross, the best version of Xexex took a long, long time to get an ideal American release. The Japanese version includes a massive variety of guns, including one of the coolest weapons I’ve ever seen in a game like this. It’s called the Shadow Gun, and if you sit still while you shoot it, it kind of seems like an ordinary Gradius-style laser. Whoopee doo. BUT, if you move around while you shoot it? Well, you might want to watch this because I don’t think I can do it justice. Oh, and the video shows what a fully-powered charge shot looks like no matter what gun you use.
The first time I saw that gun, I started giggling because it was so awesome. It’s VERY satisfying to use and easily my favorite gun in the game. But, unlike a lot of shmups, some bosses are clearly tailored to work better with some guns than others. Against a boss that also features a giant hologram that blocks your shots, I struggled when I used the Shadow Laser but later did much better when I used a weapon called the Search Laser. In fact, I found so many situational uses for the guns that I wish you had an inventory instead of only getting to have one gun at a time. There’s too many good weapons to be limited to whatever your latest pick-up is.
Nobody can accuse Xexex of being too generic. (“I can’t believe you didn’t make a Zordon joke, Cathy.” Me neither.)
No matter which gun you use, the Flint (the shield attached to your ship) can be detached for major damage depending on how many tentacles it has. It can have three at a time. Now, in the Japanese version, the Flint can be detached two ways. Just pressing the detach button will release it right in front of you. Or, you can hold the attack button down to charge up your power blast, then press the detach button to launch it across the screen. It’s an effective option for some bosses, and for others, I honestly can’t imagine any other way to beat them except via the Flint. Like these things:
You can actually see the one on the left has the Flint stuck in its vulnerable part (aim for the brains!). I could not possibly shoot these things enough to kill them any other way. They’re clearly designed specifically to be defeated by the flint. Thankfully, it’s so satisfying. Every element about Xexex is, frankly. There’s never a dull moment. Every boss is an event. There’s a section that feels like baby’s first bullet hell that I enjoyed a lot even if the enemies are shaped.. ahem.. suggestively. It’s also not as difficult as you would think for a game that has NO dip switch settings. I couldn’t stay alive at all in the US version thanks to the lack of guns and lack of flexibility with the flint. In the Japanese version, I didn’t even need to cheat to warm-up to it and eventually beat the game without cheating at all.
Golly, that three-tentacle charge shot never got old.
When I started this feature, this was NOT one of the games on my radar. Hell, it wasn’t even on the initial list of 40 to 50 games that I started with even after I added the first wave of non-Gradius/Parodius/Salamander games. Needless to say, I’m very happy that I decided to just go for broke and do every Konami shmup from before the Xbox/Game/PS2 era I could find, because Xexex stands very tall. I strongly doubt I’ve played any game that was screwed historically to the degree this one was. I really struggled to figure out what’s missing. I guess set-pieces, but that can so quickly devolve into gimmickiness that I’m happy they “played it safe” with straightforward level design seasoned with large and detailed enemy sprites and some genuinely imaginative facades. I don’t know if Xexex is the best shmup ever. I really liked Gradius Gaiden, coming up later. But this is the best arcade shmup I’ve reviewed so far and maybe the most underrated game ever made. Verdict: YES! – $15 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection but this review is not over.
And then there’s the US version. Oof.
SPLIT DECISION – US/EU/WORLD VERSIONS
Very subtle, fellas. By the way, in the international versions, the “baby’s first bullet hell” section is just a straight-up bullet hell. Enemies can spawn behind you or above you and begin spreading bullets in a way you can’t really defend against. In Japan, there’s ways to deal with them regardless. There’s no heat seeking bullets in the international versions and the flint is ALWAYS shot across the screen.
In the international versions, you don’t have lives. You have a lifebar that drains very, very quickly. On the plus side, checkpoints are replaced by instant respawns and no limit to how many times you can continue. I’d say “you’re hosed when you lose your gun” but gun drops are generous. The problem is there’s only one gun, a spreader, that is gradually upgraded to include more bullets and a wider range. There’s also Gradius-like missiles that mostly did nothing. In Japan, even the crappiest gun pick-ups do more damage than any non-Japanese version’s fully-upgraded standard gun, forcing you to hold the fire button down and rely solely on the charge shot. Why not use the Flint, you ask? You can, especially against bosses. I took down over half of them by detaching the Flint in a way that caused it to ping the boss to death. But, in the middle of a level, with bullets and enemies all around you? It’s not that simple.
The bosses mostly play differently too. Like in Japan, you fight one satellite here. It’s two in all other versions, one of which can basically only be hit with the charge shot since its vulnerable spot never faces you. Bosses also had their sponginess increased for the non-Japanese games. Battles I could win in 30 to 45 seconds in Japan could take me several minutes in the US. It’s a total slog.
You can’t do a charge shot without having the Flint attached to your ship. This matters a great deal. In the international versions, the standard gun is so useless that I was caught by surprise when it actually caused a killing shot. I stopped using it after a certain point. In Japan, I could take down basically everything from basic enemies to bosses with the guns. Since the Flint has to be shot across the screen in the international versions, you can’t use it as a shield while you attack enemies with your gun. A gun that, as a reminder, is next to worthless even when fully-juiced. That means the risk/reward factors associated with how you use the Flint in Japan are gone ENTIRELY from the US version. On top of all this, they beefed up the sponge and heavily altered attack patterns. I couldn’t even cheat to survive several situations.
There’s multiple instances that feel like they’re built specifically to knock a player’s health out come hell or high water to force them to drop another quarter in. The Flint can ram enemies from the front, but unlike the Japanese ROM, there’s not a lot of options for what’s behind you.
So here we are, with yet another Japanese masterpiece ruined for no good reason. Like with Thunder Cross, all these changes were likely implemented to appease arcade operators by making a much more difficult game. In a sense, I get that. I can legitimately beat the Japanese game without emulator-based shenanigans. I can’t say that about a lot of coin-ops. But, if someone of MY skill level can do that, without all that much practice at this specific game? That means a player without a lot of money can spend a lot of time on it. It might make for an amazing game in 2025, but it doesn’t make a ton of business sense in 1991 for a machine trying to earn a quarter per play. But surely there’s a better way than stripping most of the fun out of it. What hurts the most is, unlike Thunder Cross, this completely wrecked Xexex, now known as Orius, is still pretty close to being okay. It’s not boring, that’s for sure. It’s just too brutal to be fun. A reminder that Konami’s business motto for the world outside of Japan seems to have been “fun, but never before profit.” Verdict: NO!
Gradius Platform: PC Engine Released November 15, 1991 Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE* Wikis: Konami – Gradius – Strategy
*Included in TurboGrafx-16 Mini. In the TG16/PCE Minis, hold SELECT while GRADIUS is highlighted on the main menu to unlock the “arcade” version. This review covers only the standard retail build.
This is much closer in feel to Gradius III’s desert than MSX’s boneyard.
Gradius for the PC Engine is the final version of the original game in this feature. It’s late to the party, but at least it has some added value to make it worth it. Ignore what the Gradius Wiki says about this being the skeleton level from the MSX game. The theme might be similar, but it looks and plays completely different and is yet another welcome addition. Another thing the Gradius Wiki got wrong is saying this is an otherwise identical game to the coin-op. I disagree. I feel the difficulty is slightly toned down, leaving it within the acceptable parameters.
It’s a REALLY cool stage.
For example, I had a much easier time surviving the volcanoes in the TG-16 build than the coin-op. They’re noticeably easier, but not as completely nerfed as the NES versions. Also, because of issues related to scaling of the coin-op graphics and sprites, the stages are wider. Like, you literally need to vertically scroll. Is that what’s happening here? I just double checked the coin-op directly against the PC Engine version. Here’s what it looks like. The screen in the middle is from the coin-op, while the screens on the left and right are taken in the same position on the first level, only higher and lower on the playfield.
Gradius (PC Engine) High
Gradius (Arcade)
Gradius (PC Engine) Low
Oh! I see it! It’s the score! It’s actually down under the item bar instead of being laid over the top of the playfield. Except, the scrolling temporarily stops during the volcano/Big Core fight. So, let’s compare those!
Arcade
PC Engine
What a strange development decision. Well, the good news is, it actually makes this version feel different, and perception is reality. It’s not as good as it could be. The biggest problem in the game, by far, is that there’s NO option menu. By this point in gaming, not having options to increase or decrease the difficulty is obviously not a good thing. I thought this was a well-balanced game, but I’m not good at these games. I imagine someone who is might be annoyed that they have to do a full game cycle to bump the difficulty up. This is probably too easy for seasoned veterans.
Since this is the final version of the original Gradius, I figure I’ll take this space to say how lame I think the whole “the final boss doesn’t fight back” trope of Gradius/Parodius is. I get it! I get it! Everything you’ve fought through leading up to it is the line of defense by the enemy forces, who are protecting the brain, so it DID fight back, which is what the whole game has been. F*ck that noise. It’s the last boss of a video game. Besides, you really don’t think they’d have a ton of guns aimed at the door of it, instead of just in front of it?
Otherwise, *I* think this is a better version of the coin-op with a really fun new level that makes for an excellent way to say goodbye to the original Gradius. The home ports in general made me feel better about that NO! I assigned to the coin-op. Konami, if you’re reading this, you have to right this wrong with Gradius Origins, before it’s too late. The people are going to want these ports. They’re good ports worthy of both playtime and study. The most tragic thing of all is what an unfathomable longshot including the PC Engine ports in a modern console collection is. It shouldn’t be. This was the console that went toe-to-toe with Sega in their prime and won, and even held industry leadership over Nintendo, albeit very briefly. The TurboGrafx-16 is a historic footnote, but its Japanese counterpart is not. From my experience, PC Engine fans are right up there with any of the best gaming fanbases. Non-toxic, loyal, and dedicated. Let’s do the right thing here, Konami. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Salamander Platform: PC Engine Released December 6, 1991 Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE* Wikis: Konami – Gradius – Strategy
*Included in TurboGrafx-16 Mini. In the TG16/PCE Minis, hold SELECT while SALAMANDER is highlighted on the main menu to unlock the “arcade” version. This review covers only the standard retail build.
Warning to people with photosensitivity: you might want to avoid the PC Engine build of Salamander.
Look, that dragon is also a question mark!
Keep in mind that this is a port of SALAMANDER and not Life Force, and boy, does it scoot along fast. The speed of movement for enemies and the background was increased, possibly to make up for having fewer enemies and targets flying around. It’s not smoke and mirrors, either. You feel it. I have to admit, after playing the coin-op and finding out the PC Engine build used the same item system and included no new stages, I didn’t think I’d be giving this a YES! There were changes, though. The guns and missiles can now be upgraded twice for a higher fire rate. A couple of the bosses play differently, including the final boss gaining the ability to huff, puff, and blow your options away or even disintegrate them completely. Finally, you no longer instantly respawn upon dying in single player. If you need a reminder why that’s a big deal:
Yep. Die during this segment and you get to start it all over. Thankfully, the start-over point is the start of the escape sequence instead of having to fight the final boss all over again. I also think the game gives you a little more cushion in terms of the movement speed of the barriers. I only needed two attempts to escape.
I have no clue what possessed this change. What makes it especially frustrating is there’s adjustable difficulty. Why not have the instant respawn taken away for the hard mode but leave it as it’s supposed to be for easy difficulty? I don’t get it. By the way, in the coin-op, if you die, there’s a window where you can catch your options before they scroll off screen. In the PC Engine port, they kept the animation for the options beginning to drift away, but not the “respawn with a chance to catch them” part. You dicks. I’m pretty mad about it because Salamander was cruising to an easy YES!, but these changes muddied the waters pretty badly and turned my final verdict into a closer call than it needed to be.
Unlike the coin op, these balls don’t linger on screen. Now it’s an enjoyable boss fight.
When in doubt, I always ask myself “did I have more fun than not?” In those terms, recommending Salamander for the PC Engine is a no-brainer. It’s a big improvement over the less fair coin-op, and with none of the technical problems that plagued the NES game to boot. I will never love the item system of Salamander. Even after multiple sessions, I can’t really tell the items apart. I don’t think the theme was a rousing success at all. I also think they must have buffed the boss hit points because it took me forever to kill the dragon during the fire level. I’m also not sure why it took them so long to bring these games to the PC Engine. The PC Engine came out in October, 1987, and by time it did, Gradius and Life Force had already been released for the Famicom in Japan. What took over four years? In the case of Salamander, it doesn’t even add any new content. It’s fine, but worth the wait? Probably not, especially for a game that was always overrated to begin with. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Detana!! TwinBee Platform: PC Engine Released February 28, 1992 Directed by Masato Osawa Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – TwinBee
You know, in screenshots this doesn’t look like it solves the visibility problem, but trust me, it did in a big way.
Getting the negative out of the way first, the PC Engine port of Detana!! TwinBee is missing the entire sixth level. That’s a big downer and there’s no getting around it, especially since the sixth level was pretty strong in the coin-op. Maybe I’m spoiled because both Gradius and Gradius II on the PC Engine, which I played before I played this, added levels. Really good levels, at that. The pace is certainly slower, as well. Maybe it’s an illusion because the screen is stretched out, but levels feel longer than in the coin-op. The visuals also take a slight hit, though that might not be a bad thing. Now for the good news: in many ways, the PC Engine version of Detana!! TwinBee is superior to the coin op.
This boss didn’t open himself up to attack as quickly as he did in the coin-op. I had to wait quite a while before I had an open shot for his final form.
The most obvious difference is visibility problems that plagued the coin-op are mostly improved. I only struggled to see enemies and bullets in the fifth level and the battle against the final boss. That’s a big upgrade. As expected, the enemy counter is lowered, along with the projectiles. For what it’s worth, I think when you pump up the difficulty (or play the second cycle after beating the game), Datana!! TwinBee on PC Engine is harder than its Gradius or Parodius counterparts, and right from the start, too. I’m also happy to report they didn’t simplify the more ambitious bosses. The giant ship that you have to fly around twice in the coin op plays the same here, as does the boss that you have to rotate the paddles on its head to open up.
While you still have one PC Engine review to go (the best one, in fact), Datana!! TwinBee was the fifth and final PC Engine game I played for this feature. I think that Konami’s shmup presence on the platform was nothing short of phenomenal. It’s a punch in the gut that it’s unlikely for Konami to ever do the right thing and put these games in collections. Especially a collection like the one I’ve imagined in this feature. In the 80s and early 90s, home versions of coin-ops, even with all the sacrifices they had to make to the audio/visual experience, were often better. I ultimately can’t go THAT far with Datana!! TwinBee because it’s missing a pretty good level. Had that been there, I might have given the slight edge to the PCE build over the coin-op. I penalized Parodius Da! for missing a stage and fair is fair. But this is obviously a much stronger game than Parodius, even with the lost content. It’s not QUITE as good as the arcade version, but it’s pretty close and worthy of inclusion in a set that celebrates what Konami accomplished in this genre. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
I’m still cautiously optimistic that G.I. Joe will get some form of a home release.
I’ve already reviewed G.I. Joe, but I wanted to briefly revisit it. Partially because I was curious if this started development as a sequel to Devastators, but that game has a lot more going for it than G.I. Joe and I abandoned those thoughts quickly. I still stand by everything I said in my February, 2023 review, so this time, I want to talk about the co-op AND what kids of the 2020s would say about it. Playing G.I. Joe with two players can be a frustrating experience. Items often land too close together, and since there’s only three (health, rapid fire, and missiles), having one player scoop up both rapid fires is annoying. This is compounded by the fact that one single shot from any enemy causes you to lose the rapid fire. G.I. Joe is an unrepentant button masher that has one gun, and one only. The need to constantly mash the fire button was so physically painful, even for the kids, that I had to activate autofire, even if it negated the point of rapid fire. Once I did that, yea, the game is better co-op than solo. Like, no duh, right?
The game is so visually loud that it almost always caught me by surprise when I died.
While the kids, ages 9 to 14, all kinda enjoyed it (none of them loved it), they were baffled that a game that looks as good as this does has NO variety to it. None at all. No mini-guns. No laser guns. Nothing but the basic weapon and the ability to stop mashing buttons for maybe as short as a single second. No jumping. No diving out of the way of big enemy attacks. There really isn’t even much in the way of a defensive game because the bullets are so poorly drawn that you can’t really see what’s killing you. G.I. Joe’s claim to fame is the gameplay degrades into unbridled chaos with no finesse and no variety, and it’s actually a miracle that what’s here is still an okay game. It is fun, but even the kids understood why this was never ported to the SNES or Genesis. It’s too shallow. I don’t even think the normal $7.99 Arcade Archives price would be worth it. G.I. Joe is video game junk food, and like junk food, you’ll regret it afterwards, especially when your hands cramp like they’ve never cramped before. Verdict: YES! – $4 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection.
Parodius Da! Shinwa kara Owarai he aka Parodius: Non-Sense Fantasy Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released July 3, 1992 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED* Wikis: Konami – Gradius
*Technically re-released in 1997 in Japan via the Nintendo Power flash cartridge system.
For the SNES version, the screens with the Octopus were played on a “2” out of 7 in difficulty. The screens with Twinbee ship are 4 out of 7 and the screenshots with Gradius ship are the max 7 out of 7 difficulty.
Had Parodius for the SNES gotten a US release, I have no doubt it would be remembered today as one of the greatest games ever made. But it wasn’t. Imagine that it’s 1994 and someone at Konami says “we need one more game for our release schedule and we still haven’t released that ultra fun, ultra quirky Parodius game in North American. But.. nah, let’s license Biker Mice From Mars instead!” Yeah, yeah, there would have been some controversy over the showgirl. I wonder if Nintendo told Konami “not in the United States, because Sega might cite it against us in congressional hearings.” Of course, they repainted her for the Famicom version, so why couldn’t they for the US version? Change it from a showgirl to a gorilla. I mean, why not?
Anything can be a dil(censored) if you’re brave enough! “Cathy NOOOOOOOOO!”
Parodius on the SNES has a whopping seven adjustable difficulty settings. I played full sessions of three of them, and I’ll say that you can feel the difference, at least between “2” “4” and “7” levels. Mind you, “7” isn’t an automatic trip to the second loop. It’s hard, but not so hard I couldn’t beat it without cheating. Curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to really put the difficulty settings through the wringer by playing the bonus “Omake/Lollipop” stage. By the way, while it has the same scoring-rush rules, it’s a very different stage from the PC Engine version and I ultimately think the SNES Omake is better. I played it seven times with 9 lives, each round with the penguin, upping the difficulty each time. It was a fun exercise because the incremental difficulty was very noticeable from higher enemy counts or enemies firing more bullets. I’d say they nailed the balance perfectly. Of course, for the bonus stage you’ll want to play on level 7 because it gives you more scoring opportunities.
My best game of Lollipop, at least with the penguin.
Because of the flexible difficulty, the SNES port is clearly superior to the otherwise nearly identical coin-op version. Whether or not it’s the best version depends on how you feel about the PlayStation build. On the SNES, no levels are deleted, and actually, one stage unique to the SNES was added. Sadly, unlike a lot of previous examples of new stages, the “public bath” level is a major disappointment. I think part of that is the placement in the level order. Despite feeling like a very early stage in terms of layout and challenges, the public bath is placed as the second-to-last level in the game. I think if it had been the second or third overall level, it would have felt a lot better. But putting such a low-frills stage as the penultimate stage was a structural misfire. Plus, it ends on a spongy, boring boss fight that feels too similar to the “Pig Tide” boss (the sumo guy) from the fourth level.
And I wasn’t totally sold on the collision detection being perfect, especially for the large scale bosses. Never a deal breaker or even close, but there were multiple moments that made me go “hmmm.” The showgirl and the giant puffer fish especially. For the PlayStation build, only the quills of the puffer fish I felt were a bit sketchy on the collision. The SNES also doesn’t quite nail the pacing that the PlayStation does. The speed doesn’t pick-up in the Pachinko level, for example, and it’s missing some minor and ultimately insignificant animation sprites and theme special effects.
From here out, the many, many versions of Parodius still left to review pretty much all offer the option to disable the ultra-annoying roulette. It’s sort of a monkey’s paw thing, because if you turn it off, you can’t recover quickly from death. The roulette really sucks if you have a full load-out that includes the shield, since your only options are a speed-up, the double gun (a downgrade) and the whammy that takes away everything. This is a game with so many tight squeezes that I didn’t want more than two speed-ups.
So, while Parodius on the SNES is excellent and it’s a crying shame it didn’t come out in America, there is one slightly better version of it. If you could only choose between the PSX and SNES versions, it would really come down to how much do you want that score rush mode. PSX doesn’t have it. For me, it’s a fun extra, but the main course is why I’m here. Make no mistake, however: you’ll have a great time playing Parodius on the SNES. Verdict: YES! – $8 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Axelay Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released September 11, 1992 Designed by Noritoshi Kodama Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Strategy
Holy cow. I don’t know what I expected, but I wasn’t expecting my mouth to hurt from smiling so much.
Like most games in this feature, I’d never played Axelay before. I’m not sure why that’s the case with Axelay, either. I’ve had it recommended to me a bunch of times from gamers of all stripes, who always note that the team who made it all left shortly after finishing it to found legendary development house Treasure. Despite all those requests, it never was really on my radar until I did this feature. I think that’s probably because I only recently realized that shmups are one of the genres I most consistently enjoy. That’s why I’m doing this feature, where I was told that a YES! verdict for Axelay was guaranteed. Oh really? Guaranteed, huh? Fourteen years of doing this and nobody has ever guaranteed me I would like a game. And guess what? They were totally wrong.
Nah, I’m just kidding. This game is pretty good. Mostly.
The vertical scrolling stages feature the best use of the famous Mode 7 effect I’ve seen. It’s almost got an almost holographic quality that makes it feel like you’re really hallucinating a game. I think this is what they were hoping Super Castlevania IV‘s special effects would be like. By the way, a lot of the CV4 crew worked on this. You can tell, for better and for worse.
From a technical point of view, three levels of Axelay are jaw-dropping visually. It’s astonishing to me that anyone thinks a game like Star Fox on the SNES was some kind of masterpiece visually. I wasn’t around for the debut of Star Fox, but by the time I was playing retro games, I thought it was ugly. Most games that feel like they’re based around cutting edge graphics don’t seem to age well. Of course there’s exceptions to that, but I would never bet on such a game. Well, if I had bet against Axelay, I would have lost. It uses Mode 7 for levels 1, 3, and 5 to hypnotic effect. I literally can’t imagine ever wanting to play a game that looks like this:
When I can instead play a game that looks like this:
The Mode 7 stuff is certainly not perfect. The distorted perspective makes tight turns especially tough to judge safe distance. As a result, I died as much from crashing into walls as I did from enemies. Especially at the end of level one right before you fight the first boss. This is the point when the game felt less like a shmup and more like Super Mario Kart, only with much tighter turns. It wasn’t until my second playthrough that I understood what they were going for. In that one, I wasn’t braining myself to death on the walls, but I was gnashing my teeth the entire time because it felt close. As exciting as it was as it was happening, I’m also not entirely sure how I survived it when it looked and felt like I was as close to the walls as I was the first time I played.
That’s not to say the enemies aren’t affected by the strange Mode 7 stuff, either, because the curvature and way they enter the playfield makes judging the most immediate threat unintuitive. But, going against a player’s intuition is sort of Axelay’s thing even in side-scrolling levels. There’s a lot of instances where it’s not instinctively clear that you can safely pass through something. This became REALLY apparent during the first boss fight of the first “2D” level. It’s an ED-209 clone that likes to pin you up against the wall, to the point there’s no wiggle room.
Except, even though it’s not colored differently and there’s no real indication this is even possible, there’s parts of the robot’s leg that you can safely fly past.
What parts? I dunno. Sometimes when I tried it, it worked, and sometimes I blew up. Safe:
Not safe:
Also not safe:
Safe:
It seems to have to do with both whether the foot is moving or not, but also whether the other foot gets you, even though the other foot is darkly shaded, which implies it’s in the background. But I’m flying IN FRONT of the left foot, so why is that other foot even able to get me? Shouldn’t it be well away from me? Also, the circular joint seems to not be safe. You know what? I’m sure there’s a logic to this that made complete sense to the developers. But, they didn’t really prepare the players to know this stuff intuitively, and I don’t think the graphics do a good job of letting players know that depth is part of this fight. There’s no real point where you pass through a similarly-colored thing or a structure in the level. I know this game has fans, and actually I did overall enjoy it. But, this part here was REALLY badly done. “Or you could fly above it.” I suppose.
It often feels like Super Metroid if Super Metroid were a shmup.
The weird thing is, nothing like that happens again, and overall that ED-209 fight was awesome. I don’t know what happened. Given that nearly everyone who made Axelay bolted Konami shortly after this, maybe they were distracted? Or maybe Konami didn’t have a lot of faith in Axelay? It’s a short game at only six levels. Besides the trio of Mode 7 stages, the big hook is there’s no item pick-ups at all. Instead, you swap between three different “arms” that each have a different style of gun or missile. You swap between them with the shoulder buttons and acquire one new potential weapon after each stage. That sounds great, except after a few playthroughs, I came to the conclusion that the most enjoyable three weapons were the ones you start the game with.
What a joy this is, and a heartbreaker as well.
The gun that I really liked was actually a pair of guns that, when you first activate them, shoot behind you. But as you hold the button down, the guns pan to your sides before ultimately shooting in front of you. When you let go of the button, the guns travel back behind you before ceasing fire. They specifically tailored several attack formations for this gun, and it’s awesome. The upgraded guns have nothing that satisfying. I was consistently disappointed whenever I tried a new gun. Every single one of them lacks a nice BANG, which is so damn baffling because the starting three have that punchiness to them in spades. There are few games I’ve played that I like as much as Axelay where it’s also obvious that something clearly went horribly wrong along the way. It’s a game that pretty much consistently is very fun, and also one that never feels like it reaches its fullest potential.
Like this. This is the last upgrade you get, and it’s so boring.
I might be in the minority of this, but I wish the whole game had been the “3D” vertical scrolling stages. I’d rather have had five of those and no 2D levels than the three of one type and three of the other that we got. Even with the double-sprinkler-head gun, I’ve played a lot of stuff like the 2D levels. The 3D levels felt fresh, original, and never failed to be exciting. There’s just not enough of them. I have faith that the team that came up with those three levels, then immediately created one of the greatest studios in gaming, could have done at least two more stages like that. Axelay just never quite feels like a finished product. It feels like a very highly polished proof of concept for a more ambitious game that never happened. If you beat the game twice on hard, it teases a sequel that never came. But really, the whole game is a tease. Verdict: YES! – $6 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gradius II: Gofer no Yabou Platform: PC Engine Super CD-ROM² Released December 18, 1992 Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE* Wikis: Konami – Gradius – Strategy
*Included in the TurboGrafx-16 Mini.
For what it’s worth, even though I think the Moai stage feels too much like the original Gradius, something about the Super CD-ROM² version of it worked better for me.
Man, I’m happy we got the Super CD-ROM² emulation working right. Gradius II on the PC Engine Super CD-ROM² was probably the #1 game on the absolutely stacked TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine Mini. Yes, even ahead of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. One of these days, I’ll go through my collection of Minis and rank the games in them, and when I do, I’m starting with the TG-16 Mini, even though I’m pretty sure the winner is a lock. This build of Gradius II is the best home version of the best arcade Gradius and one of the greatest video games ever made. Yep, I’ll go that far. It plays faster than the coin-op but comes with none of the technical issues of the NES game, at least on the default settings. If you boot up right away, the difficulty is far more balanced. If the default setting doesn’t offer enough bite, there’s also adjustable difficulty that I’ll get to shortly. Oh, and it throws in an extra level, and like most extra levels in these home ports, it’s one of the best levels.
It looks familiar, as it should, but in terms of gameplay, it feels original enough.
The new level is like a cross between the NES Life Force’s temple stage and the opening level of Gradius III. But it has whole new enemies, environmental challenges, and a one-off version of the Big Core that never appears in any other version of any other Gradius or Salamander game. It’s not a long level, but it might be the best in the entire game, and that’s saying something. It doesn’t go as far as it could have. There’s no double-upgrades to the guns or missiles, and I think the Option Hunters are spawned a little too often. The damn thing was spawned after I’d already beaten the final boss! No kidding!
It’d be funny if this thing, which doesn’t even kill your ship, somehow ended up destroying you and winning the war for the bad guys. It gets an evil ticker tape parade and the evil key to the city. I’m telling you, there’s a spin off here. “Option Hunter: Hero of the Bacterian Empire” could be good. Can’t be worse than Gyruss!
But overall, I think Gradius II on the PCE-CD is one of the best games I’ve played in this feature so far. I really had to stretch to come up with anything it does that could truly be considered “wrong” and I’m still struggling. I think it even looks better at times than the coin-op, despite sacraficing backgrounds. I guess offering Gradius III-like flexibility in choosing your loadout would have been nicer, but the way it is now is directly lifted from the coin-op. Nah, Gradius II on PCE is probably as perfect as shoot ’em up gets. I’d probably even place it on my short list of genuinely perfect video games, alongside Pac-Man, Portal, the modern base concept of Tetris, the tiny NES indie adventure Böbl, and the pinball table Attack From Mars.
This screenshot was taken on PROFESSIONAL difficulty. You feel the difference immediately as the dragons have a different attack, acting as almost wranglers that try to force you to move in a way that’ll block you from making progress. There’s no continues and the max starting lives is capped at three.
I played through this build once with every loadout and never got bored and even tried the hidden arcade mode (hold UP + both face buttons when you boot it up) but all it seems to do is remove the extra stage. Why would anyone want to do this? The only change a person might want to make is to buff-up the difficulty. There’s four settings: EASY, NORMAL, HARD, and PROFESSIONAL. If you want much more aggressive enemies that spit out a lot more bullets, Gradius II on Super CD-ROM² can do that, but at a steep cost. PROFESSIONAL offers a meaty challenge, but warned: performance takes a big hit on this mode, slowing down as much as the coin-op does. Even with only two options, the slow motion kicked-in fairly quickly on this. I barely noticed it on NORMAL, though it did happen. But, it’s certainly not worse than the coin-op’s slowdown either. And thus, I can comfortably say that NEC fans in Japan had the best option for Gradius II. The fact that this version isn’t in Gradius Origins should be the nail in the coffin for anyone’s enthusiasm for that set. Verdict: YES! – $15 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Pop’n TwinBee Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released March 26, 1993 Developed by Konami Included with a Nintendo Switch Online Subscription (Standard) Wikis: Konami – TwinBee
Those little robot chickens (man, that’d make a great name for a claymation TV show aimed at Gen-Xers) were some of the most annoying basic enemies in the entire genre.
I’ve gotten pretty good at these shmups over the course of writing this feature. I’m not a pro or anything, but I can eventually either beat a game or come close to it without cheating. I mention that because, on the standard 4 out of 7 difficulty, Pop’n TwinBee ate my ass for lunch. Badly. What makes that weird is this is one of the few games in this feature that doesn’t contain one-hit deaths. Instead, you have a life bar this time and a limited number of credits to beat the game, and every X amount of ground-based enemies you kill will drop life refills. Also, you can’t have your arms blown-off this time. I was really happy about that. No more “hey, wait, when did I lose an arm?” Instead I was looking up at my life bar and saying “when did I take that much damage?” Or “when did I lose all my drones?”
This is easily the coolest boss design of Pop’n, and it’s still very far behind the coolness factor of Detana!! TwinBee/Bells & Whistles.
Once I toned back the difficulty to a “2” out of 7 and then a “3” out of 7, ehhh, Pop’n TwinBee is fine, I guess. It’s just such a letdown after Detana!! TwinBee. It doesn’t feel like it takes the franchise forward. That’s probably because it seems optimized for co-op. Hell, there’s even an option for someone playing with a shmup novice that will cause the enemies to target Player One while leaving Player Two alone for the most part. So that’s neat, and co-op has a, well, let’s call it “slightly overpowered” feature that I’ll get to later. But, as a single player experience, there’s also no adjustment in the amount of enemies. This is a big deal, especially with the ground-based threats. In previous TwinBee games, at least in the coin-op versions, you throw a whole cluster of bombs and the auto-aiming is very generous. In Pop’n TwinBee, you throw one bomb at a time, and you throw them very, very slowly. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, unless, say, the whole screen is full of them.
You’ll have to take my word for it that every one of those holes had a cannon and one point. Apparently I was so focused on the chaos on screen I wasn’t grabbing as many screenshots as I thought. Oh, and see those big bullets? Those are mine, but they don’t do more damage than just plain normal bullets. They’re just bigger. That’s so lame.
You’ll also notice that the enemies are shooting pink bullets, and a large part of the playfield there is pink. So, Pop’n TwinBee has tons of visibility issues and it’s slow and frustrating to fight ground-based targets. Plus, the bosses are a big step backwards from Detana!! TwinBee. Normally, I’d hate the game that screws up that much. But, Pop’n does have genuinely good basic combat mechanics. In this version of TwinBee, you have to collect up to four drones individually. Taking damage costs you a drone, though you can stockpile more than the four by catching green bells even after you have all four drones flanking you. and what you can do with them takes a page out of Thunder Cross if you pick one of the three possible formations. Specifically, this one:
The first one is just the traditional “drones follow slightly behind you” TwinBee options. The second one is where they spin around you. But with the third one, you can spread out the options by holding the attack button. What makes it interesting is that, in this formation, when a drone reaches the side of the screen, it climbs up the screen and starts shooting to the side. So, when I played my first round of Pop’n TwinBee, I got annihilated by this screen.
This is with the difficulty set to a “2” out of “7.” That seems to cause less enemies to appear.
Oh no! The whole screen is full! What can I do to stop all these fish? Well, I can just hold the fire button down and look what happens:
The center circle isn’t mine, obviously. By the way, there’s a “punch move” that allegedly defends against baddies at close range, but I found it very flimsy and unreliable. I wasn’t even sure it was working until my third or fourth play session. It’s not well animated and they didn’t design it in a visually satisfying way. It’s one of those ideas that the tech wasn’t ready for.
That’s pretty nifty. And it begs the question: why isn’t this just the way the game is? The designers of TwinBee came up with so many enemies and attack formations that are seemingly built specifically around the ability of your drones to ride the walls and shoot to the sides that it’s really weird that they gave you two other formations to choose from that don’t have this ability. A LOT of enemies will linger towards the bottom of the screen, hug a wall themselves, or even have their only vulnerable spot be something that you need that wall riding ability to kill. Like these things:
These centipedes must be shot in the head, but there is no possible basic attack that can actually hit them in the head. You just don’t have the ability to shoot at that angle. If you choose any other formation for the drones but the Thunder Cross-like spreadable formation, your only option with these is to either avoid them or use a valuable screen-clearing “super bomb” on them. Now refills for the super bombs are plentiful, but you’ll still want to save them for ground-based stuff because when the game floods the screen with them, I can’t stress enough, you can’t take them out as fast as you need to. There’s no power-ups for the normal bombs you throw at the ground, and even the incredibly overpowered co-op double team move doesn’t do anything about them. So, Pop’n TwinBee is just sort of okay. It feels like it never gets out of first gear.
Oh, and about that co-op move.
With a single press of the right shoulder button, you can grab your partner, swing them around, and throw them. They will ricochet around the screen, destroying almost every non-ground-based enemy they come in contact with. It lasts several seconds and seems to even heat-seek for combos when you successfully hit the first enemy. There’s no cost to doing this move. You don’t take damage from it. It doesn’t use up one of your super bombs. It’s effectively a free, unlimited-use mini-super-bomb. That sounds cool, except it had an unintended consequence when I attempted to play this with both my father, my niece Sasha, and my nephew TJ. No matter who my partner was, the game would inevitably devolve into us spending the entire time trying to throw each-other. We didn’t CO-OP-erate. It was silly. It was chaotic. It got old quickly. It hastened a state of boredom along faster. BUT, there was nothing to stop us from doing it. I can’t tell if this is bad design on the development team’s part for this mechanic or bad design on God’s part for me and my family. Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gokujou Parodius! aka Fantastic Journey Platform: Arcade Released in 1994 Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
LULZ at the bonus level that happens when you finish the game. “Thanks for playing our game. We appreciate it. You’re a gentleman and a scholar. Kindly get the f*ck off our machine now so we can make money. Thank you, and God bless.”
Don’t expect a major leap forward with the second real Parodius game (assuming the MSX original was a proof of concept). This feels more like a more-of-the-same expansion pack with eight new levels and a couple new characters. Whether that’s a good thing or not really depends on how much you enjoyed Parodius Da!, because the main game being satirized in Gokujou Parodius is the previous game. A lot of the gags and setpieces are fully dependent on you already being a fan of Parodius. Which isn’t to say there are no improvements. Far from it. The timing of set-pieces are really well done. The cat ship? It shows up early in the second stage instead of right before a boss. I’ve never understood the logic of putting a mini-boss directly in front of a big boss. Well, while you finish the cat right before the boss, you encounter it throughout the level. There’s an excellent speed-zone bit, and a couple of the settings really stand out, like the opening claw-game stage. So why didn’t I like this more?
How they stage it is perfectly done, too. You see glimpses of it before diving under the water to deal with it directly, but I’m pretty sure you can’t win before the end of the stage.
Here’s a great example of “the step forward is really a step backwards.” The showgirl is back, only this time she’s twice as big. That sounds great, except this time around, each pass she makes only has half the available safe zones to navigate. On paper, that sounds more intense. But really stop and think about it: because the choice of how to navigate to safety is already made for you, logically it’s less exciting because there’s only one option to escape. You don’t have to struggle with the tension that comes with having choices. That’s just how it works, and if a dummy like me can grasp that, surely Konami, who have been making one banger after another (seriously, there’s only three NO! votes left in this entire feature) should have fundamentally got this. What they should have done was turned this from the traditionally “can’t kill” walker into a King Kong-like “knock it off the building” trope.
You can’t see my sprite because the score is blocking it. I cannot stress enough to developers: DO NOT DO THIS!
But, other tropes I’ve never cared for have been improved. I’ve never been a fan of the “crumble wall” segments from Gradius/Parodius. Shooting the walls to clear a path is too limiting and thus there’s no excitement. Remember: the most flexibility a player has, the more they have to think about what to do, which means the choices are more exciting, which carries over to the gameplay. I think Gokujou Parodius’ development team must have agreed with me, because this is the best implementation of the crumble wall in any Konami shmup yet. They managed to open it up in a way that causes white knuckle near-misses without feeling cheap. Having an emphasis on falling blocks hidden within the walls, which causes wider gaps to navigate, which makes the whole thing much more open, and thus more exciting.
Obviously a satire on falling-block puzzlers.
Probably my biggest knock, and this will probably be controversial, is the reason why I don’t think this is on the level as Parodius Da: the boss fights. They’re fine from a gameplay perspective. It’s safe to say that Konami had this part of shoot ’em ups down to a science. In terms of their personality or memorability? I don’t really think they’re that amazing. A few of them feel like they’re trying too hard. There’s genuine quirk and there’s forced quirk. Gokujou Parodius’ bosses feel artificially wacky, and frankly, the franchise isn’t going to get much better from here.
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Of course, being a coin-op, Gokujou Parodius features extreme difficulty. Well, unless you pick the fish. In my final run through the games in this feature, I played as the fish, which certainly nerfs some of the levels, especially the final one, but that’s the only character who really saps the challenge. For all other characters, the difficulty situation will be almost entirely fixed in the upcoming home ports. But, for the coin-op, it’s certainly a thing that would turn off a lot of players. There’s also a few minor differences between Fantastic Journey the coin-op and the SNES/PlayStation Parodius. The biggest one is the bunny girl that I did my first play session with in the coin-op. She has a totally different gun in the SNES/Super Famicom game. What gun? Oh, just the boomerang gun from Thunder Cross. Yeah, I’m ready to play that version, please. Gokujou Parodius in arcades is fine, but nothing special. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gokujou Parodius! Platform: Super Famicom Released November 25, 1994 Directed by Nobuniro Matsuoka Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
Oh hey, it’s Kid Dracula! Wait, so they shoehorned him into Parodius but they never made a 16-bit Kid Dracula game? Boooooo! Bad form! Boooooo! Boooo, says I! Booooo!
The Super Famicom version of Gokujou Parodius adds Kid Dracula (an NES and Game Boy parody series that went away for no reason), Goemon (aka the Mystical Ninja), and Upa from the Famicom classic Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa. Also, some of the guns were changed around. The most notable, as mentioned in the coin-op review, is that Hikaru and Akane now have the boomerang gun that I fell in love with from Thunder Cross 1 & 2. Does it work as well as in those games?
Yep. By the way, instant revival from death instead of checkpoints is a toggle in this. Very cool.
There’s three other big notable differences. One is that the adjustable difficulty works wonderfully, which leads into the second big change: the after-game bonus level isn’t f*cking impossible. Unfortunately, it’s just not a very strong stage. It has a few unique enemies, like satires of the tentacles from the original Gradius. There’s also another boss, but again, it’s just not that fun to fight. As far as bonuses go, this whole thing was weak. But, almost everything that led to it was pretty good. Well, except the third addition over the arcade game: lots and lots of slowdown.
Not all the characters get options. Some just get their gun upgraded over and over. Upa gets more bullets for his gun. Additionally, Upa doesn’t get a shield. Instead, he gets a bomb that’s functionally like the blue bell.
The amount of slowdown you’ll experience will be dependent on who you use and what your loadout is. For example, with Kid Dracula, it was constant. With the bunny girl, it became constant once I had all four options and the boomerang. It’s not a deal breaker, but after playing through a coin-op where it almost never factors in, it stands out. There’s also heavy balance issues with the characters, but at least that feels in service to the entertainment value. Like, Kid Dracula’s gun is so incredibly overpowered that it almost feels like a satire on its own. The Super Famicom port is fine. An imperfect port of an imperfect sequel, but since the PlayStation version has INSANE amounts of slowdown, the extra characters might make this the best version of it. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Parodius Da! Part of Gokujō Parodius Da! Deluxe Pack Platform: PlayStation* Released December 3, 1994 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
*I did NOT play the Sega Saturn version. It doesn’t have the hidden level the PSX version does.
Finally finished with Parodius Da! Six different versions. Yeesh.
The final version of Parodius Da! in this feature is the one found in the PlayStation 2-in-1 pack, and it’s far and away the best version of the game. Sorry Saturn fans. You got hosed, because there’s an extra level hidden in this game that ranks among the best levels in any Gradius-engine based game. For whatever reason, that’s only in the PSX build. I’ll get to that stage in a few moments, but first, I’ll note what this package does not offer: the Omake/Lollipop score rush mode found in the PC Engine and SNES builds. While I really enjoyed that mode, it is just a nice bonus on top of an already solid game. It’s missed, but not to the point that I would have considered its exclusion a deal breaker unless the gap between the SNES and PSX was close. It wasn’t. However, you shouldn’t expect profound changes in the PlayStation version of Parodius Da!, but rather a series of subtle ones that add up to a greater whole.
The second loop I could never hope to beat legitimately if I lived to be a thousand. Well and presumably was a vampire. If I lived to be a thousand without being a vampire, I imagine I would be pretty decrepit from 60ish onward.
Besides the bonus level, the most notable feature Parodius Da! on the PSX doesn’t offer is any attempt at an audio/visual upgrade. While it retains every frame of animation from the coin-op, any visual changes are barely noticeable. It’s a little disappointing. I know this sounds weird coming from me, but I was really hoping for an updated soundtrack that replaced the memorable, cheerful classical music chiptunes with full orchestral renditions. That would have been insanely cool, but alas. During the ball maze level, I weirded out my sister by singing Homer Simpson’s version of the Nutcracker, which she had never heard before. “I need a present for my wife, or I’ll have no sex for life! A diamond ring! A vase by Ming! Some kind of useful kitchen thing!” and she stared at me afterward like 😶. As for the graphics, again, subtle changes over the SNES version. On the left is the SNES build, and on the right, the PlayStation. The water effect is much more rich in it, but otherwise, it’s pretty much the same, right?
Super Nintendo Entertainment System
PlayStation
If you’re curious how close it looks compared to the arcade, here’s some comparison shots that I chose because you can see the difference, or lack thereof. It’s really a matter of dimensions and stretching. Super Nintendo is always left. Arcade is always in the center. Right is always PlayStation. Here’s the clowns in the second level.
Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Arcade
PlayStation
Here’s the trees in the Japan level. The PlayStation build DOES have a richer, fuller falling-leaf effect and is probably the most stand-out “special effect” added to the build. It’s not much, but it’s there.
Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Arcade
PlayStation
And here’s the ball maze.
Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Arcade
PlayStation
So it’s really close visually, and I guess that’s disappointing, right? On one hand, it perfectly replicates a 1990 coin-op. On the other hand, 24 of the PlayStation’s 32-bits are going to complete waste (the original coin-op is, shockingly, an 8-bit game). Well, except in one sense: there’s no slowdown this time. Or at least, there isn’t on the default settings or under, and you feel it. I really didn’t care for the gigantic Moai ship in the coin-op. It just plays too slowly and, once you’ve destroyed all the targets, you have to spend too much time waiting around for the action to scroll back so you can take out the bottom targets. It’s pretty boring, actually. On the PlayStation, the tempo is vastly increased thanks to the horsepower. The result is one of the most tedious stages is instead reborn as the mid-game highlight it was meant to be all along. But the whole game is like that. The same game you already loved, only without any of the technical hangups. It was that aspect, and not the extra level, that really hammered home to me that this was the best version of Parodius, hands down.
It kind of looks like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, doesn’t it?
So, what about that extra level that I declared “one of the best?” Well, it’s not actually part of the natural progression. It’s an alternative Stage 2 that you must unlock after beating the first boss. Here’s how you do it. As soon as the buffer zone between the first and second levels starts, shoot every one of the enemies in the first row that comes out at the bottom of the screen. Then, when the second row of enemies comes out the top, you have to only shoot the one in the front. This is the part that annoyed me about this, because depending on your loadout, it might not even be possible to only kill the front one. And you’re not even done yet! After shooting that front enemy in the second row, you have to not kill anything else. If you do this correctly and avoid dying, after about ten seconds, there will be a fairly long load time, then every enemy on screen will explode and you’ll enter yet another buffer zone before the train station begins.
STEP ONE: Kill all these guys.
STEP TWO: Kill only this guy.
STEP THREE: Avoid dying until this happens.
It is worth the effort because the stage is fantastic. It’s a little on the short side, but I like that aspect. It has a lot of unique enemies, one-off sprites, an excellent use of the tight squeeze trope, and one of the best bosses in Parodius Da! But, I hate that you have to unlock it, and I especially hate that the method for unlocking it is so arbitrary. What a waste of a masterpiece of a stage. None of the other games with extra levels make you jump through hoops like this. At some point in those other games, it’s just like “here’s an extra level. Thanks for buying our product!” I’m also not sure why they didn’t bother putting this in the Sega Saturn version, because it’s seriously THE highlight of the game and one of the best levels in a shoot ’em up EVER! It’s fantastic, and most people who owned this collection probably never even played it. What an absolute travesty!
In my hypothetical Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection, they can right this wrong and add the extra stages from both the SNES and PlayStation games into the order of the levels, placing the bathhouse early and the train station late in the game, creating a definitive version that would be in the upper-echelon of Konami’s shoot ’em up library. I guess that’s the thing that frustrates me most of all. Over the last couple months, I’ve played six versions of Parodius Da. I did it the “right way” and spread out playing the different versions so that I wouldn’t get burned out on it. When I thought I was done, I had to go back and check things to see how close the versions were. And I’ve come to a sad realization: the best version of this game really doesn’t exist. Not yet. It’s somewhere between all the different ports that have existed. The best of those versions is the one included in Gokujō Parodius Da! Deluxe for the PlayStation, but now I kind of hope Konami does one final Parodius Da! and gives us the game they should have included here. Verdict: YES! – $8 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gokujō Parodius! ~Kako no Eikō o Motomete~ Part of Gokujō Parodius Da! Deluxe Pack Platform: PlayStation Released December 3, 1994 Developed by Konami Never Released in North America NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
If the shape of the fish looks familiar, it should. It’s got the same outline as the player sprite from the MSX legend Space Manbow. These weapons are hell of fun to use, despite being grossly overpowered. However, they come at a very steep cost to the game’s performance.
Gokujō Parodius on the PSX has so much slowdown that I went back and replayed Parodius Da on PSX again to see if I somehow hallucinated the lack of slowdown I experienced playing it. I didn’t. Now, Gokujō Parodius is much more technically advanced than Da!, but still, this is pretty damn bad slowdown. While it’s always sort of there if you have a full loadout, it’s especially noticeable when you choose the fish. I wish this build had a hidden extra level, a bonus boss fight, or some new player characters to make up for it, but it doesn’t. This was SO disappointing after the best version of Parodius Da, from literally the same disc mind you. Gokujō Parodius on PSX is still a quality game, but really, there’s no reason to play this specific build over the superior SNES version that offers more characters and probably a little less slowdown. So, this is a historic first: I’m awarding both a YES! and nothing in value. Verdict: YES! – No value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
TwinBee Yahho!: Fushigi no Kuni de Ōabare!! Platform: Arcade Released April 19, 1995 Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – TwinBee
Woo hoo! Wacky fun! That’s what I want from a TwinBee game!
The final original TwinBee shmup goes out with a decent-sized bang. This is basically “what if a shmup took place in Alice in Wonderland?” I mean, it’s not called Alice in Wonderland. In fact, the giant robotic doll you fight that looks exactly like Alice is actually called “Emily” but, trust me, this is Alice in Wonderland: The Shmup. There’s Cheshire Cats. There’s evil playing cards. The only thing it’s missing is growing and shrinking. How can you make an Alice-inspired shmup and not have growing and shrinking? I’m as mad as a hatter over that.
You even fight Tweedledum and Tweedledee, though again, they’re not called that. Instead, they’re called “the Balloon Brothers.” Really? There’s no way this is a copyright concern issue, either.
My biggest concern with Yahho is the lack of fairness. There’s several attack patterns I’m almost not entirely sure are survivable. Thankfully you come back to life where you died and have as many credits as you need to win. With that said, over the last sixty-five games in this feature, I’ve gotten pretty damn decent at shmups, and I want to genuinely win without needing to reload quarters. I want the glory of victory, dammit! But when the screen looks like this:
This laser beam eventually reaches the corner and I died when I flew as high as I could get and tried to cross over the head, where I thought I would be safe. Nope. Died as soon as I reached the midpoint.
(shrug) I’m sure there is a way to survive, but it feels like blind luck. That’s fine. I’ve played enough brawlers and run & gun games that I can appreciate a shameless quarter shakedown as long as the game is fun, and there’s no doubt that TwinBee Yahho! is a ton of fun. While I think Bells & Whistles is certainly the cleaner game, I appreciate the heavy emphasis on setpieces in this follow-up. It’s probably the most cinematic classic-style shmup ever made up to this point. It almost feels like they were trying to steal a bit of that Star Fox magic with all the character dialog, talking head windows, and shifting camera perspectives. This is a shmup that really wants to tell a story. Now, if you can’t read Japanese, that story might be lost on you. It’s basically an expansion of the TwinBee radio dramas that ran for 96 episodes in Japan. That’s not what’s important, though. This is:
The camera movement is limited strictly to the backgrounds. The gameplay stays entirely 2D, but the backdrop creates the illusion of doing loopty loops or flying on your side. It can be very disorienting, which I suppose means the illusion is successful. Actually, it’s one of the most successful background tricks I’ve experienced in any game. It works. Now, whether it’s welcome will be up to you. I thought the camera tricks were neat. On the other hand, I thought the giant talking head windows were hugely distracting in those rare times where they show up in the middle of stages. Thankfully, such moments are few and far between. The other big knock is the “lose an arm” bit returns from previous TwinBee coin-ops. After the last SNES game, I was kind of hoping that mechanic would be retired, but to their credit, they really came up with a way to make it work. How? Well, first let me note that Yahho has the heaviest emphasis on ground-based targets in the franchise. Thankfully, they didn’t leave you hopelessly overmatched this time. For the first time, there’s an item that helps with the ground targets. This:
Yea, it’s a big ass bomb that has a big ass blast radius. Awesome, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, it’s great that they finally addressed the problem with the ground based targets and the speed at which you can hit them by creating an item that’s tailored to them. It only took them until the very last goddamned shmup game (the last TwinBee game was an RPG) in the franchise to do it, but better late than never. Hell, if I’m being honest, the item they created is even more powerful than one I or anyone else would have reasonably expected. It’s so unbelievably useful that the first time I saw it, I thought it must be a one time item. Nope. You get it until you lose the arm throwing it.
One big difference between this and other TwinBee games is that the game isn’t stingy with repairing your arms. In addition to the ambulance no longer being limited to once per life, you can also grab a pink bell to repair a broken arm. You’ll need these too, because the collision doesn’t feel completely accurate. The game is so visually loud that I never was able to tell for certain, even when I used rewind to examine lost arms, whether or not the collision was truly sprite-accurate. It sure doesn’t feel like it, especially when you have to make tight squeezes like seen above. Hey, I really enjoyed TwinBee Yahho, but make no mistake: this is a messy, messy game.
OR, until you pick up another item. Remember how you got the triple shot from ground-based targets in previous games? Well in TwinBee Yahho, there’s four weapons that rotate from a single pick-up, and one of those four items is the bomb in question. In my opinion, this doesn’t quite work out as well as they probably hoped it would. In theory, one arm gets the gun, the other gets the bomb, right? Well, you can do that, provided you get the items in the correct order. Or you can dual-wield triple shot guns, or you can have the big bombs in one hand and the triple shot in the other. In practice, I couldn’t keep BOTH arms alive long enough to get a good feel for it, even when I tried to cheat. I should also note that when you have only one arm, the bomb is so useful, especially in later stages, that you’d be foolish to take anything else. Sure, it’s not very useful against bosses, but you’ll want to use charge shots against them anyway.
The bosses are mostly a lot of fun to battle against. This really is quite the hidden gem, as far as Konami shmups go.
And speaking of the charge shots, there’s four styles of charge shots as well that you have to select at the start of each credit. One is the traditional wave of fire. One is the boxing glove you can see in the first pic of this game’s review. One is a really weak spread weapon that I don’t recommend. The third option is the strangest: it allows you to give birth to up to three drones, like you’d get with the green bell. Then, charging them unleashes a bomb similar to the one in Pop’n TwinBee for the SNES.
TwinBee Yahho has one of the worst final levels of any shmup. It’s not hard or anything. It’s just not that good.
TwinBee Yahho does all the stuff I love about a good Konami shmup. The locations are genuinely fun, high-energy facades. The enemies are memorable. The bosses feel like events. It doesn’t take forever to build up a formidable loadout. Really, the most disappointing aspect of Yahho is that it’s a very short game. Five full stages and then a remarkably strange finale themed around a chase against Dr. Warumon. Some games stick the landing with their climax. TwinBee Yahho not only didn’t stick the landing, but the plane exploded midair and it bailed out at the last second only to discover that someone had swapped its parachute with a tombstone. There’s no satisfying final boss. The whole thing just kind of ends anticlimactically after a certain point. I guess, in a sense, the giant Alice is the final boss and the last level is a glorified epilogue. I’m not taking away anything from TwinBee Yahho because the game had been damn fun up to that last sequence, but it does kind of break my heart. Especially since that was it. The last memories of the last coin-op TwinBee. Talk about going out with a whimper instead of a bang. Verdict: YES! – $8 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection And now let me talk briefly about Detana TwinBee Yahho! DELUXE PACK
As you can plainly see, the PSX port is an easier version of the coin-op.
Originally, I planned on doing full reviews of both games featured in Detana TwinBee Yahho! DELUXE PACK for the original PlayStation, but unlike the Parodius PS1 collection, no additional levels were added. The two games included are the same games, only both now come with an options menu. The most important inclusion to both Detana!! TwinBee and TwinBee Yahho is adjustable difficulty. Especially with Yahho, you can feel it, though even on 2 out of 7 (pictured above) Yahho can get quite fierce. Yahho also includes extra voice-overs and, I think at least, a very slightly improved collision box. Maybe. Or maybe it was the placebo effect. I enjoyed replaying both games very much but I think I’m all out of words for them. If you wish, consider both an easy YES! Because the gameplay is, more or less, identical to the coin-ops, and, because the options are more extensive than the coin-ops, I would not be angry if the coin-ops were not included in my hypothetical Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection. Hell, these versions might even be preferred. For that reason, I’d award $2 in bonus value to each game for the options menus.
Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius Platform: Super Famicom Released December 15, 1995 Directed by Nobuhiro Matsuoka Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
Except for the cat, this could have been any of the SNES Parodius games.
It’s safe to say that, after dozens of Gradius and Gradius-like games, the formula is starting to become predictable. Except, like, shouldn’t Parodius be where the formula is played around with? Where a surprise or a twist should happen? Sadly, there’s no such moments like that in the third and final 16-bit Parodius game. I take back what I said about Gokujou Parodius, because THIS is the one that feels like little more than DLC. Which might not be a bad thing, depending on how much you enjoy Parodius. If you’ve liked the previous games, Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius is more of the same. If not, well, Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius is more of the same.
The bosses are the most spongy of any Parodius game so far. This is not a good thing.
The big original hook of Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius is the “Oshaberi” part. Oshaberi means “chattering” or “chatterbox.” Usually the context for it refers to idle, frivolous talk, so a more accurate English translation for the purposes of this game would be “bullsh*tting.” At the time of its release, Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius probably set some kind of record for a cart-based title’s voice samples. The entire game has running commentary that describes themes, enemies, setpieces, and bosses. Unfortunately, if you’re not fluent in Japanese, this won’t do anything for you. For a hypothetical future compilation, if they recorded an English dub of it, I’d award bonus value.
The other baby (the one in the pink clothes, not Upa) is insanely overpowered.
I can’t argue that Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius is a bad game. But even with direct parodies of familiar Konami games, I just didn’t think this was as good as previous titles in the series. Hell, there’s a level that’s a direct parody of Xexex, from the art style to the enemy patterns, but it’s just not well done. It’s not terrible either. It just feels like this is the Parodius made out of ideas that were cut from previous games that they then decided to doll-up with the commentary. There’s nothing particularly clever about it. Like, the showgirl returns, only this time, she’s faster. Oooh.
And she looks different too.
Everything right about Parodius on the Super Famicom returns as well. The pitch-perfect adjustable difficulty. The optional ability to immediately respawn after dying. The fact that there’s not separate buttons for normal shots and missiles. Seriously, that might be the most underrated aspect of the SNES games. I hate having to press two different buttons. But, overall I felt the humor didn’t land nearly as much, the levels were much more bland than the previous two games, and the bosses dragged thanks to their increased hit points. It’s still a pretty fun game because the Gradius formula is hard to screw up, but it’s also not hard to see why games like this weren’t long for this world. Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Salamander 2 Platform: Arcade Released January, 1996 Programmed by Takeaki Hasegawa Developed by Konami To Be Included in Gradius Origins Wikis: Konami – Gradius
I just finished this game and I honestly don’t remember fighting this thing. It wasn’t even half-an-hour ago. Yeesh.
Salamander 2 is the sequel that honestly feels like it doesn’t want to exist. Like they felt like they had to do a sequel to a Gradius game because the technology was getting better, but they had no inspiration at all for it. The weird thing is the first Salamander felt the same way, but that game feels especially inspired compared to its sequel. The biggest change this time is to the options. Now, there’s two tiers of them. You could get a large one, or you could get a small one. The small ones are especially under-powered and kind of useless. Now, two small options will combine to form a large one, but it begs the question: why bother if the game will occasionally drop big ones and small ones? Shouldn’t they all be small to start? Also, you can sacrifice options for power shots. The small ones will make a tiny little shield around you for a second or two. Sacrificing a big one is basically a bomb. It looks like this:
Functionally, it’s more like a high-powered homing missile that never seems to aim for what you’re hoping it will aim for unless you save these exclusively for bosses. But even after activating this, you can still pick-up the now reduced-in-size smaller option. So, I guess that’s kind of neat. Less neat is the fact that you can double-up the power of the guns, but a max-power gun only lasts for ten seconds before it goes back to the previous tier. This system MIGHT have worked if they had done the Gradius item bar system, but Salamander 2 uses the same system as the original Salamander, so the super-powered guns never seem to appear when you want them the most. Thankfully, there’s only six pretty boring levels to slog through, along with some of the least inspired bosses in the franchise. The first boss is pretty cool. Here it is:
Either this is the first boss or I said “Beetlejuice” three times.
Very cool. But, after that, there were bosses that didn’t feel like bosses at all, and this sensation is punctuated by one of the most ridiculously spongy final bosses in any game in this entire feature. It’s terrible.
You’ll notice there’s a lot of bullets there. Salamander 2 often feels like it’s an attempt by Konami to do a Toaplan-style bullet hell. It didn’t do that bad a job, except for the fact that the whole game is boring. I didn’t actually struggle all that much even when enemies were spraying waves of bullets not far from me. At most, I only needed to wiggle a little bit to make my way through a swarm of bullets. For most enemies who launch tons and tons of shots, the opening is just right there in the center of the cluster they create. It feels like a bullet hell that doesn’t understand bullet hells. It also doesn’t feel like it understands why the bosses are considered highlights of other games. Salamander 2 is competent blandness run amok. Well produced, and a total bore. Verdict: NO!
At this point, I planned on reviewing Gradius and Gradius II from the 1996 Japanese-exclusive Gradius Deluxe Pack. I was operating under the assumption that it might be an upgraded version of the coin-ops, or feature no slowdown. The only real upgrade is adjustable difficulty. It’s pretty disappointing, given Konami’s track record. BUT, those option menus would be nice to have for the coin-ops. You can especially feel it in the first Gradius game. Like with the TwinBee two pack, I’d award $2 in bonus value for those option menus alone.
Sexy Parodius Platform: Arcade, PlayStation Released March, 1996 (Arcade), November 1, 1996 (PSX) Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan* NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
*Apparently the coin-op was available in other Asian countries.
There’s no octopus ship this time, meaning no ring weapons. However, a sentient option is a ship, and it has the boomerangs from Thunder Cross.
The good news is that the PSX and Arcade versions of Sexy Parodius are identical, except the PSX version has adjustable difficulty. The bad news is they’re identical. Sexy Parodius is the one Parodius shmup I had never previously played coming into this feature (probably a poor choice of words). I felt some degree of sadness as the title screen loaded, knowing this was it. The only Parodius that followed this is a Japanese-exclusive turn-based game. Hell, this could very well be the last time I play a Parodius game for the first time (I played the next game in this feature before playing this). Well, after playing Sexy Parodius, yeah, it was time to end this franchise. They were clearly out of ideas for levels and especially bosses. Besides Salamander 2, I’d even say that this has the weakest lineup of bosses of any Gradius game of the 90s. A couple stand-outs, like Medusa or a penguin wearing a toilet seat on its head, but for the most part, the designs and attack patterns are uninspired.
To really nail (probably a poor choice of words) how lazy and uninspired the design is, the boss rush features three bosses from Parodius Da! and one from Gokujō Parodius instead of new bosses. Okay, so the evil mouths eventually combine to form a bigger mouth and that’s new, but then the final boss of the rush, which looks original, only uses attack patterns from the previous four bosses in the rush. Whoa, careful there, fellas. I almost sat up in my chair for a moment. Actually, I became genuinely listless playing this, which hasn’t happened much in this feature so far. Sexy Parodius is so phoned-in that it feels like an assignment that nobody wanted. Like the CEO of Konami said “gentlemen, we need another Parodius to fill a gap in our arcade release schedule” and everyone who might have had an original thought said “not it!” in unison, leaving only Uncreative Joe who was late to the meeting because his zipper got stuck.
For whatever reason, they decided the bosses needed a visual lifebar in this version. Also the white bell spawns that Pac-Man like thing that has to be fed bells but preemptively eats many enemies.
The big twist with Sexy Parodius is that each level now has an objective to it, mostly collecting or destroying things. Well, the first level’s goal is just “beat the boss” which isn’t exactly optional, but after that, the objectives take priority and mostly succeed at giving players more to do than just shoot with reckless abandon. It’s actually not the worst idea for a Gradius-style shmup. I REALLY liked the fairy collecting in the next Parodius game in this feature, which is a remake of Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius. For Sexy Parodius, the first actual objective is collecting 300 coins. My first time playing the coin-op, I actually failed it with 298, and I thought I was doing pretty good. So, it’s not a token gameplay mechanic. That’s a good thing, right?
The “sexy” part is related to finding girls in a few levels. Oh and a woman who squashes an octopus with her bare ass. This could be called “Parodius: Rule 34 Edition.”
But, I don’t think the objectives are a win at all, and here’s why: branching paths. Normally I’d totally go down on them. I MEAN I’m down with them. Ahem. I mean, I’d prefer an option that allows you to play every single stage if you want. I think one of the best quality of life ROM hacks I’ve ever played is a Castlevania III ROM hack that removes the branching paths and gives you a complete level tour, but I’m down for having a variety of levels. Except, Sexy Parodius has levels that can only be accessed by failing objectives, and if you want to experience the whole game, you’ll need multiple play-throughs and have to avoid shooting things in some stages. The latter part of that could have easily been fixed by letting players choose which level they want if they succeed while taking the option away when they fail. The real kick in the ass is that the better levels are the ones you play when you miss the objectives. This could very well be the worst version of branching paths I’ve experienced in a retro game so far.
Your reward for completing every objective is a quite unimaginative but ultra-difficult “bonus stage” that plays almost exactly like the after-game bonus stage of Gokujō Parodius. I only was able to finish it by grabbing about a dozen green bells along the way, and the boss fight at the end is nothing to write home about.
Before I wrap this review up, I have to tell you about one of the worst closing sequences to a game I’ve seen. Here’s how Sexy Parodius climaxes (probably a poor choice of words).
“You’ve already had to fight several identical walls like this one in this level, except this wall has three targets. Blow up this wall!”
“Okay, I did it!”
“Cool. Now here’s another wall, but this one has five targets and even more crap spamming the screen. Blow up this wall too.”
“Okay, this is getting tiring but I got one more in me. I’ve made it this far, afterall!”
“You’re tired of not fighting walls? Well how about yet another wall, this time with TWELVE targets!”
“……… Nah, actually I’m good, thanks.” (turns off game)
What a boring way to end a game. Yes, I get what they were trying to do, but as a gag it’s not funny because the gameplay is too repetitive. And even if it wasn’t meant to be a joke, it doesn’t work as climatic sequence anyway, because, I mean, it’s f*cking walls! Like most other Gradius games, there’s no boss after these final walls. THEY ARE the last boss, unless you count the bonus level. I’m not even mad about the shameless blanketing of bullets coupled with low visibility, even on the easier settings mind you. By this point, I already realized why Sexy Parodius was the last original Parodius shmup. They were creatively bankrupt at this point, and in retrospect, the franchise was on a downward trajectory after Da! and was going to crater eventually. Well, it happened, because Sexy Parodius just isn’t fun. The set pieces, bosses, and new characters are lame as f*ck and the jokes don’t really land. The gameplay is still Gradius and if you are incapable of being bored by Gradius, you’ll enjoy a handful of new levels, but otherwise, it was clearly time to put this franchise to bed. Probably a poor choice of words. Verdict: NO!
Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius: Forever with Me Platform: PlayStation Released December 20, 1996 Directed by Kazutomo Terada Developed by Stone Heads Published by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
Much, much better.
Forever With Me is a remastering of Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius that rights a lot of wrongs. Some of the more boring boss fights are replaced with better ones in this build. Like, the Big Core MK I just shows up in JOP. Not a satire of it, but the real thing, and apparently the subversion of the expectation of a joke is the joke. Well, that’s not funny, so here’s a dog instead. You’ll notice in the picture its attack pattern is still the Big Core’s, more or less, but it just works better. That’s not to say they only repainted bosses, either. After three previous games spent as a mini-boss, the Cat thing is now a full-fledged boss in Forever With Me and a highlight of the game. There’s also several small changes to the level layouts and new set-pieces.
In the Lethal Enforcers level, a new addition is two virtual players taking aim at you for a good chunk of the level. You simply have to avoid their crosshairs. This was not in the SNES version.
There’s also new graphical effects, background gags, and even replay value. Hidden in the game are seventy fairies that must be located by shooting the area they’re hidden in, then collecting them. After you find these seventy, a fresh batch of seventy more are hidden in different locations. Now, I think they kind of skimped on the unlockables, as the only character you can get is Kid Dracula, and only if you get all 140 fairies. But, it’s a great idea that I had a lot of fun with. So much fun, actually, that I’m kind of heartbroken it took all the way to the 70th game in this feature for Konami to come up with something like this. By the way, it is different from Sexy Parodius’ objectives, because the fairies aren’t just on the screen. You have to reveal them AND collect them. They’re genuinely hidden. Now, it could have been better by having the fairies be numbered to let you know how much progress you’ve made. I feel a modern game would know to do that, but this sort of “collect-a-thon outside of adventure games” thing wasn’t super common back then.
I didn’t manage to unlock Kid Dracula, who is probably the only character that would be considered “overpowered.” Unlike Gokujō Parodius, the developers put a heavy premium on balanced characters.
Another neat addition that’s exclusive to the Sony versions are ACCIDENT levels. You have to turn them on in the options menu. These are like bite-size bonus mini-stages with a series of repetitive challenges. Oh, and they’re polygonal enemies, and there’s always something 3D-ish about their vulnerabilities or attack pattern design. There’s no bosses for these segments, and as far as I can tell, no fairies are hidden in them either. So, these are just for funsies optional stages, hence being a toggle. But, they’re certainly fun if you want to pad-out the game.
And Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius: Forever with Me is STILL not done with the new content, providing not one but two local leaderboard-driven bonus modes. First, remember the scoring-driven Omake/Lollipop levels? Yep, there’s a brand new one that’s called Omake 1 in the menu. Sadly, I felt this was probably the weakest of the Omake levels in any version of Parodius, including the PC Engine version. No awesome surprises at all. It’s solid and fun, but a bit of a letdown.
HOWEVER, I thought the way the boss worked was a nice twist, since it tosses coins out alongside its attacks. Never been a big fan of the “wall boss” in Gradius/Parodius games, so go figure the most interesting one is in a throwaway bonus mode in a remake of a Parodius nobody remembers.
Omake 2 is a totally different experience. Instead of being themed like a score rush, this level takes place on a race track and highly incentivizes using the SPEED UP boosts. Instead of competing for a high score, you’re trying to post the fastest time. The course is always the same and you really have to work to memorize it because some of the turns are, simply put, ridiculous. Dare I say seemingly impossible if you use too many speed-ups. But, as a completely out of left field change of pace to the shmup formula, I really liked this. Real crowd pleaser too, as everyone wanted to take turns trying to post a high score.
So Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius: Forever with Me is superior in every way to the Super Famicom game. But I also must stress that, like the SFC original, fluency in spoken Japanese is absolutely required to be able to fully appreciate the game. The “chattering” part is back, and apparently some of the dialog has been updated, but it’s entirely in Japanese. Also, like the original, some of the set-pieces just aren’t very good. The Xexex level was a total flop for me, and that’s coming from someone who thinks Xexex is the bees’ knees. I would have loved a deluxe version of Parodius Da, which I still think is the best game in the franchise. I guess improving a weaker game is a good thing, but I still prefer Da! Oh well, we’ll always have the flasher Moai, I guess. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Wait, what?
Almost made it to 36 years old without being flashed by a Moai. Alas. At least they blurred it out.
Solar Assault: Gradius aka Solar Assault: Revised* Platform: Arcade Released July, 1997 (Original) Released December, 1997 (Revised) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Wikis: Konami – Gradius
*The version released in the United States titled “Solar Assault” is the Japanese “Solar Assault: Revised.” Since the original Solar Assault was basically a glorified prototype that should never have been released, I only played Revised for this feature.
Do you get it?
Well, at least they finally figured out a way to freshen-up the Moai stage: make it 3D! The best way to explain Solar Assault is take Star Fox 64, add a version of the Gradius item bar that’s completely missing the speed-up slot, and then remove the NPC aspect, all-range mode, the barrel roll, and the somersault. That’s actually a very accurate way of looking at Solar Assault. It’s so well done that Nintendo could have modified this and released it as Star Fox 64-II with minimal fuss. You know how I talk about shared DNA? Solar Assault isn’t a cousin to Star Fox 64. It’s a fraternal twin. Does the item bar, including options and the classic shield design, make it feel like a Gradius game? Nope. Not even a little bit. It’s Star Fox 64, period. Easily the most Nintendo-like Konami game I’ve ever played in my life. That’s not a bad thing, by the way.
Not bad looking for an early 3D game, either.
Actually, in many ways, I like this better than Star Fox 64. I was never a big fan of the all-range segments in that. The on-the-rails stages and bosses felt more “pure” somehow and there was always a hint of jank to the truly 3D elements. Well, there’s no truly 3D gameplay here. All the 3D elements like turns through corridors or buildings are on-the-rails. Thankfully, the illusion of 3D is very well-crafted, leading to heart-stopping near-miss moments. Angela owes me $5 for doing a sentence with three hyphens. There’s a lot of smart design choices, too. The classic Gradius item capsules return, and they linger on the screen when you would logically scroll past them, giving you time to collect them. That’s probably one of the reasons why it’s not a hard game, which is stunning for a Konami arcade game. The developers apparently decided “speed-up” wouldn’t work for this format, and that’s fine. The game controls like a dream, with smooth and accurate analog controls. Why mess with that for the sake of tradition?
This is the forest primeval, only with evil robot centipedes and spaceships instead of murmuring pines and hemlock.
Sadly, I couldn’t recreate the arcade experience, which featured an open cockpit deluxe cabinet along with a gigantic flight stick equipped with a fire and/or missile button. But, the game still manages to be pretty immersive. The levels have a “theme park dark ride” quality I was hoping for. I didn’t really expect this to have exciting settings, and I was wrong. The levels are very well-themed, with even boilerplate settings going the extra mile to make them stand out. The opening level is an asteroid belt, only set directly above a planet, with the outline of a black hole off in the distance. It might offer nothing new in terms of gameplay, but the Moai stage, a scary forest, and a pair of spooky space stations feel fresh in both look and gameplay. My breath was constantly taken away by some of the sights.
This is a VERY visually-loud game.
Solar Assault is not perfect. There are two major flaws in it. The first big problem is that it’s very easy to lose where you are on the screen. Even though I’m nearly 36 and nearing my third decade of gaming, Solar Assault’s action got so crazy that I still managed to lose track of my exact position on the screen multiple times, especially at the end of the game. This didn’t happen with every ship. I strongly recommend playing as Lord British (no, not that one), who fires the classic Salamander ripple rings. The ship is reddish-pink, and it just stands out more, plus the weapon was much more effective anyway. A bigger problem is the bosses are too spongy. Hell, in my first playthrough, I beat the first three bosses by running the clock out even though I’m pretty sure I was hitting most of my shots on them. It’s telling that, once I switched off Vic Viper to Lord British, I was beating bosses with time to spare.
When you defeat third boss King Tut, his goddamned eyes roll into the back of his head and it’s so creepy and scary. That’s nightmare fuel.
The strangest thing of all about Solar Assault is that the basic enemies are much more fun to fight than the bosses. Even the traditional Big Cores show up, and they’re just not fun to do battle with because they’re too damn spongy. They don’t look great either, and I only barely recognized them as Big Cores. Oh, and the finale does the typical Gradius “the last boss doesn’t fight back” gag, and even that is spongy to the point that it loses all its entertainment value. There’s really nothing wrong with Solar Assault that some light rebalancing couldn’t fix. Even Konami seems to have recognized this, hence this being the rare game that was released, then immediately redone with new segments, an entire new level, and rebalanced difficulty and basic enemy attack patterns.
If you play the original version, you won’t be playing the lava stage. It’s not included. While this wasn’t exactly a highlight, all six levels in the revised build are damn solid 3D shooting action and worth playing. Losing even one stage hurts.
I did fiddle around with the original build, which wasn’t as good as Revised and I don’t recommend even trying it. It’s so clearly an unfinished prototype, and one that feels like it was released simply to gauge the reaction. Hell, they later did the same thing with Castlevania 64 in a way. But even the Revised version of Solar Assault is a short game at six levels. Still, it’s just awful that this has never seen a home release. Of all the games in this feature that’s true of, Solar Assault hurts the most. Sometimes early 3D games have a gimmickness to them. Not this one. It’s one of the very best games I’ve reviewed in recent years. I loved it.
Imagine what a modern remake of this could look like!
I really don’t give a sh*t if it’s little more than Konami’s take on Star Fox 64. Solar Assault really feels like the type of game that could have stoked new interest in the Gradius franchise. That was NEVER going to happen if they kept this in arcades, and especially never going to happen if the US build only got a limited release. Solar Assault might be one of the best coin-ops ever to slip into obscurity. It’s a non-entity in modern gaming, and nobody is better off for that. I’d never even heard of it, and it’s just a fantastic game. What a tragedy this whole thing is. It just hurts my heart that it’s slipped so far under the radar. This was actually the final original game I played for this feature (though not the last sequentially), and I’m wiping tears because it feels so good to have found one last hidden gem/killer app for a potential future collection. Do the right thing, Konami, because you didn’t in the late 90s. Verdict: YES! – $15 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gradius Gaiden Platform: PlayStation Released August 28, 1997 Directed by Teisaku Seki Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan* NO MODERN RELEASE* Wikis: Konami – Gradius
*Ported to Gradius Collection for PSP and the Japanese version of the PlayStation Classic
There’ve been a lot of games in this feature that didn’t get released in North America that make me heartsick. Gradius II on the Famicom? The Japanese versions of Thunder Cross and Xexex? The entire MSX Gradius franchise? But, Gradius Gaiden hurts more than all the others, mostly because we’re now in my gaming lifetime, which basically starts during Christmas of 1996. Now, the odds are actually slim that I would have ever had this game. I was not into shmups at all. BUT, I could see a scenario where my father looks at a well made spaceship on a cover and buys it for me so I can try something new. Or, maybe my parents would have grabbed it as a rental from Blockbuster Video. Now, Gradius Gaiden would have had to beat out some pretty crazy odds for all that to happen and realistically, I think my parents would have more likely rolled the dice on licensed properties. But, just those slim chances have legitimately had me staring at walls thinking “what if?” Especially after 1998 when I really got into gaming at the age of 9, I think I would have fallen in love with the genre at a much younger age than I did.
Gradius Gaiden IS Gradius #4 or #5 depending on how you feel about Salamander/Life Force. Yes, there’s an actual Gradius IV coming up, but only because they chose a name instead of a number. There’s no twist in the formula that fundamentally changes the Gradius format. This is the sequential heir to Gradius III’s legacy, period, end of story. So, why is this so much better than the others except maybe Gradius II? Because this is all the good stuff with none of the bad. Because the levels are often not just facades. Like the above stage? The crystals can reflect your lasers! Well, provided your ship shoots lasers. If it doesn’t, it’s just another pretty stage. Gradius Gaiden has a lot of those.
Here’s a very neat weapon. It’s actually the first upgraded gun of a new ship called the “Jade Knight.” Its second gun is just twin lasers. Very ho-hum, really. This is much, much more interesting. These rings are ideal for levels like the Moai stage, where you don’t always have a straight shooting angle. This is one of the best non-high-level guns in any Konami shmup. It checks all four boxes: visually striking, incredibly useful, balanced risk/reward factors, AND cathartically satisfying. I loved it.
So why isn’t it just outright the best Gradius? Well, you kind of have to be a big fan of Gradius for a lot of Gradius Gaiden’s level themes and design to work. Like, the second level is a scrapyard full of failed Big Core variants. It’s like Parodius without the humor, played entirely sincerely in a way that works. In addition to tons and tons of callbacks and hidden details, this is a game that largely sets up expectations with level themes that seem familiar, but then some incredible twist happens. Take those Moai heads. It’s been done in nearly every Gradius game, but this time, the statues break apart after being destroyed, creating secondary hazards that keep you from going into cruise control. That’s a nice subtle change. There’s also the not-so-subtle, like the sixth level. It starts with a very familiar setting: the first level of the original Gradius, which has returned multiple times at this point. Seems kind of late in the game for this particular memberberry but I guess that’s fine and HOLY F*CKING SH*T! THE LEVEL IS BEING SUCKED INTO A BLACK HOLE!
I can’t really get a good screenshot of it. You’ll just have to take my word that it’s awesome.
Now, the black hole bit works even if you don’t recognize the level. But it WORKS BETTER if you are a Gradius superfan. So do the twists with the Big Core variants you fight. And the final boss and really the entire climax relies heavily on callbacks to make any sense and I imagine will be very disappointing if you lack that context. Like, it literally morphs into three seemingly random Salamander bosses, for no reason. The gag of the last Gradius bosses being weak and essentially defenseless has long overstayed its welcome by this point, and this one doesn’t even have a memorable design to make up for it. It’s not a satisfying climax at all, so I want you to imagine dropping a new player in with THIS finale. Shooting a giant head that runs the whole thing is memorable. Shooting a thing that morphs into three bosses from an old spin-off of the actual game you’re playing is not.
This is the boilerplate Gradius game, only everything is different enough that it feels like an entirely fresh experience for veterans. This is a SEQUEL in all capital letters. That’s fine with me, and I imagine it’s fine with anyone who has read this far into Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review. I’m not entirely sure it’ll be fine for someone playing their first Gradius game. That’s why now I think I kind of understand why this never came out in America. This is not the kind of sequel that makes new fans. Not every amazing game is also an amazing jumping-in point for its franchise. While I genuinely think any fan of action games should be able to appreciate Gradius Gaiden for its amazing level design and enemies, realistically, it’s a tougher sell in a country that never really embraced the franchise to begin with. It’s a great game, but to genuinely be amazed by it probably requires preexisting knowledge.
I’m also a little disappointed that more wasn’t done for the after-game experience. After the hidden fairies in Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius: Forever with Me, I was really hoping that something like that would be in Gradius Gaiden, and there isn’t. The junkyard level has two paths, each with a unique boss, and there’s a secret true final boss at the end of the boss rush that can only be fought during the game’s second cycle. But, after seeing those things, you’ve experienced everything Gradius Gaiden has to offer. Even though this is very deep into my marathon, I would have been game to find all the hidden content for Gaiden, something I didn’t want to do for Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius. A shoot ’em up that leaves me hungry even after my fourth run through it is a true rarity in this feature. That’s why I consider Gradius Gaiden the best of the franchise, at least for me. Gradius II might be a literally perfect game and Gradius Gaiden isn’t, but Gradius Gaiden is the game I enjoyed the most in this entire feature. Verdict: YES! – $15 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gradius IV: Fukkatsu Platform: Arcade Released February 4, 1999 Directed by Hiroyuki Ashida Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan* NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Konami – Gradius
*Coin-op only. Included in various collections.
Oof. Those graphics didn’t age well.
My resident arcade expert Dave really doesn’t like Gradius IV and talked about it like it was programmed to be the entrance exam into Hell itself. That’s basically how I felt about the coin-op version of Gradius III, so I was prepared for the worst. Well, Dave and I are very, very far apart on our assessment of the fourth sequential Gradius game. I thought it was fine, and the biggest problems were ones typical of the era. Much like with Super Castlevania IV, I have a bonkers conspiracy theory related to this game and Gradius Gaiden, though I think this one is probably even more likely than my SCV4 “the eight way whipping was a last second addition” theory. Strap on your tinfoil hats for this one.
Actually, that doesn’t look too bad in screenshots. I didn’t say it ALL aged badly.
It’s not really a conspiracy so much as a weird suspicion about Gradius Gaiden. I think it was meant to be a very late-era Super NES game, which is why it barely got a bump in the audio/visual department when the project was moved to the 32-bit PlayStation. Oh, it’s almost certainly not true. Gradius Gaiden’s development cycle was well documented, but it’s fun to wonder, isn’t it? What makes it believable is Gaiden certainly isn’t trying to look “modern” by the standards of the late 90s, which is very strange for a home-exclusive 1997 PSX game. Gradius IV the first real Gradius of the polygon era, IE one designed entirely with graphics that were typical of the era. It shows, because it’s so clumsy with its handling of polygons and “advanced” visual effects that it ends up pretty damn cheesy. I’ve never thought of Gradius as a “cheesy” series, so the tonal shift is jarring. Like, there’s actual goddamn explosions during the game. As in live footage spliced into the game, and it doesn’t match the look of the game at all and it’s so distracting and wrong.
To the explosions’ credit, my family was cracking up so badly that I had tears pouring down my cheeks as I squeaked out “why would anyone do this?” Perhaps they’re playing 4D chess and this was a ploy to induce fits of laughter that would cause loss of lives, forcing faster game overs and thus earning the game more money. I’M ONTO YOU, KONAMI! But, they only have a handful of explosion effects too and it’s kind of funny that Konami thinks a giant space triops would explode in the same way that a space station does. Where it gets weirder is the first boss doesn’t have the live footage explosion when it dies. They made a different effect for it. It’s like someone on the development team was caught screwing around with a Video Toaster at their work station after the first level was complete and they said “that’s pretty cool! Let’s put it in the rest of the game!”
Dave had me thinking I was in for pure pain, but honestly, I thought this was a lot easier than some of the earlier versions of Gradius I played. The Moai stage was easily the hardest stage in the game, at least for me.
At the start of Gradius IV, I was worried that, because “cutting edge” graphics were the hook, the game would be full of repeated set-pieces and bosses, only now they’re polygons instead of sprites. I was right, to a certain extent. Like, the Moai stage’s new twists aren’t new at all. They break apart, just like the ones in Gradius Gaiden did, and the boss is the same two-headed giant Moai as before with a new attack pattern. The only fresh part of the whole thing is that it’s a 2D game with 3D graphics. Yippie. But, there are some really memorable segments. The lava level waves up and down and it’s so hypnotic when it happens that you wish you had more time to sit and admire just how breathtaking it is.
One of the best uses of the tried and true “tight squeeze” trope as well.
Actually, my biggest knock with Gradius IV is the lack of a nice BANG to the gunplay. There’s a feathery lightness to the whole thing that becomes especially pronounced during boss fights. They’re all a bit spongier than I care for to begin with, but they ALL lack a nice, satisfying snap to them when you land your shots. The worst by far was the new “armor-piercing” gun that’s the sixth and final loadout’s laser weapon. I do NOT recommend using it, but the other guns don’t do much better in the satisfaction department. Even something as simple as the “Konami Bing” or whatever that noise is that signals a landed shot in dozens of Konami games would have made all the difference in the world. It’s rare that I comment on sound design and music because I spent the majority of my play sessions with the game muted, but I thought Gradius IV had some of the worst sound design in the franchise.
At times, this can still be a damn beautiful game.
Okay, so the first polygonal Gradius that’s meant to be Gradius (that assuming we don’t count Solar Assault) was never fated to age as gracefully as other games in the series. But, let it be said that I’ll stand by Gradius IV as being not that bad, actually. Hell, I gave both the odd-numbered games in the series a NO! for their coin-ops so it’s only fitting that both even-numbered ones scored a YES! I really liked a lot of the boss designs and attack patterns. There were still plenty of twists to keep me interested from start to finish. A bizarre but absolutely true final note to end this review on: Gradius IV is easily the most generous in terms of the collision box. There were so many times I caught myself saying “how did I survive that?” Of course, a counter to that is I’m sure at least some of the sponginess was related to small collision boxes for the bosses, especially the Big Cores. I don’t want a re-release of Gradius IV. I want a full remake of it that fixes the crappy soundtrack and offers toggles for difficulty and collision. But, this is an underrated game. I’ll die on THAT hill, Dave. Verdict: YES! – $6 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gradius Galaxies aka Gradius Advance (EU) Gradius Generation (JP) Released November 9, 2001 Designed by Hideaki Fukutome Developed by Mobile21 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Wikis: Konami – Gradius
OH MY GOD! LOOK AT THE LITTLE BABY LEGS ON THE ROBO-MOAI! HAHAHAHAHA!
Seriously, I laughed more at the GBA version of Gradius than I did at any Parodius game. I honestly couldn’t tell if it was serious or not. As the last original Gradius game in this feature, I mean, it’s fine. I guess. There’s no real stand-out set-piece, though not for a lack of effort. The problem is the “twists” are just kind of the same things they’ve already done, only framed differently. For the Moai stage, after a third of the stage being the normal, extremely tired Moai stage, they start to emerge from the ground like zombies. I mean, they’re just the same old Moai statues with the same evil ring bullets, but they, you know, come out of the ground. Or for the expected remake of the original level one Gradius stage, instead of the whole level being sucked into a black hole, a mountain falls off the ceiling.
We call this “fracking” on Earth. I have a funny story about that. “No, don’t tell them about that!” Angela pleads. Oh, I’m telling them. We were watching the Presidential debate in 2020 and the topic of fracking came up. “Fracking” does sound dirty, and there was no context for what it actually was in the debate. After a couple minutes of arguing about it, Angela, then 10 years old, asked with complete earnestness “is fracking a sex thing?” Our mother did the most Hollywood-perfect spit take. It was so cinematic. Of all the happy memories I have of my family, that’s the one that’ll be stuck in my head on my deathbed.
So there’s a large “been there, done that” vibe to Gradius Galaxies. It’s certainly not a bad game. I’m giving it a YES! and everything. But there’s also nothing really notable about it. Well, unless you play the Japanese version. Exclusive to Gradius Generation, when you beat the game, you unlock a challenge mode that made me sit up in my seat. For about twenty seconds, until I realized what it was.
This could have been so cool. Alas.
It’s exactly the same game you just already played, broken into forty-seven bite-sized chunks. As in, thirty or less seconds per challenge. Challenge A is roughly equal to the game on NORMAL, and after finishing every single stage, Challenge B is unlocked which contains the same challenges set on HARD. It’s sort of like Gradius meets WarioWare, and it is challenging, because you start each segment from scratch with no speed or gun boosts. The problem is that they created a “challenge” for seemingly every square-inch of the game, when not every square-inch of the game is suitable for such a challenge. Like, there’s a challenge for each buffer-zone between levels that ends at exactly the point the stage would be starting proper. If they had limited this concept to just the bosses and the big set-pieces, and maybe put a worthwhile reward for completing it, like a new ship or even a new level, hell, this could have been the best feature in Gradius history. Instead, it’s almost entirely busy work, and you need to beat all forty-seven of them to unlock the much meatier Challenge B.
When the challenges work, they’re pretty dang good. But less than half are any fun.
Make no mistake: there’s some damn good gameplay in this challenge section. I’d reached the point where I wasn’t dying a ton in Gradius games and nearly aced the game. When playing the main mode, I only really died in the speed zone (which got me several times). These challenges reminded me how hard the game is when you don’t have a full loadout. It just doesn’t work because they overdid it. Well, their hearts were in the right place, I suppose. It’s rare enough to complain about bonus content missing the mark, because this is bonus content. But this would have been a lot more welcome in one of the better Gradius games. I don’t even know if I would have complained about the oversaturation of challenge stages if this had been a feature in Gradius Gaiden. For Galaxies, hell, not a single boss is among the elite of the Gradius franchise. It’s just north of the middle of the road. Not a disaster, but nothing special. If nothing else, it’s proof that Gradius is pretty hard to screw-up. Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
PLAYSTATION PORTABLE COLLECTIONS
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There’s four collections of Konami shoot ’em ups for the PSP, and at first, I was going to play through every game in them, but honestly, it’s overkill. TwinBee Portable offers a Tate Mode for its games, which is nice, I suppose. The more interesting builds are Gradius Collection and Parodius Portable, which reworked the games to be wide-screen. That’s not the blessing you think. Maybe some day I’ll talk about them, but I don’t think they’re likely to get a re-release. At the time these were released, they didn’t get the best reception because the PSP was not suitable for shmups with its crappy D-pad and crappier little analog nub. Thankfully, I got to play these with the comfort of a PS5 controller. Anyway, there’s two MSX remakes and one Game Boy remake spread among the four collections, which felt like a great way to cap off this feature. Enjoy!
Parodius Remake of Parodius for MSX Part of Parodius Portable Platform: PlayStation Portable Released January 25, 2007 Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Wikis: Konami – Gradius
The game design of the MSX original is fully intact, for better and for worse.
The first of three PSP remakes contained within collections I played, and I had the highest hopes for this one. The other two remakes that I’ll be giving the full review treatment for already got a YES! but Parodius for MSX I’ve already given NO! to twice before. I was hoping the gameplay would be improved, and to a degree, it is. The slice-scrolling of the MSX original is gone, replaced with the expected smooth scrolling. Plus, the game runs in widescreen. REAL wide-screen. No stretching here. So, the remake of the original Parodius is a rousing success then? Well, no.
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The problem with the Parodius remake is it’s still the same game, with the same rules, as the MSX version. What was spongy then is spongy now. What takes forever then takes forever now. While the boss attached to the rope was easier to defeat because the hit box seems more accurate (and the hit boxes can apparently be adjusted in the options menu), other bosses were every bit as miserable to fight as they were on the previous build. The giant Moai took forever. The twin maids took forever. The giant eyeball took forever. The part of the game where the ceiling collapses took forever. Plus, they stuck to the original game’s format, so all five characters are just skins that all have the same potential weapons and upgrades. I’m SO disappointed because they had an opportunity to vastly clean up a game that wasn’t very fun to begin with and they didn’t take it. The gameplay is better because the scrolling is better, but the original Parodius is still a badly designed game, and I’m glad to be done with it for good now. Verdict: NO!
TwinBee Da! Remake of Pop’n TwinBee for Game Boy Part of TwinBee Portable Platform: PlayStation Portable Released January 25, 2007 Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Wikis: Konami – TwinBee
Well, this is much better than the Parodius remake.
Following Parodius Portable’s remake of the original MSX game, my expectations for the remake of the Game Boy version of Pop’n TwinBee were pretty low. I expected, more or less, the same game with sharper sprites and color. While that’s technically what I got, TwinBee Da! on PSP is so damn good that it makes Parodius retroactively worse. It’s so good that we suspect they might have used the original development notes and figured out where mechanics and enemy attack formations had to be cut due to the limitations of the Game Boy. You could even call this Pop’n TwinBee: Arcade Edition. Remember how you threw whole clusters of bombs in the early TwinBee coin-ops? That’s back! Actually, I don’t think the bombing mechanic has ever felt better.
The boss rush sequence of the Game Boy original puts up a MAJOR fight in this one. This was not a cakewalk.
It’s also much, much harder than the Game Boy original was, because there’s just so much flying around the screen. Yet, the graphics are so damn crisp and vibrant that it never becomes too busy to follow the action. It’s still a short game at only five levels plus a grand finale boss fight. Except, the weakness of the Game Boy game is now a major strength in the remake. The boss rush that caps off what is now the fourth level was fairly weak in the original build. In this one, not only do the colors and reworked sprites make the bosses feel less generic, but they actually put up quite the fight. I even ate a GAME OVER during this sequence. And the final boss was a major pain in the ass too. But, the strength of the well-designed levels carries over to the boss rush. There’s no downtime in this TwinBee. It’s short but potently fun from start to finish.
What had been a let-down of a finale on the Game Boy is now the chef’s kiss in the remake.
I can’t stress enough how impressed I am with the entire direction of the Pop’n TwinBee remake. It’s one of the best looking games in the series, easily. You would never guess this started life as a Game Boy title. But it has perfect, even generous collision detection while maintaining a fast pace and a lot of action. Nobody would have possibly expected this in a collection like this, and the fact that it’s part of a collection really makes this a kick in the pants. Of all the “lost” gems in this feature, this one might shine the brightest, yet it’s treated like a throwaway +1 for a collection. If Konami ever does another collection, HOPEFULLY they don’t forget this one. Verdict: YES! – $7 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection
Gradius 2 Remake of Gradius 2 for MSX Part of Salamander Portable Platform: PlayStation Portable Released January 25, 2007 Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Wikis: Konami – Gradius
Hmmph. Total letdown after TwinBee.
Hmmph. Total letdown after TwinBee.
Welp, this is it. The final-final-final game of Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review. You’ve reached the end. Hope you enjoyed it. I wish I had ended on TwinBee, because this remake of Gradius 2 for the MSX is not a major step-up over the original. Actually, I’m pretty sure this is what the game would have been if it had been made for the MSX2+. If the MSX2+ was, you know, wide-screen. The graphics are marginally improved and scrolling is marginally smoother. However, there’s still a TON of slowdown. It’s certainly preferable to play this build over the MSX one because smoother scrolling helps with immersion. BUT, if this isn’t an option, you’re not missing out on anything, really. Kind of a letdown for a final review after everything above, really. Verdict: YES! – $6 in value added to Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection BUT only if the MSX build isn’t in it. If it is, then this is $2 in bonus value.
FINAL TOTAL
YES!:52 NO!:24 Target Value: $60 – $70 Total Value: $292
And that final total is before factoring in any bonus value, including the automatic $10 in bonus value for a nearly fully-loaded Infinity Gauntlet of Emulation. Now, of course my hypothetical Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection is never going to happen. So, let’s play around with some combinations, shall we?
The obvious one is Gradius Origins, which will retail for $39.99. Now, I haven’t played it yet, but I’m projecting a value of, drum roll: $15. Actually, that goes up to $25 with its fully-loaded Infinity Gauntlet and it might even get another $5 to $10 from its galleries and bonus features, and Salamander 3 is eligible for up to $15 in value. Keep in mind that, in previous features like Making of Karateka or Tetris Forever, I always noted that if you’re not into old advertisements or box art, you can ignore the bonus value I add for that. And even if you don’t ignore it, the total value still comes short of $40. It’ll need a big YES! from Salamander 3 or it’ll need to earn bonus value from the prototypes, which can earn a little value even if they get a NO! Still, only a single game in it got a YES!, and that’s Gradius II. Gradius I, Gradius III, and both Salamander games got a NO!, so having multiple versions of them ain’t going to help all that much. Having used rewind and save states, the NO! games are not saved by those features. They’re just not aged well enough. Now, the collection will get discounted if Konami’s other collections are any indication (Arcade Anniversary is priced at $7.99 as I type this, but scored an actual retail value of $29). Gradius II *is* worth owning, and hell, if it’s cheap enough, you might as well get the other games.
But what if Gradius Origins had more? Let’s go back to just the $15 we know I’m giving Gradius II and the likely $10 for the emulation, so $25 in value. Let’s add JUST the NES Gradius games and Life Force. That’s +$10 in value just by those three additions for $35, but with the bonus value of the special features, it likely makes it to $40 in value. Doesn’t that by itself make Gradius Origins look pretty silly? Or, forget the NES games. Let’s add JUST the MSX trilogy and MSX Salamander. Salamander got a NO!, but the three Gradius games earned a YES! and a whopping $19 in value, bringing the total to $44 and a victory for Gradius Origins. Hell, let’s really go nuts! What if the collection had all the Gradius and Salamander ports I covered up to Gradius III? $15 for Gradius 2, $10 for the emulation, $10 for the NES games, $19 for the MSX games, $10 for the Game Boy titles, $22 for the PC Engine games, and $6 for Gradius III SNES. Total: $92.
Now, here’s where it gets REALLY damning. Let’s ignore every single home port and pretend that Gradius Origins went to IV instead of III. That’s $31 in value. Okay, still not quite enough, but what if it had Gaiden instead of IV? That’s $40 and a victory. The same goes for putting Solar Assault instead of Gaiden. Now, what if it had all three of those games? That’s probably the most believable alternative package I could come up with. Gradius Origins + Gaiden + IV + Solar Assault = $61 and a win. Remove Gaiden because it’s a home exclusive? Fine, it’s still a winner at $46. Do you see why I’m so frustrated? They had paths to make this happen.
Just for fun, what if Gradius Origins had included zero arcade games? What if it had been focused on 8-bit consoles, including the MSX? Well, it wouldn’t be called “Gradius Origins” then. Let’s call this set Konami Home Origins, and we’ll say it has the NES, MSX, and Game Boy games from this feature. That set would contain twenty-two games valued at $70, before any bonuses are added. Wowie!
Imagine if they could get the Salamander anime as a special feature.
All Gradius & Salamander games earned a total of $93. The total value of TwinBee games in this feature was $32. Parodius earned $47 as a franchise ($29 of that from versions of Parodius Da! by itself), while Thunder Cross, which apparently includes Space Manbow, earned $27.
Five games earned the max $15 value: Gradius II Arcade, Gradius II for Super CD-ROM², Xexex, Gradius Gaiden, and Solar Assault. Three other games earned $10 or more: Thunder Cross, the third MSX Gradius game, and Space Manbow. And this really means nothing in the grand scheme of things, but the two games based on licensed IPs, Aliens and G.I. Joe, earned $10 in value.
Having the Super Game Boy/Game Boy Color options for the GB games would probably get $1 in bonus value. These things are so hard to predict. It really depends on how many essential features are missing, because if they add the GBC filters but not things like quick save? I’m not going to be in a generous mood.
The total value of all thirty-four coin-ops in this feature was $125. The NES/Famicom/Famicom Disk games are worth $25. The MSX games + Super Manbow for MSX2+ scored $29 in value. The PC Engine games along with Gradius II for the Super CD-ROM² earned $27. The original black & white Game Boy titles earned $16, which is $19 if you throw-in the GBA Gradius. The Super NES games are $22, while the PlayStation titles scored $28.
Gradius II for the Super CD-ROM² is the big winner among classic platforms and one of only two home console games in this feature to score the max $15, along with Gradius Gaiden. My congratulations to PC Engine fans. Shame on you Konami for not doing more with this platform.
Twenty-one of the games I reviewed have been released on Arcade Archives. Those cost $7.99 each, so the total value should be $167.79. The actual value? I swear, I didn’t plan this out but it’s perfect: $67. Wow. I mean, come on, that IS funny. And in fairness, those would get a lot more consideration than this review gave them due to special features. Titles like Time Pilot certainly benefit from Arcade Archives’ high score and 5 minute modes. Games on Nintendo Switch Online scored $10.
Meanwhile, twenty of the games have never been re-released, and they earned $82 in value. That’s sad. Thirty games were filed under NO MODERN RELEASE, and those games earned $133. Lots of money left on the table. In short: DO BETTER, KONAMI!
THE END
To my amazing family, to all my friends, and to every single reader I’ve had over the last fourteen years: thank you so much for putting up with me. I know I’m often annoying and I’ve given you many sleepless nights. But, please don’t ever forget that I love you all! I mean that, from the bottom of my heart, which is apparently where all the love must be located since everyone who especially loves people cites their love comes from their heart’s bottom. I would think coming from the top would be better because it means your love traveled less distance, as if you wanted them to feel it faster, but whatever. I’ve tried to think of what I could possibly say that would express the heartfelt love I feel for you all, and this is the best I came up with: you all make me want to find the best version of myself.
You’re still here? Huh.
Okay, well, fine. Here’s my thoughts on the wide-screen versions of PSP’s games.
Arcade
PSP
When I saw that Gradius Collection and Parodius Portable had true, reworked wide-screen, I became really excited. But, the problem with wide-screen gameplay is that the games weren’t built for it. They might have adjusted the size of the playfield, but they didn’t make any adjustments to the enemies for it. Every single attack pattern that was presumably fine-tuned for the original dimensions of the arcade or television monitors at the time is cut and pasted. Consequently, some tight squeezes or sections built around claustrophobia are actually less exciting. Sometimes significantly so.
This was probably my least favorite level of Gradius II, and it’s still one of the better crumble-wall levels. But, the sense of tightness is gone. It’s just not as good. By the way, there’s STILL slowdown in this version, only it doesn’t feel the same as previous versions of slowdown. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they added it artificially because it was originally there. Parodius Da! doesn’t have it.
Weirdly, they did make SOME adjustments to the bosses, but it’s never to the benefit of the fight. The giant female Moai statue that spits out Moai missiles? The gag with her (poor choice of words) is that her missiles reach the full length of the screen. Hold on, wait a second. The whole point of that fight was it’s built around REALLY close calls. So what happens when the screen is much bigger? Well, this happens:
Now a boss that was built specifically around narrow safe spaces to dodge the attacks has a great big gap between the edge of the screen and the launching point of the projectiles. Well, that boss is ruined. It turns out, you can’t just keep the same attacks on a wide-screen. I actually laughed when I saw that the solution Gradius II had for this was to just position some of the bosses more in the center of the screen, like so:
But, some bosses are still ruined because the logic of the fights no longer makes any sense. I can’t stress enough that Gradius bosses are almost entirely built around limiting your available space to dodge attacks. On the left is the Super CD-ROM² version of Gradius II’s second boss. On the right is the PSP. Does this look like there’s still limited room to dodge its attacks?
Super CD-ROM²
PSP
That’s just too much playfield for a boss that still has the same attack pattern. It doesn’t work at all. It’s not all a disaster. The Parodius games have little to no slowdown, but who cares when many of the set-pieces and bosses are completely destroyed by the wide-screen format? There’s segments of some stages that do work slightly better in both Gradius and for Parodius. But for the most part, this was actually a pretty epic disaster. The famous electric cage? Dead. Like, dead-dead. Here’s the Parodius version of it:
Look at all the extra space to move around.
This is the equivalent of when an old television series with a 4:3 aspect is “enhanced” for modern TVs and that ruins the experience because now you can see ceiling lights and boom mics. There’s a reason why this type of thing isn’t commonplace with retro re-releases: it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. This doesn’t count for the reviews above, but I would actually give every game in Gradius Collection and Parodius Portable a NO! They’re some of the best games ever made, only formatted in a ruinous way. If they ever do something like this again, they can’t simply copy and paste the old games. They have to be entirely remastered, with new logic, or they won’t work.
And now you’ve reached the end. Thank you for fourteen amazing years, and here’s to the next fourteen! I hope you enjoyed Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review!
Imagine the OG pack-in Combat if it had active environmental hazards. Oh, and it was a LOT faster paced. And the map changed after every point. And the vehicle changed after every point. And the….. you know what? Screw it. Don’t imagine Combat. This is very different, actually. Your first impression will be “Updated Combat” but that’s just not the case.
When it comes to reviewing multiplayer-focused games, getting the players isn’t the worst part. Eventually, I can get my family to give me some time with just about any game. The big problem is parity. I just don’t have anyone around me who can match me on some genres. When I did Tetris Battle Gaiden as part of Tetris Forever, I had such an experience advantage over every possible opponent I could muster that I couldn’t really figure out how balanced the game was for anyone else. I had to watch my father and nephew duel in order to finish the review. This is the peril of indie developers making multiplayer-focused games. Unless the game is suitable for all skill levels out of the box, with either NO learning curve or one that gives someone new to gaming a fighting chance against a seasoned gamer, even getting optimal coverage from critics is going to be a pain in the ass. And that’s to say nothing about what the experience will be like for your actual consumers. The reason I bring that up is everyone who plays Oh Shoot should be, more less, on equal footing regardless of experience, even though it’s a modern Atari 2600 game.
Without the ability to shoot in any direction but straight ahead, you might find a situation where both players camp behind the scenery. Even with this “problem” I don’t know why on Earth there’s a toggle that allows bullets to pass through scenery.
My playing partners/opponents were my senior citizen father and TJ, my middle school aged nephew, who isn’t into Atari games. As stated in the first caption, this is NOT Combat. You can only shoot straight in front of you, and even when you specifically select slow movement, this is faster than, say, the tanks in Combat. We tinkered around with the different two player modes and agreed that the best mode was mode 10: fast/manual with FX turned on, which makes the environment change in the middle of shooting. We also turned off the ability to shoot through things, which I recommend because otherwise the game is just insanely boring. I don’t even know why that’s something that can be toggled on and off. With it turned on, players aren’t incentivized to use strategy. Just lob bullets from the other side of the screen with no regard for the setting except not to crash into it. With it turned off, Oh Shoot makes for a pretty solid competitive game.
If I could suggest one additional rule for Oh Shoot, which presumably I can since the game is not out yet, it would be to add the rule “regardless of the score, players must win via a bullet and not by deliberately crashing into the other player.” Or actually, just make it so the person winning must survive the winning round. Once we knew what we were doing, too often the games ended by the person (mostly TJ, the little dweeb) who built up a lead no longer trying to score the kill the “right way” and instead just look for any opening to crash into the other player, which gives BOTH players a point. First to 20 wins. I don’t even know if our idea is programmable on the 2600. That’s why they’re the game makers and I’m the game review writing person.
The hook, besides the active environments that shift, warp, or retract, is that there’s a pool of 1,024 different screens that are randomly chosen and change after a kill is scored. So every point is a fresh experience, with players being reset to their side of the screen for a new map. When I played my father in Combat, there was almost always a stretch where one person would score a few shots in a row before the person could even get away. That’s not the case here. You’re also assigned a random vehicle, which is not just a skin. The helicopters shoot in straight lines and their bullets don’t travel the full length of the screen. The jets shoot the full length of the screen AND their bullets can be aimed by moving up and down after you shoot. The UFOs can also be aimed but their bullets travel in a small wave. Finally the things that look like TIE Fighters shoot bullets that travel in a big, chaotic wave. And both players don’t always get the same ship, so luck probably does factor in a little too much sometimes.
Some rounds ended immediately when one or both of us flew into the scenery as it spawned.
Oh Shoot is probably not going to be a game that we pull out during family rec time. TJ wasn’t especially interested in it, but in fairness, he’s like that with 99% of games for anything before the PS4. When I was his age, I would have been exactly the same way with Atari. I don’t think he would have played this at all in most circumstances. Thankfully, he IS into Aliens, Predator, and Aliens vs. Predator. And that’s how I got him to play this. A couple weeks ago, he was my co-op partner for the 1990 Konami Aliens. When we finished, I told him about the Capcom AvP brawler, and today he asked to play that. I asked him “before we do that, can I get about fifteen minutes on an Atari game I have to play for IGC?” Well, I didn’t get fifteen minutes. He gave me almost three times that. Mostly because he whooped us, but that’s beside the point. Sure, he spent most of that time complaining that he could only shoot straight ahead, but he also slaughtered us. Actually, he came back in one down 13 to 7 and won 15 to 20, and I only got those last two points because he decided the best way to win was just to crash into me. He’s evil.
This is incredibly nit-picky but there might actually be too many options. Like, there’s the ability for the ships to move forward automatically. We didn’t like that at all. I really wish Phillip would have focused on optimizing a handful of modes instead of seemingly trying to cover every possible house rule imaginable.
What TJ didn’t know during our first round was this wasn’t a game from the 1970s. “You just played an Atari game that isn’t even out yet! You’re one of the first to play the full version of it, in fact!” His reply summed it up better than this review ever could. “It’s cool that they still make Atari games.” It is cool! TJ wasn’t Oh Shoot’s target audience, and frankly, neither am I. And actually my father said he liked Combat with Pong bullets a lot more than Oh Shoot. Probably because he actually wins rounds of that, and he didn’t win a single round of this. I thought Oh Shoot was fine. Not mind blowing, but for what it is, this was an enjoyable waste of a morning. I wasn’t ever going to be blown away by it. Well, I was blown away dozens of times playing it in the literal sense but that’s obviously not what I meant. I didn’t grow up with an Atari 2600. It holds very little in the way of nostalgia for me, so it’s not like I’m longing for a game like Oh Shoot. For my generation, there’s always a hint of a novelty to the Atari 2600, which is probably multiplied by playing a new game built today for it.
Missed ’em by THIS much. I will say that if one player had the jet and the other had anything else, most of the time the player with the jet was scoring the point.
At the same time, I’ve heard plenty about what a pain in the ass the Video Computer System is to program for and I get why someone would do that. Asking why anyone would make games for the Atari 2600 today is like asking George Mallory why he would try to climb Mt. Everest. “Because it’s there!” Yeah! Because it’s there! In that sense, it might not even matter if the game is fun or not. The experience is the point. The novelty of a new Atari game is the point. If that game happens to be fun, that’s a bonus. Oh Shoot is fun, for everyone. A kid who can count his experiences playing Atari 2600 games on one hand and still have fingers left over slaughtered us, and apparently not just so he could get to the game he actually wanted to play faster. Would I want to play it again? Probably not, because I’m not specifically into Atari two player shooting games. But, is it worth playing? Yeah. Why? Because it’s cool that quality games are still being made for the Atari 2600. Because it’s fun. Because it’s there. Verdict: YES! Try the Demo
A review copy was supplied for this review. I mean, obviously. The game isn’t out yet, but I forgot to put that the first time.
Once Upon a Katamari
Castlevania Legends
Haunted Castle
Vampire Killer
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
Kid Niki: Radical Ninja
Kid Niki: Radical Ninja
Ganso!! Yancha-Maru
Kaiketsu Yancha Maru 2: Karakuri Land
Kaiketsu Yancha Maru 3: Taiketsu! Zouringen
YES
Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters
Knightmare (MSX)
A-Jax/Typhoon (Arcade)
Gradius III (Arcade)
Crisis Force (Famicom)
Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius (Super Famicom)
The End
Scramble
Super Cobra
Pooyan
Time Pilot
Gyruss
Mega Zone
Juno First
Time Pilot ’84
Scooter Shooter
TwinBee
Gradius
Finalizer – Super Transformation
Jail Break
TwinBee
Knightmare
TwinBee
Gradius
Salamander
Gradius
Moero TwinBee: Cinnamon Hakase o Sukue!
Battlantis 
Flak Attack
Gradius 2
Life Force
Falsion
A-Jax
Salamander
Thunder Cross
Gradius II: Gofer no Yabou
Parodius
Devastators
Gyruss
Gradius II
Gofer no Yabou: Episode II
TwinBee 3: Poko Poko Daimaō
Gradius III
Space Manbow
Aliens
Trigon
Nemesis
Parodius Da! Shinwa kara Owarai e
TwinBee Da!
Parodius Da!
Gradius III
Thunder Cross II
Detana!! TwinBee
Parodius Da! Shinwa kara Owarai e
Parodius
Gradius: The Interstellar Assault
Crisis Force
Xexex
Gradius
Salamander
Detana!! TwinBee
G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero
Parodius Da! Shinwa kara Owarai he
Axelay
Gradius II: Gofer no Yabou
Pop’n TwinBee
Gokujou Parodius!
Gokujou Parodius!
Parodius Da!
Gokujō Parodius! ~Kako no Eikō o Motomete~
TwinBee Yahho!: Fushigi no Kuni de Ōabare!!
Originally, I planned on doing full reviews of 
Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius
Salamander 2
Sexy Parodius
Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius: Forever with Me
Solar Assault: Gradius
Gradius Gaiden
Gradius IV: Fukkatsu
Gradius Galaxies
Parodius
TwinBee Da!
Gradius 2
YES
Now, here’s where it gets REALLY damning. Let’s ignore every single home port and pretend that Gradius Origins went to IV instead of III. That’s $
Oh Shoot!
Because it’s there! In that sense, it might not even matter if the game is fun or not. The experience is the point. The novelty of a new Atari game is the point. If that game happens to be fun, that’s a bonus. Oh Shoot is fun, for everyone. A kid who can count his experiences playing Atari 2600 games on one hand and still have fingers left over slaughtered us, and apparently not just so he could get to the game he actually wanted to play faster. Would I want to play it again? Probably not, because I’m not specifically into Atari two player shooting games. But, is it worth playing? Yeah. Why? Because it’s cool that quality games are still being made for the Atari 2600. Because it’s fun. Because it’s there.
Indie Gamer Chick 
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