Gradius (Gradius 3 and 4 (PS2))

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Product:	Gradius 3 and 4 (PS2)
Date:	24/05/01 (586 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: umm,not much

Disadvantages: most of it

Konami's Gradius series has always been a popular favorite with the 2D shoot'em up crowd, at the arcades and on home systems. Konami has brought the classic series back into the homes once again, but instead of making a completely new Gradius title we get two arcade conversions. Gradius III from way back in 1990, and the more recent Gradius IV which appeared in the arcades in 1999. Is there still life left in the old dog? Let's take a look...

As soon as the disk loads you are greeted with a long impressive intro, which shows a gorgeously rendered Vic Viper taking on the bad guys of the past Gradius games. Skipping that you get to the menu where you get to choose which Gradius game you want to tackle. This is where the game begins to show its true colors.



Gradius 3 looks identical to how I remember it, which isn't surprising really because rather than porting the game they seemed to have emulated the original arcade version, with some terrible results. The main problem caused by emulating the game is the horrendous slow down it causes when the screen gets cluttered with too many sprites. The original arcade game did also exhibit some slow down, which usually passed after a second or so, but with the PS2 version you will literately have to battle through most of the game in slow-mo. I know longevity is a problem with a lot of the launch titles, but making the game run in slow motion isn't the kind of longevity people were thinking of.

Luckily, Gradius IV is of slightly better quality than its predecessor, due to the fact the game is mostly in 3D. The game still has its feet firmly planted in side scrolling shoot'em up soil, but it means Konami have taken advantage of the machine's hardware, creating a much smoother ride all round with no visible slowdown. Though after a few goes you will be begging for some slowdown as you soon realize how incredibly difficult the game is. Gradius has always been ai
med at the hardcore shoot'em up fan, but the level of difficulty is ridiculously high, even on the easiest setting, it makes the game no fun what so ever. To make matters worse, if you die you have to start from the last checkpoint building up your firepower from scratch. When this happens you might as well reset the game and start from level one again cause there is no way you can go up against an end of level boss with a standard gun and a speedup as your only backup. With Gradius III, once you have beaten a level you can then skip to that level via the main menu, meaning you don't have to play through the whole game to reach the same place. Gradius IV doesn't have this feature, which leaves you battling through the first few levels over-and-over, which as you can imagine gets pretty gosh darn tedious after a while.



The Bottom Line...
If you are some kind of sadist and like to be frustrated by games, then I would seriously suggest picking up a copy of Gradius III & IV. It really only appeals to hardcore fans of the series and has no place in the collection of your average gamer. If you do fancy some scrolling shoot'em up action take a look at GameArt's Silpheed: The Lost Planet, which shows how this aging genre should look on a next-gen machine

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