Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 114: Gradius

Episode Date: August 28, 2017

Kurt Kalata and Rob Russo join us from Hardcore Gaming 101 to delve into the history of Konami's legendary Gradius series. From its prequel (Scramble) to its most recent spinoff (Otomedius), we blast our way through the span of the entire series!

This week in Retronauts, we're going to shoot that core. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another exciting episode of Retronauts. It's me, Jeremy Parrott. sitting in a hotel room powered by fire-breathing funny cars. Yeah, we're here at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. And while we're here, I thought it would be good to talk about the Gradius series because I've been writing about Gradius a lot all of a sudden, thanks to NES Works and Super NES Works.

And as it happens, we have someone here on our panel at Long Island who wrote a book on Gradius. So it just seemed like a cosmic connection that we needed to make. And therefore, that's what we're doing. So guest of honor, why don't you introduce yourself? I'm Kurt Kalata. I run Hardcore Gaming 101, and we put a whole book about Konami Shooters, which includes Gradius, Twinby, Prodeus,

in the at least dozen other types of shoot-'emops that Canami put out. And also here with Kurt. You haven't written a book about Gradius, right? No, I've read books about Gratius, right? Oh, that's pretty good. Sorry. My name is Rob Russo, also known as Xerxes. Unfortunately, I started using an internet handle before I realized that people would call me that in real life.

You don't want to be mistaken for a character from 300? No. Well, that, no, that guy, yes, definitely. The guy from 300, that's what I want people to visualize. I think of me. Who's this guy in the podcast with the amazing abs? I was confused with the guy from, not the guy, the AI from System Shock 2. I'll live with that too

But no You can just call me Rob And I do Hardcore Gaming One-on-on's podcast And we It's called the top 47,8 1858 games of all time I have a problem with names

I just realized I'm really bad at them But it's Yeah I can all plug that at the end of the show And of course rounding out the cast Hey it's Bob Mackey And I'm gladious to be here

I cook that one up all morning Wow I'm glad that one up all morning just for you guys I'm glad you spent your morning so productively. It's a... All right, so anyway, yeah. Like I said, I've been writing a lot about Gradius, but I don't know as much about the series as these guys.

So we're going to have an episode here that is just packed full of nutrients and information. It's going to be amazing. Just you wait. So dig in for some Gradius. All right, so in talking about the whole, like, the whole, like, let's go game by game. so done. We've done that so many times. What was your first experience with Gradius? That's what I'm curious to hear about.

Kurt, what made you fall in love with Gradius and made you say, I need to write a book about this? The first time, I didn't actually grow up not liking shootemops because they were too difficult. Like, you would just die in one hit. The only one I rarely ever played was Lifeforce over at a friend's house and Nintendo, which we just blew through with a 30-man code like everybody else did with Contra. But during the Casperian. Dungeon, I had ran to contact with a guy named Rob Strangman. And he was like, well, if you like Calcivating and Contra, Panami also put out this Grady's series, which is pretty cool.

And at the time, they were going to release a compilation that had the Salmander Deluxe Pack and Gradius Guidon, which ended up being canceled from American release. Just to contextualize, you mean, in the U.S. Those games came out in Japan, and they were available for importers, but otherwise not accessible. And he was annoyed at that. So he started a whole retro website called the OPCFG back in the late 90s. I didn't realize that was the impetus for that site. Yeah.

Okay. Because he wanted a sort of campaign to get them. Of course, you know, nobody cared about campaigns, especially back then. Right. But it sort of started up his idea of writing about retro games. And he was like, yeah, you should give it a shot. So with my first job, I shipped my PlayStation and from a place called Game Cave, which I'm sure. I remember a port of the 90s remember.

And it picked up Gradius Gaiden and the Salmander deluxe packs and later got sexy proteus. So that's where I first got into it. And then eBay was first starting to become a thing. So I ripped the tabs out of my Super Nintendo and got Hoppin' Twindby. Like the first one I had actually played and got into was Gradius 3, which is I think also where a lot of other people got their start. Which at the time when it came out, I don't think anybody really liked because it was full of slowdown. Like it was, since it was a Super Nintendo launch title, they really wanted something that looked impressive.

And it did. It looked pretty much like the arcade game. It was good looking, but it was just. so slow, but you could finish it. Yeah, compared to the arcade Gradius 3. Well, I found that I can't finish Gradius 3 because it has slowdown except in the high-speed maze zone. Oh, yeah. Because there's like almost no enemies on the screen on the screen.

And the only time the game slows down is when enemies are on screen shooting at you. And so like the one part where slowdown would have been so good because it's going so fast, it's actually not slowing down. So that part's like twice or three times the speed of any other part of the game because it's like actually running at full speed. Plus, you're moving at, you know, an accelerated rate. So that part is always where I get, like, back in the day and now. It's terrible.

Such a baby. Anyway, Rob, what, what drew you to Gradius? Well, I mean, and it's ilk. And it's ilk. Well, I'll say, like, I think my first, I was thinking about this, I think that my first contact with Gradius was actually, it was one of the, a friend of mine's dad was like a business traveler. You know, he went to Hong Kong a lot. And he brought back one of those, like, you know, 501 multi-carts with the honeybee adapter strapped to it.

And that had all these, you know, the really low, like the really, you know, kind of low-in early Famicom games on it. And so that's how I played Gradius. But I was also playing it along with other, like, with Zevius and Twin Bee and stuff like that. And that's, Grady's probably stood out at the time because it's a little bit more involved than the other games. because of the power-up system, which we'll have to get to. But that's kind of like the whole reason for Grice's existence. And, yeah, so piracy, a lot, well, even in the early 90s.

I had a similar story to that, though. But actually, it's a combination of your and Kurt's story where I played Lifeforce as a kid. And I was like, I like how this looks and the music is great, but this is too hard. And I will not play shooters because this is bullshit. This one-hit kill stuff. And then later in life, when I started emulating things, it's like, oh, safe states will help me through this. And I found Perodius. So I found and I love and I still love all the Perodius games.

And now going back to play Gradius, it's sort of like another thing I did, whereas I saw Spaceballs a million times before Star Wars. So it's like, I saw the parody before I saw the real thing. So now when I play Grotius, I'm like, oh, that's the Kitty Battleship. That is this thing. That is just like it's a weird experience for me. That doesn't look like a Vegas dancer at all. And frankly, I like Peronius more because it is wackier.

But I understand this is where it came from. So I can appreciate that. Yeah, my story is actually kind of a combination of everyone's. Life Force was the first, one of the actually very few, maybe the only shooters that I bought for my NES. It came out, you know, just shortly after I got an NES because I got that after Christmas, 1987, and Life Force came out early 1988 here. So I think I got that for like my birthday a few months later and really enjoyed it. The fact that it had a 30 life code meant that I could actually finish it. and then, you know, I played it enough that I got to the point where I could finish it without ever dying,

or at least I can make it to the speed zone of the very end without dying, and then lose a couple of lives and just get out, you know, by brute forcing it. So I went back and played Gradyus because a friend of mine had it. I borrowed it from him, and I was like, oh, man, this is so primitive compared to Life Force. This isn't that cool. Yeah, so Gradius Guidon was one of the first games I imported for PlayStation, and I really suck at that one, but it's so cool. It's such a gray game.

So, yeah, this is one of the series that I, like, have followed pretty closely and I'm not actually any good at, but I like it anyway. So I guess that says something good about the series. It has a very consistent visual design style, a very consistent sort of unique mechanism for playing it. And it has, you know, kind of like these themes and elements that recur throughout the series. So, yeah, there's a lot of consistency with this series. series, and I guess after a while it kind of feels like maybe it's repeating itself, but then you get something like Gratius 5 come along, and it's so good that they have to kill the series off after that. But, you know, there is room for innovation within that framework. Some innovation doesn't necessarily work like solar assault, but at least they tried by God. So, yeah, the, I guess if you really want to be particular, you could say that Gratius begins its existence back before Gratius in 1981 with an arcade game called Scramble.

I don't know if you guys have ever played that. They have it at the convention. Oh, yeah? But it's not set to free play. Yeah, so we didn't play. Yeah, I was, I had never heard of Scramble. And then when I was living in Michigan for a short while in, like, 2001, there was a local bar that had a few retro games. One of the retro games that the guy had was Scramble.

So I checked it out and was like, this is Gradius. And right around the same time, Gradius Generations came out for Game Boy Advance. and it kind of took the introduction from Gradius 3 in the arcade where it's like 1985, Gradius, 1988, Life Force, etc. And it did that same thing with like the Sepia Tent, but

it went all the way back to 1981 and I was like, okay, so it's not a coincidence. These games are connected. And in fact, the original Gradius started out as Scramble 2, right? That's what I learned from, I think, watching your video. And that's what I learned from researching

at Kurt's site, I think. Which I learned from an interview with Schmopulations. There you go. So we found the source. Yeah. So if we're wrong, it's all Schmopalation's fault. I had not played a Super Cobra for the Atari 2,600,

which I had when I was really young. And I had never put it together. Because Super Cobra was like a, not quite sequel, but a sort of revamped version of Scramble with a helicopter. Yeah, I only hear about Scramble in conversations about Gradius, but I also always get to confuse with, defender even though they're very different games. But I just, a primitive shooter from that era, I just think of defender. And that's all I can think of. Yeah, Scramble, I would say, like,

if you were to take Zaxon and just take away the asymmetric element and turn it sideways, that's pretty much what you have because you're flying through these landscapes. It's pretty slow-paced. And you have to take out these fuel tanks. Meanwhile, like, there's missiles taking off into the sky at you. And the thing that kind of makes scramble different, aside from the fact that you have to shoot the fuel tanks to regain fuel or else your ship will crash, is that you have two weapons.

You have a forward blaster, and then you have a bomb that arcs forward. And, you know, Namco would do that the following year with Zevius in a top-down perspective. But I think this might have been the first game that did that. And they're independently operated, the attack or like the shoot and bomb buttons. And they give you two different ways to attack,

like shooting, it just goes straight across, but the bomb arcs forward and then drops down. So it kind of does open up the strategy, and you have two different ways to approach ground-based targets, which is the way most targets appear. Like, do you want to swoop down and try to shoot them on the level? Or do you try to, you know, kind of stay high and give yourself more room to maneuver and try to take them out with bombs, which are trickier to use? I think it's, the bombs sort of work like the papers and paper boy, don't they? We're like, they travel with your ship.

Oh, yeah. So it's not like we drop it and then you go beyond it. It's that you sort of have to aim where it is. Very strange. Yeah, there's, I can think of a couple other games that do this too. And it's maddening. Does every arcade game keep up the idea of the bomb button? I only played the console versions in that, in that you fire both with the same button,

or you can fire both with the same button I usually do for the sake of simplicity. Yeah, Grodius 3, I know, still used separate, like, gun and bomb buttons. And the Super Nias version does give you the option to combine those to the same button, which is nice. Why wouldn't you? Yeah, why wouldn't you? The Proteus games, I think, even in the arcade version, they gave you an option, or at least may have even done it automatically. So it's interesting because it's like Scramble predates Zevius. And Zevius is the game that has, you know, it's got the bombing from it.

It's a horizontal shooter. Right, right? Or not horizontal, vertical shooter. Yeah, top down. And it's got, but it's got like the tank enemies and the enemies that kind of show up and, like, shoot at you and then fly. way, which was a big difference in shooters. And that was like very much, I can't remember the guy's name who

created Zebby's, but he's the guy. Masanobu Endo. Yeah, he creates, you know, he's one of those guys who just did all these amazing things. He also made Tower of Draaga because he hates happiness. So, a lot of big in Japan games. And, uh, but I think that like that always

felt to me like what you see in Gradius, like what kind of defined gratis for me. It was like, oh, these little guys like crawl up on the bottom of the screen, like shoot at me. and like and there's it's just all this extra stuff to keep track of and because it's a horizontal shooter you're you can dodge by you know it's not like you've got that extra thing to worry about because there's stuff coming towards you and then there's stuff like underneath you and above you and in a way it's like way harder than zebius yeah you're you're

kind of dealing with with attacks from all directions um you can definitely see where scramble influence gradius because gradius does give you the ability to of course you shoot straight forward, but also to use a bomb. But it's not something that you start with by default. It's something you have to earn and choose to activate. And that's kind of what makes Grodius interesting. You mentioned that briefly, like the power up system. But like that, that is sort of what defines Grodius. I mean, there's MoI heads and there's the Vic Viper and there's, you know, all these, these elements, the big core. But what really makes Grodius Grodius is the central weapon upgrade mechanic system, which allows players to choose how they power up their system and really

makes it unique compared to pretty much any other shooter that I can think of. Like if you compare it to, you know, PC engine shooters at the time, you can choose which weapons you want, but it's not with the same sort of agency that you have in Gradius. Like you shoot an enemy and it drops a weapon power up that flies around. And if it's like a yellow weapon power up, then hey, you'll get the electric beam. And if it's the red power-up, then you'll get, like, you know, a burst of fire or something. Yeah, some like the compile shoot-em-ups, like Zannick and Alesta. They had something where, like, the numbers would cycle, so you could sort of pick what you want. But because of the way the power-ups and gradies were ranked, like, they have different levels. So the first one is

a speed-up, which you probably want to use first because you're really slow otherwise. Yeah. And then it goes up to a missile, double laser option and the shield. So you have to prioritize, like, you know, do you think I can live long enough to get a shield or, you know, probably make that your first goal or if I want to try to get a laser. And that becomes, using that prioritization is a big deal because you get sent back several screens whenever you die and start basically at zero. If you have something, you get one thing, at least see. Yeah, so, okay, so let's explain just how the mechanism works, the mechanic works.

So when you shoot certain enemies, like, you know, kill chains of enemies or, destroy a red enemy, then they drop this little glowing red capsule. Sometimes it's blue and it just wipes out everything on the screen. But usually it's a red capsule. And when you get that, you have this bar, the status bar at the bottom of the screen with seven, I think, spots, maybe six in the original Gradius. And when you pick up a capsule, the leftmost spot on that power-up cycle glows. And if you press the, I think, A button instead of attacking,

you'll use whatever power is highlighted, and that becomes conferred to your ship. So again, yeah, you have like the speed up, but every time you collect a capsule, it advances one along the cycle. And if you go all the way to the end and collect another capsule, well, you're an idiot, and it starts over with speed up. And so basically you're kind of like spending credits almost. It's like you're earning the like a currency almost and spending it. And you have to, like you said, make that choice. you know, do I spend now? Like, at this point, do I need the ripple laser in order to survive?

Or can I keep going and hope that I can kill something and get the option and double my firepower? But then I'm going to be stuck with a standard blaster instead of the ripple. Like, what's my choice here? For me, I don't know when they introduced this option in the game. I usually set it to auto because I don't like making those decisions on the fly, just too much thinking for me. I know Gratius 3 had that. I'm not sure if it showed up before that. Yeah, it might have been like a 16-bit edition.

But yeah, that's my style. Like, you do it. I don't want to make these decisions. How does the auto cycle, like the auto choice usually work? I never use it, so I don't actually know. I think you can, I don't know if it chooses because there are two subweapons that are very different, and I forget how it decides which one it gives you. I think a prioritizes the laser usually.

Yeah. Because it's weird, like they give you a choice between, at least the original one, a double, and a laser. And it's like one is more versatile because one fires straight and fires downward, and the other one is much more powerful. but the thing is the laser like 95% of the time is probably what you want to use so I think that's what defaults. Yeah, the laser has a piercing effect

so any enemy that it destroys in one hit it just goes straight through that that enemy and punches to the next one. So it's extremely practical and once you have the options, which we should talk about later, you know, once you have a couple of options and lasers, you're basically just like

creating these curtains of pure destruction that fly across the screen and ripple up and down But at the same time, yeah, there are situations where you do want the double or the tailgun or the ripple or, you know, depending on which game you're playing. Like those other weapons can be situationally useful. And so it's kind of good to have those. Yeah. I don't know whether you mentioned it if you did. I apologize.

But like some of the, some of the power up stack. For instance, the speed up power up can stack to the point where it's way too fast that you've actually handicapped yourself. Yeah. And then there's the option, right? So the option, does he mean know why it's called an option? I'd like to know. Etymology. There's probably some weird Japanese understanding of it.

And certain games called them multiples, which makes a little more sense. Yeah, that's what it's like a little glowing power orb. It's like the kind of like, like everything you collect is an option. Every everything you're taking an option. Yeah. So it doesn't. Okay. But in a way, there is no option because you cannot finish the game unless you're fully powered up.

which is true of every Gradius game. And that's kind of the, that's the big downside. Yeah, that's the Gratius handicap. When you die, like you said earlier, Kurt,

you get sent way back in the level and you have nothing unless, you know, you had an unspent power up, in which case you get a three speed up. Yeah. Congratulations. It's amazing how many times

you do end up dying when you have an unspent power up though because you're like, that's how you die. It's like, oh, I'm going to get that. Yeah, gone. Yeah, I mean, I know that in Japan, it was kind of the arcade culture at the time. It was like known.

They knew how at any point where you died in Gradius, there was like instructions for how you would get back to fighting strength. And like it was just kind of like a known thing because everything happens to the game. And there are actually, are the volcano things random? I think the trajectory that each film go to. but there might be like safe spots you can sort of hang out in. So there's a way of doing it no matter where you are. And that's the level of kind of insanity that I don't know whether, I don't know whether people really ever got into shooters in that way so early on in North America.

But that was out. Yeah. Yeah, we had like the Pac-Man patterns. You know, the Russians were always after those trying to steal them from us and use them against us in the Cold War. But other than that, like I never really heard about that sort of thing. And that was when I was doing. I was frequenting the arcade, but it just never seemed to be like a mastery sort of thing, the way that it is in, you know, the maniac culture in Japan, as they call it.

I think that all started with Star Soldier and Star Force and those Hudson Caravan things. Like when I was reading some articles about Takahashi Magian, there's some source in some newspaper where they credited him as like being the figure that made adults take the Famicom seriously in Japan. Like, that was really the thing that made it popular versus Nintendo stuff. So that sort of, I mean, like, that sort of arcade culture was always there. But that really gave the shoot-em-up industry a much bigger part of the market than was here. Because here, I think they just never remotely got to that level. Like, I rarely saw a lot of those games when I was younger. Yeah.

I mean, even in Japan, you know, even in the late 70s, early 80s, you had strategy guides for video games, which, you know, there was like Jeff Roving, how to win at video games kind of things. in the states, but like it was a much bigger culture over there. So games like Space Invaders and Hayankyo Alien, yeah, that's right,

I mentioned it. Oh, God, no. They all had, you know, like, these sort of really strong followings and people who had, they were publishing strategies. Like, Hey,ankio Alien is one of the first games that had, like, very elaborate strategies

published about them. People laugh because I keep mentioning it. But historically, it's very important. And that was part of it. And I feel like, yeah, whatever culture existed around Gradius, just built on that sort of early culture. You know,

and like Tower of Duraga, we mentioned earlier, like that game is impossible to complete unless you know all the secrets and all the hidden things. And the criteria by which certain things appear, it's like, you know, on a certain stage,

you have to hit the top wall and then turn around and a treasure will appear. Or you have to, like, kill only certain enemies within a stage in a certain order or something. Like,

no one's going to figure that out on their own, but collectively people work together and they share the tips in magazines and, you know. They're like little books in the game centers too, but people could write stuff in. Like that just, that, there was some of that here, but not to the degree. It wasn't as like a collective thing like it was over there. And I feel like maybe that had something to do with just the population density. You've got pretty much most of the population in Tokyo or Osaka, Kyoto. So like, you have these. cities that are, you know, bigger than New York City, like a higher population, like Mexico

city-sized. And that's where everyone lives. So, you know, it's all very urban and all very connected. And it's just easier to have that sort of shared culture. The closest I ever saw to that kind of arcade collaboration was, I think, somebody just taping an index card to a Mortal Kombat 2 machine that had all the fatalities written on it. So that was helpful. But that was like the one time I saw anything like that, just like, oh, thanks. I feel like the spirit of the of like the high level players and this country was probably really different. I'm picturing like a Billy Mitchell

type character like writing in like fake answers into the books and like that's true. It's more like yeah, it's like to get an edge on his competition. I don't know whether that's it's a huge dinner. Or hot sauce. Yeah. Um, but I don't really know. I mean, I also don't know how much that factored into Grady's success.

But it was a, it was a big hit. And its first sequel was what? Lifeforce kind of. Yeah. I mean, if you, if you look at the, the official numeration on the title or the introduction of the arcade version of Gradius 3. It goes

Gradius, Life Force, Gradius 2, and then Grodius 3. Yeah, but then you also have like Nemesis and you've got all these other games that, where do they fit? Question mark, I don't know. They're all sort of weird. That's a shield. Yeah. In some of them. Because you have the

exclamation point. Yeah, but that's a whole sticky wicket right there. Yeah. Yeah. The exclamation point, I'd never use that because I'm like, I don't know what's going to happen. There is a reason because some of the, a lot of you use this thing called rank where there's an like an invisible difficulty select that the longer you play and the more points you get, the more difficult it gets. And that's the game's sort of internal way of combating whenever you get four options and lasers. I can just power through everything. In addition to the, there's these little goblins, I guess, that will come up and try to steal your options if you're not paying attention.

Oh, which game is that in? A lot of them, actually. It may even be in the first one. They have this little option catcher. Maybe in the arcade. It's sure not in the NES version. You don't have enough options in the NES game to be able to... Yeah, I think you only got two.

Yeah. So that'd just be dickish. I wasn't going to say. But if you used to power down, I think it resets the rank a little bit. But it's one of those, again, very strategy game things. Like, until I started visiting, like, shoot-em-up forms and they talk about rank, like, it's completely invisible to the point. player. So unless you really know how it works internally, then it's nothing.

I think some of them let you, some of the games let you adjust what the exclamation point's going to be. I know Gradius 3 on Super NES does. So you can have like the mega crush that basically just, you know, free, clear out the entire screen of enemies. But you can also like turn your extra lives into an option. I think it's a weird stuff in that game. But I mean, wouldn't it be just more economical to get the option? Like that's two or three points cheaper. Yeah. Like, why would you use a life when it takes, I don't know.

I don't understand why they felt the need to make this more complicated. I'm kind of with Bob and that, like, I always find Gradius games kind of stressful because I'm like, I have to like, am I doing this right? Like, am I picking this the right time? Like, oh, I should, I should have done that. Yeah, Gratis feels so good when you're fully powered up and just cruising through. But then there's so much stuff on the screen that there's a tiny little diamond bullet that you don't see and it comes through and it slips past the shield and hit you.

and oh, that's it. Is Gradius 2 the one that has like the little like silverfish looking thing that will like hang out behind you and then shoot across the, yeah. That's the one I'm talking about the Alpine catcher. I think Gradius 3 in the arcade does that too. Maybe like the higher level. I can't remember which game starts that. But I remember like, oh, well, there's a whole new thing.

Like I was barely making it through. And then there's this thing. Right. And then, you know, there's also the factor of like you get the shield. It can take five hits. And you know you're down to like one hit. left. So you're managing your options. You've got your option meter set. So it's on question mark, which means next time you take a hit, then you can immediately get a shield. But then all

these options are popping up around the screen. And like all of a sudden it's this minefield. You do not want to get those options because then you've blown it. You have to start all over and build up. And what if you take a hit in between then? There's actually a boss in Proteus, which spits out those power up capsules like his weapons. I love that. Yeah. But going back to the lineage. The follow-up was, it's called Salamander in Japan, and it's called Life Force over here. But the way that they worked, they kept

adjusting it, and it comes out on different names in ways that are really confusing. Yeah, like the original Salamander arcade game is pretty different from the NES game that we got. I remember something about the localization where they were trying to imply like you're going through a body. Was it, that actually happened, or is this something I'm just falsely

remembering? No, you're right. Because of the way Salamander worked is that there were one or two levels that looked like you were flying through a Like, the first stage is those big, like, teeth that come in and then you fight the brain gollum at the end of the level. And when they made the American version Life Force, they were like, okay. They changed the color palette. So, like, some of those areas were, like, green and blue, and they became more pink and red. So they're more, like, bodies.

They changed the tiles and things like that. They added some extra voices, I think, in that version. That sort of played up the idea. It's like, oh, this level is in an asteroid field. You're fighting kidney stones. Wow. Oh, you're in the Moai zone of the body, yes. And then when they re-released it in Japan, calling it Lifeforce, the same version of the American one,

but they had added the Grady's power-up system, and they changed a little bit more. Yeah, because the power-up system was more like the automatic version of Gradius's power system originally, right? Where you just kind of like cycle through and picked up stuff. They just dropped whatever. So you could get, like, enemies would drop like two or three options. You could pick up or get the lasers or the ripples is where. they first introduced that game. I mean, also, Salamander is not a good name

for a shooter. Life Force is not a good name for a shooter, but it's also the name of that. I think Salamander was supposed to be like the fiery serpent that you destroy that's circling the core, the heart core at the end. That's like a mythological thing, right? Yeah, like a flaming salamander. I don't think anyone in America know about that though. Yeah. People who read lots of fantasy

novels do. True. But I mean... Dorks like me do. When I was a kid, I don't know if you guys felt the same way or thought the same thing. I thought this was the video game version of a movie called Lifehorse. Yeah. which I didn't watch because it was rated R in about a naked vampire alien. Yeah. So I thought the movie was based on the game.

So when the movie came on television, I was like obviously like very, very baldurized, very expurgated. I watched like 20 minutes of it. It was just like, this has nothing to do with my video game. This is stupid. And I think part of my child brain thought this game was a version of the movie where they go inside of Martin Short. So that was mine. I don't know why I made that connection.

but there you go. Yeah, I had similar ideas, but then again, I also around the same time, thought that Donkey Kong was somehow related to Mr. Magoo. I don't know where these things come from. You know, because there's the girders and Mr. Magoo, like, calls to sleep and sleepwalks. That must be it. That's it.

And then that actually became a game thing with Mario versus Wario. Yeah, there's that. The secret history of Magoo games. We just went down a rabbit hole I wasn't prepared for. Sorry about that. Now, the thing I love about Life Force is that I remember seeing this game in a grocery store and I was transfixed by the weird vainy thorns sticking out of the ground and all these weird like bio horror type elements to it that I was just like I was like this is the coolest

idea I've ever seen you're flying inside of a giant space monster and I was uh it's like the millennium falcon went back to the giant ass right a worm for revenge yeah it's no cave let's go deeper in where's the uvula let's attack this thing and uh I was so uh transfixed that I was like I couldn't tear myself away from it. My mom got really angry me. She's like, it's time to go. And like my brother left when she said to go and I didn't. I kept watching the attract screen and so my brother

got a candy bar and I did. They had at the local YMCA that in like the Robocop game in 1943. Those stuff that I played a lot even though I don't think I ever beat the first stage. I never actually saw Lifeforce in the arcades until a couple of years after

like I was probably like three or four years after the NES game came out. And I was like, wow, this game was an arcade game, too? Why does it look so weird? What's going on? The colors are all screwed up. Yeah. Because there were a couple of different versions, I think, that came out in the U.S. had, like, the pink version and

the blue version. I never saw it. I'm not mistaken. I think it's only one unless they were importing boards. It could, it was at a six flags over Texas. So who knows? It was just randomly there. I was like, wow. Is this the Japanese version? This could be an Ohio thing,

but I've never seen any Grodius game. in any of the arcades I went to growing up, and I went to a lot of them. Not one Gradius game. Lots of Konami games, though. And that's the only Gradius-related game I've ever seen in an arcade. Yeah, I don't even know if, I know it did in Europe because we called it nemesis over there for some reason.

But, yeah, I've never seen it. The Gradius. I'm only ever seen Lifeforce. There must be, like, a law in Germany about, like, mispronouncing the word Gladius. Can't do it. Yeah, I think Gradius 3 only came out for arcades in Asia. Yeah.

Because it was so hard, they were just like, the rest of the world can't handle this. That game was, let's be nice. Zach has a weird reputation in Japan because it flopped. It was way too difficult. Like, I think they were emphasizing trying to make money off of it more because they had too many pros that were too good at Grady's too, even that's an extremely difficult game. Yeah. So you can't even continue in that game at all. So you die and that's it.

So, like, I think you talked about Jeremy how like the original port of Gradius was really, really good for an early NES game on your video, right? Yeah, yeah. So going back in the the NES works video series and playing these NES releases chronologically, you know, it's not the same as the order in which the games came out in Japan. So obviously

the different, the experience people had in Japan was different. But here in the U.S., Gradius came out for the NES at the end of the system's first year on the full American market. And it was like the seventh or eighth, third party release for the system. And

almost all of those third party releases were pretty much poop like they were technically janky the one game that wasn't was Commando which is kind of like super flickery and non-micron

Yeah it was the first game Capcom developed internally and like it has some problems but none of them are game breaking whereas like Ghost and Goblins is just it's a huge mess 1942 a huge mess Chebby Cherub

it's okay muscle no Karate champ, no. These games were not well done. And then Gratis came out and all of a sudden it's just like this game for NES that seemed almost as good as the arcade version. Like they cut out some of the options. You couldn't control as many items on screen. They took out, I want to say, oh, the vertical scrolling in certain stages, which does make things a little harder. Like when you get to the tentacle brain zone, you're supposed to be able to move up and down to have more room to maneuver around them.

But you can't do that. So it's really hard not to die because they kind of drift toward you and they're reaching toward you and they're shooting toward you so it sucks and I can never get past that part. But like technically it was a pretty impressive

demonstration of what you could do with the NES and it wasn't running on an advanced mapper chip they didn't have those yet. It was just like, here's what the NES can do in the hands of programmers who really know what they're doing. And it turns out Konami really knew what they were doing. And like it's a, it makes a,

makes a great first impression. Like, this is the first Konami game in the U.S. It's like a great arcade conversion. It plays really well. It looks good. It sounds good.

Great box art. Yeah, like it introduced the Konami branding, like the trade dress that they used for the NES until like 1991 or so. It was just, they just hit it out of the park

with this game. And like, you know, I said at the time, I kind of disparaged it because I played Life Force first. But I think if you had played it, Like, if I had played it back in 1986, I would have been like, my mind would have been just completely annihilated. If the listeners are curious, he did, like, put his hands on his skull and, like, expanded them like a mushroom cloud.

So, yeah, they kept up the, they were, they kept up the quality on the ports, too, because the, the Famicom port of Gradius 2, which we didn't get in the United States, was bonkers. It's like it does not, it looks like, it doesn't look like it belongs on an NES. No, it's more like a PC engine game. Does it use a different mapper chip? They created a mapper chip specifically for that game. I want to say the VRC 2. I know it's I think you have VRC4. Maybe. It's one of those.

Oh, no, VRC2 is salamander chip. Yeah. And VRC4 is Grady's 2. You know, it's crazy that they never released it here. Because I remember Electronic Gaming Monthly, for all the import previews, they were always putting along that next to like Super Mario Brothers 3 as like, this is the new amazing thing that Nintendo can do. Yeah, I don't think an NES mapper chip could have done that.

I think it was just beyond the capability. abilities of what Nintendo made available for developers. That's my, don't quote me on Wikipedia or anything like that, because I don't know if this is actually true, but there have been some people that I've been trying to hack the game to work on a standard Nintendo mapper chip, and they could kind of get it working,

but it's still pretty glitchy. So I got the perception that maybe that was the reason, just like technical. I mean, they've reworked games all the time to work with. Castlevania 3, they, like, that had enough presence. The Castlevania series had enough impact in the U.S. That it was worth it for them to figure out how to make that work on the MMC 5.

Yeah, and I'm surprised because everybody, like, Brady's wasn't really that popular, but a lot of people knew Lifeforce. So even though if it necessarily have the branding, even if they need to call it Life Force 2 or whatever, like it's just strange that they ignore it. How interesting would that have been if Gradius had become Life Force in the U.S.? Like Life Force had become the brand that we knew it by? If they knew what, if they had foretold how big the series would become later on. They really should have.

Just like change a couple sprites and put it out here as Life Force. but instead, Milton Bradley just snatch that up with Abadox. It's just like, no, we've got this. Let's take this and run. They drop the ball. It's ours now. I guess the famous Abadox franchise that continues running to this day. This might be a little bit of a tangent, but what I love about shooters so much, especially, I mean, even to this day, like, it's really hard to tell the difference.

If you just get a list of prescription drug names and a list of shooter names and mix them up and just give it to like an average person on. the HG 101 forums, they will not know. They will not know which or which. I need my prescription of dead moon filled. Yeah, it's like, I'd like, what's one of the, I once tried to get somebody to recommend a game that didn't exist called like a cyclodine, which I thought sounded like a perfect.

Yeah, that'll keep me from being depressed. I didn't take my Darius today. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so anyway, that's it. But Gradius, actually, the name is based on something. It's like supposed to be a real word. It's not like a sword. It's a sword.

It was a short sword carried by Roman soldiers that was made to just poke out between your shield and go right between the ribs. And I think in Latin it would be pronounced gladius, I think. I think. Although the pronunciation please got after me for saying gratius. They're like, that's not how you pronounce gladius. It is gradius. I always say gradius anyway. It's pronounced gladius.

That's how it would be pronounced in Latin. Jerk. And also that's how that vowel sound would be pronounced in Japanese. and that's what they're really working at is like how would they phoneticize it. Anyway, I mean, that's not... Pronunciation police, you can go to jail.

More importantly, who cares? Yes, exactly. It doesn't matter. Yeah, so as impressive as Gradius was on NES, like Lifeforce was really amazing because not only could you do all the stuff that you could do in Gradius,

but it changed perspectives. So sometimes you were shooting horizontally, sometimes it was top down. And then on top of that, it had two-player simultaneous play, with like okay so there was some flicker when that happened but holy crap like that like that's why gradius was such a disappointment to me because it just felt like it was so much more meager compared to life force right did it come out about the same time as

capcom's 1943 port yes because sometime in 1988 i think 19443 in the arcades did have cooperative like two player i feel like it probably yeah i think so but they changed that in the uh the nes version so instead you just have like a permanent power up system yeah i mean The NES version of 1943 is way better than 1942. Yeah, but it's still not as good.

Like, I loved 1943 in the arcade. I played that like every Sunday that my family went to the pizza place and I was never that good at it, but I loved playing that first, like the first two stages. Yeah.

And the NES port just didn't do it for me. It was the third game I ever got. I think first was, of course, the pack-in. The second NES game was Mickey Mouse Capades, which introduced me to the, Well, it kind of birthed my love of Hudson Soft in a weird, like, masochistic way. And then 1943.

And, but anyway, yeah, like with Lifeforce, you have the two-player cooperative that's just like, this is still back when like, you know, like double dragon comes out and it's just one player, you know. And even in the 90s, like for a superintendent, like final fight, you know, it's like this, it's a really, like if you're looking for things to cut and you need to free up a lot of space, that's a good place to go. Which is really interesting because, you know, Kevin Bunch, who's been on the show at our Midwest Gaming Classic or whatever panels, he just started an Atari 2,600 chrono-gaming series called Atari Archives. And one of the points that he made in his very first episode is that, like, there was no room for game code logic for single-player games. There was no space in these tiny cartridges for artificial.

intelligence. So every game back then was two-player. And it's interesting how, like, ten years later, that completely flipped in reverse. And so all of a sudden, like, multiplayer was the thing that really bogged stuff down. So let's just focus on the single-player experience. For just to be a pet hand

about this, I think that didn't they have a chess game for 2600 that somehow faked a weird AI in the 70s? I guess you just made random, if they had enough room to make a random number generator. I think if I think it's in racing the beam

but I could be completely wrong about this. Maybe I'm wrong. But I recall there being some story about like this thing that shouldn't happen happens on the 2,600, but that's like the story of the 2,600. Whenever I see chess listed in a list of 2,600 games, I'm just like, like, how did this happen and how bad is it? It probably could still beat me.

Me too. Yeah. So do you want to talk about, like, the MSX, Karadis 2, which is, like, technically a different game and maybe the worst game in the series? I watched it and I wanted to throw up. Was that normal? Well, are you talking about the like the stutter scrolling? Yeah, I don't know. Like, Canemian was a big supporter of the MSX and a lot of the games that they made for it worked well. But for some reason, they decided to make a lot of shooters, even though the system didn't have any hardware scrolling. So the first thing they made was it's called Nemesis in Europe.

Right. And that's specifically the MSX-1. Yeah, MSX2 came along a couple of years later and added smoother scrolling. Not really. Somewhat smoother. Well, they had enough things so that a couple of games. could do some technical tricks. Like Space Mambo, which is another

Konami game and Psycho Worlds, which was a Sega game that got ported. Those are both really well known for actually having smooth scrolling on an MSX2. Okay, I just didn't mean to digress, but yeah. But yeah, they made a port of the original Gradius. And then for Gradius 2, I guess it must have been successful enough

that they made their own completely new game. It's the Snake's Revenge of Gradius. Yeah. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, but it was called Nemesis, wasn't it? That's not only in Europe, it's called Nemesis, too. Was it? I thought the games were called Nemesis in Japan also, like the MSX games.

No, it's called Gradius 2, but with a Roman numeral. Oh, Gradius 2, but then when it gets remade, right, then it's re-released as Nemesis 90 Kai. Yeah. For the Sharp X-68. Okay, and then you have the Game Game Nemesis, which was called Nemesis in Japan, wasn't it? Yeah. But then the sequel was Nemesis 2. in Japan, no?

It was called Gradius Interstellar assault. But, yeah, it was called Gradius here, but it was still called Nemesis 2 in Japan. So, you know, there is a theory for the Japanese retro game book, which I translated, the guy had a, like, nobody ever knew about it. But I think they wanted to establish brands on different platforms for some reason, because they were worried about copyrights. Because around that time was when the Tetris debacle was happening, where they were like, okay, the copyright for a PC very, version is different from a copyright from an arcade version, which is different from a copyright of the console version. But trademarks and copyrights are like kind of different.

Like this is more of a naming convention thing, right? Well, I guess I don't know how it works in Japan, but for whatever reason, they thought that they didn't want to cross over between platforms. That was the logic that he was trying to use. I didn't quite grasp it, but I'm like, that's an interesting idea. I feel like they just wanted to like any kind of possible fan community around this to just nip that in the bud and make sure nobody had any clue. Like, when's the next Gradi's game coming out?

It's like, well, I don't know, but we've got this. I mean, I guess, you know, Akamajo, Dracula and Castlevania worked out with that regional difference. But it doesn't seem like there was any real consistency with the Gratius games. Oh, when we talk about the branding. So it's very confusing. Especially with Dragon Slayers, I'm sure we'll talk about it tomorrow. The branding is that is just way off because, okay, they have two different creatious twos, again, one with the Roman numeral, which is the real one. One with the Arabic numeral, which is the MSX one, which is a totally different game.

The main thing about that is that they added a plot line to it, which is only in that version. The third game, which is called Nemesis 3 in Europe, is actually Gofer No Yabo episode 2, which means it's the sequel to Gradius to the arcade game, not the MSX game. And it's not called Gradius. Who's Gopher? That's my question. I don't know, but he's ambitious. I know that. Yeah.

The guy, the brain guy, if you see, the final boss, it sort of mutters you in garbled speech, that's gopher. That's gopher. Okay. What is up with, in shooters, like, giant space brains? Like, why do they hate us so much? Like, you think they'd be so smart. They'd be above this. It's like, I have nothing to do with you.

I don't think in this nebula over here about my... And one of the recurring things about a Grady series is that the last boss itself is actually very weak. Yeah, which is a cool thing to do. Yeah, because the actual challenge comes beforehand with some, like, defense mechanism. Then you just stroll up and shoot a couple times. It gives you some impression of, like, there's... Maybe there's a reason why they only sent one fighter ship off to... It's like, we've got one, it's like, well, if he makes it all the way through, then it's a cakewalk.

You know, you've got to penetrate the, but it doesn't really make any sense. All right. So, anyway, we were talking about the MSX games. Oh, that's terrible. I mean, they have really neat ideas because of the technical limitations. Yeah. It's just very hard to play because it only scrolls in like, what, 18, 16 clump pixels. Right.

I think it's eight. I think it's eight at a time. And it's weird because the background scrolls with that level, but the sprites scroll regularly. So it just causes this disconnect. It makes it feel much more difficult than should be. I felt kind of seasick while watching it, just like, oh, what do I look at? It's not so bad when you're playing because your eye is fixed on the sprites, and everything that's really important is kind of moving along with your sprites, but it's kind of weird

because it's sort of the opposite of how things work in the NES port of 1942, where the background scroll very smoothly, but then the sprites, like, they'll, they only move like every other frame. they kind of all take turns moving because the game logic can't handle moving them all at once So it's really stuttery I'm sure we'll get to this But did Perotius start on the MSX?

Yes, yeah Okay, I thought so And that both that game and Gradius 2 For the PSP collections I think I can't remember who Porta M2 worked on at least one of them

But they went back and sort of redid the MSX games But reprogramed that have smooth scrolling So they're much easier to play there And Grady Sue also got a remake, like you mentioned before, called Nemesis 90 Kai for the X68,000. And that is a complete, they read it all the graphics to me, like the arcade games and they added some levels. That's still, that's available on modern. Did they put it out again as part of the, no, they never? It's only been on the X68.

They really should. Canami, I don't think really did it. I don't know if they programmed it or was published by SPS, which is like Sharp's own label. Well, if they haven't done it yet, it's not going to happen. It's probably never going to happen. The thing about the MSXX. Gradius, the eye, too, is that I noticed that if you get the double shot,

your fire rate decreases. Is that, am I right about that, or is that an optical illusion? All of them, because, you know, the old games, they were like, okay, you can only have two bullets on the screen at the same time. For the double, they're like, okay, you two bullets is the one that goes horizontal and diagonal, so you only can fire that one shot. Why did I only notice it?

It really, like, seems like it, maybe it's just a product of like the herky jerky scrolling, but I felt like I can't fire fast enough. I can't. Maybe the firing rate in general is lower. Yeah, could be. The storyline for the MSX games is pretty interesting because you've got, I see someone mentioned here, there's a guy named Dr. Venom, no relation to the character in the G.I. Joe Comics, but he's like this green space, like he's kind of like Vegeta or something. Am I thinking of the right character? Yeah, he's green space elf. Yeah, and he's like the villain. And then the Vic Biper's pilot is named. I think it's James Burton.

Yeah. And he's like the hero of the first game. And then I think the plot of the movie. the second game actually sees Dr. Venom traveling back in time to kill James Burton before he can be born, and he accidentally sets into motion a chain of events that causes James Burton to become the pilot by, like, attacking the space colony where he was born and killing his parents and filling James Burton with a sense of burning justice and a desire to put a stop to the bacterians or whoever the hell they are. They were not like an alternate, it's been a while since I've actually played Gradyus too,

but there's like an alternate thing that you need to do, like secret stuff you need to find. Oh, like you have to fight Satan with a cross and ghost and goblins kind of thing. Well, there were like hidden objects that you need to find. Otherwise, you get a bad ending. Because it's not hard enough to be gratis. It would also have to find all the secrets. Yeah, I would settle for unending.

That's not me walking away and disgust. We should walk this back for a second to the name Vic Viper. I don't think we mentioned that's the name of the ship. Oh, right. I don't know where that comes from. There's also the road British. Road British, which is, it makes sense that Richard Garriot as an astronaut, right?

Or he's into space. Like, all the, all the super brainy nerdo computer guys eventually become astronauts or, like, space people. I don't know why they called the ship Vic Viper or Lord British. Lord British, I think someone there must have liked Ultima, right? I think it just sounds like, you got to remember, like, something just sound really cool in other, like in Japan. Yeah.

They sound super cool to them. And to us, they sound weird. And then when the people translate them for the NES manual, they're like, oh, road British. Sure. That's a real name. I just feel like Vic Viper should have an origin that we don't know about. Maybe it's like Space Adventure Cobra.

It's short for Victory Viper because it was the hero who defeated the Viper. Really? No. I would only buy that. That was a Metal Gear reference because Big Boss for a while was Vic Boss. Oh, you're right. Okay. Wow.

Okay. So it just is dumb. Is the Vic Viper the first shoot-em-up sprite where the ship banks when it goes up or down? That's like a really cool. thing in there, right? I think the ship in Zevius does that, doesn't it? Like, it, it, maybe not. I think it might.

The bad guys do, like, they peel away. Yeah, yeah, I think it might be, like, in a, it's, it's not an obvious thing to put into a, a horizontal shooter, because technically, like, you wouldn't be banking at all. You're going up or down. Right. But it's one of those, like, cool. Yeah, it's one of those things.

In video game logic, it makes sense. And the abstraction of it makes it work, kind of like how you can, control your jumps in Mario Brothers, even though it's impossible, or Super Mario Brothers, but it feels like that should be how it works. And so it's okay. Yeah, the Vic Fiper is a very iconic design. It's, you know, like a small, I think, guess in Star Wars they'd call it a snub-nose fighter. It's a snub fighter, yeah. Kind of reminds me a little bit of the ships from Battlestar Galactica almost.

The Vipers. Yeah, the Vipers. Okay, there you go. Oh, hot damn. Except in, okay, so it's kind of got like the, you know, like the F-14 cockpit style. And then it has these two sort of, what would you call those like? Prongs? Prongs, yeah. It's a little laser sheet out from in between things. Yeah, like these two things that kind of come out ahead of the cockpit.

Those are spoilers, right? Sure, they're forward spoilers. And then it has, you know, like the thrusters on the back and the wings, but it has a very sort of distinct design. And it's like the specifics of the viper have changed through the years. But it's always kind of like that same sort of pronged design. Yeah, like a forked design. It's much cooler looking than most shoot-em-up spaceships were before then. There's some, in that, like, Shmopulations, interview that they did.

I think they mentioned that there's inspiration from Lensman, the anime, which I don't know anything about. So I'm just kind of... That was a pretty influential series. I mean, there's a picture, and that sort of looks like how the VIPP players. Lensman is pretty much one of the big inspirations for Star Wars, too. Or not the, not the anime, but the original. novels. Wasn't Linsman based on a novel? I found that out

just now by typing into Google, so... Okay. I feel like it was a pulp sci-fi series in like the 30s and 40s. Oh, yeah. This is E.E. Doc Smith. Yeah. I happen to be a guy who can talk about Pulp sci-fi novels from the 30s.

There you go. Is there any other connection to Linsman besides like the design of the ship based on the anime? Well, I don't know much about the anime. So that's the thing I can't talk about. As long as we're staying in the 30s, That's my zen. Right. But they've got the, like, the laser swords and stuff.

Yeah. Like, so it's interesting because, like, Lensman inspired Star Wars, which inspired the Lensman anime, which inspired Gradius. And now, finally, like, the most recent Star Wars movie finally has a spaceship where they're, like, two prongs sticking out from the front wall. Yeah. So everything goes. Well, no, the A-wing fighter, actually. No, I guess I didn't have the prongs.

Yeah, I mean, well, the Y-wings had the two little, they're, like, antennae that stick out. But it's not, like, two huge, like, wind-like things. that, yeah. Wait, do the prongs have anything to do with the sword? We mentioned that earlier. Weren't there two prongs on the sword that would put people? No, Aglodius was about like a foot to a foot and a half long, I think. And what they remind me of, if you look at him, is remember the old tiny, like, Lego Castle swords that were like these weird rounded?

Yeah. That's kind of what they were like. Okay, yeah. Huh. So maybe like the center, like the cockpit of the ship is kind of designed like that where it's sort of poking out from. Yeah. Who knows? I think it sounds cool and it's like a cool weapon. There you go.

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Just go to podcast1.com and click on the survey banner or go to podcast one.com slash my survey. It only takes a few minutes and it gives you the opportunity to make a direct impact on your favorite shows. Tell us how you really feel so we can get to know you better. We value your thoughts and participation. So check out the survey at podcast1.com slash my survey or click on the survey banner on Podcast1.com. All right. And we're back. And I think we need to talk about Gradius 2. The actual Gratius 2, not the MSX Gratius 2. It's confusing. But the kind of a prevailing opinion I've noticed, especially with your writing, Kurt, is that Gradius 3 seemed cool if you were an American kid who'd only played Gratius in Life Force. But if you were someone who'd played Gratius 2, then you played third game. We're like, eh. So why is that? What's so great about it? Gradius, too? Gradius, well, the first

Gradius was, I mean, it was pretty well done with his home port, too, but it only had one boss through most of the levels. It's sort of repeated. And so the second game, it tweaked a lot of stuff to make it feel more modern. It was much more impressive graphically. Like, he started the game, there's these big

solar flares, which came kind of recurring patterned amongst other Canami games, including Lifeforce, I guess, was the first one that had that sort of thing. Right. But, yeah, you had the prominences. Was that in the arcade version? I know were two levels that they added to Life Force for NES that were not in the

arcade game. One of them was the Egyptian pyramid theme, but I think the prominences were the second level that were unique to the NES game. I can't remember, being honest. It's been a long time since I've looked that specific point up, but I

think that's right. Maybe I'm thinking of Ninja Turtles too, which had two levels added. I don't know. They did that sometimes. But yeah, it was the graphically, and I have it And it also added four different types of power-up bars. So you could choose which one to get each one. Like they all had a power-up and things like that.

But you changed a bomb. It changed the type of laser you got. You could even choose a type of shield where you either had one that surrounded your whole ship. Like, yeah, I think that's one of the main difference. Like, the original gradius only had the forward shield where it would just get you from the forward. And although I think, I want to say in the NES game, like the shield worked no matter which direction you were hit from. Yeah, yeah. But it was supposed to be forward only.

But they had to compromise that a lot. The original idea with the forward shield was that the two orbs would fly in from off screen and converge on your ship. Kind of like the option ships in 1942, but they would, like, smash anything that they hit on the way. And then they would work as, like, a forward shield only. But on the NES, like, if you take a hit from behind, you still get shielded. Yeah. So you could choose between that one that gave you a forward defense or one that cloaked your own thing. But I think it only lets you take, like, two or three hits or something like that.

And the levels that each room had like stricter themes. Like you started off with the fire level and then what's the second one? Like the H.I. Gaggar level, which was like in basically so many arcade games from the 90s just sticking a level like that. And there was a level where it's made out of like glaciers and ice things that had particular patterns. You'd have to break them up. So it made a lot of those themes. The speed up zone, which you were talking before, that was from Gradius too. So it just defined a lot of the zones

that the later games would sort of build off of. And some of them would just choose a different thing like Grady's Street had like a plant level. I think it was a biological level. There is, yeah. Which is technically based off a life force. There's like a sandy level that you shoot through. But that's just kind of a variant on the two levels that appear.

And the first Gratius where there's like things that you have to blast through to get forward. Yeah, the first Gratius, like, it's. it kind of has a shortage of level ideas. The two that really stand out are the tentacle brain zone, the moai zone, but otherwise you have like the first level, and then later you fight through the first level upside down. Yeah. And then you have

like the level with the little red orbs that you have to shoot through, and then you have another level that's just, you know, a pallet swap of that. Yeah, so it's sort of modernized it to make it where other games from the 80s were. And it's not a huge jump, but it's enough that it feels like

it got a more improved game. Yeah, it came out after, Gradius 2 came out after R-Type, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. So there's probably a lot of reaction to what I REM did with that game. Yeah, that was a big deal at the time. That's a crazy good-looking game for 1986, too. And it was one of the games that kind of, like, took the Gradius option concept and said, let's take that another level with the little bit that you can use in so many different ways.

But the Grady's 3, it didn't add much to the formula? No, like there's other types of zones, and they added more power-ups. And then the arcade version had a weird, like, space area type or level, which nobody liked. Yeah, that 3D zone. It's so weird. It's like the only time Grades has ever done, like that behind the ship perspective. And it doesn't, it's like, it's just there and then it's over and it never shows up again. It's really strange.

Neat. Yeah, I think they just had problems improving on the formula. So if, like, the Super Nintendo Greatest Street was the first one you played, you didn't see the, the things that established it. But as it stands, it's sort of like, well, it's another greatest game. But the Super NES version is the only version that ever was, like, released for consoles until the PS2 collection, right? Yeah, because they changed a lot of stuff.

Like, since the game was kind of a flop in Japan, they needed to rework it substantially. So it's a much easier game. They took out that level. They switched a lot of stuff around. I remember like just reading a Nintendo Power in other magazines Gradius 3 would be used as a way to show up the technical power of the SNES and that they would always show you the screenshot with all the bubbles on it

I think that was like the big like the one thing it was like transparency and a whole lot of sprites and big sprites but you didn't know in motion it didn't you know it wouldn't move as smooth as it looked you know as a still image and that's another thing going back to Grady's 2 because the Grady's 3 bubbles it plays a lot like the crystals So if you've already seen that, you're like, oh, this basically works the same way. Right. But it just has like an organic kind of context to it.

It works a little bit differently, but fundamentally the same thing. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's kind of fun in Gradius 3 that, like, I wish had made it to the Super NES version, like the MoI stage where there's like these gigantic Moi heads flying through space. We haven't talked about the Moi heads. Oh, yeah. That's like, how could we skip that? That's such a weird, iconic thing. And according to that Shmopoulatian's interview, like, there's no real reason for it. They were just like, why don't we just put some Easter Island heads in outer space, shooting rings at people, glowing donuts.

My thing is, my idea is that Zvius had the NASCAR lines. Yeah. So there was that sort of, like, they wanted to fit in that sort of like, I guess, Mrs. is a more to you call it? What's a... I have a feeling that the thing that ties all this stuff together is like a early 80s, craze in Japan about like North American UFO theories. So every

possible ancient thing that could could it be ancient aliens they glommed on to that. And you also see this other. There are pyramid stages in Gradius. Yeah. I mean you even see it like a monster party where they've got like the big like weird owl face like spade monster. That's like a

from a alien sighting in the United States that from it's nobody even thinks about it anymore, but it had a lot of staying power or was really there's a lot of stuff. When we talk about actually the Dragon Slayer series, there's a really weird

example of this later, but I think that's what it is. I think it's like they're aliens, but they maybe they met the Easter Island people. And they became sort of the, along with the penguin from an arc adventure, like basically the

mascots of Canami for quite a long time, which was weird because Arkanoid also had an enemy that was a moai head. Doe. I don't know if dough was a moai. He basically looks like a moai, doesn't? Yeah, he does. Yeah, he's a moai.

I've never made it that far in the games. He was just on the covers or that was like the image they showed even though nobody played Ok, you're right. You're right. That didn't even make an impression on me, but you're right. Yeah, but the moai heads are very distinct. They show up in the first Gradius and it's just these like stone heads kind of just like sitting there on asteroids in a line.

and as you fly near them they start spitting out these rings like just this cluster of rings of like the donut lasers yeah like everything else in the games shoots these tiny little diamonds at you like tiny little bullet projectiles

but the moai heads for some reason shoot like you know it's like Gandalf blowing smoke rings or something like the little things in mother brains layer right? Yeah with the rinkets. They're slow moving object yeah

yeah and so they like fill up the screen with these things and they one of the things that's really kind of sets Graadius apart from some other shooters is that enemies always aim at you and a lot of games enemies are just like shooting

but in this game with the series they're always aiming at you and that's especially true with the moai heads because you like fly and you're just kind of creating these cascades of glowing rings floating through space at you and that's one of the places

where you're really like oh I need the laser because the laser can just punch through those things and then blow up the moai heads whereas the double shot or the, you know, the ripple laser and other games, they're like, I'm never going to, I'm never going to make it. And they really, they really start playing around with the MoI concept in Gradius 3. That's one of the things. Like, yeah, maybe it's not a new idea, but it just, they go crazy with it. And like, subsequent Gradius games would just keep on going.

My favorite one is in Gradius Gaiden, and they start shooting out these gigantic lasers. But if you destroy its mouth when it's still shooting the laser, as the head. head falls off the laser, we'll go with it. So if you don't know what's coming in you're in a wrong spot, you'll get killed. It's like one of the biggest favorite tricks of that game. That game is full of mean tricks. And then it makes fun of you for losing. Yeah, there's a...

You're no good. Go away. Stop playing. That taunts you. Including the Moai boss. You can't beat me with that loser. Yeah, that game, like, it's hard enough, but then for it to be laughing at you, no thanks. Great game, though. Don't get me wrong. Just because it makes me feel like

a bad person and, and, like, Makes me want to cry. It's fine. So after Gradius 3, it kind of feels like the series took a little bit of a break. What was the next game? The next game was Gradius Gaiden, right? Guiden, but they kind of spin off with the Proudius games for a while. Yeah. Yeah, they kind of explored like Pradius and Quindby.

I feel that was a better idea because you were kind of limited about what you could do with the outer space themes of Gradius. So Pradius is just much more variety. There's variety in terms of what you see and play because as Proudius continued, the roster got he huge and every ship, I mean, the abilities at their core are kind of the same things you'd find in Gradius, but there's enough variety between them. You could be like, I want to, I want to play this guy this time. He has different music. He is a shield.

This guy doesn't have a shield. I just like the amount of variety in those games the most. And this is, again, something that, like, only hardcore shoot-map fans really knew about, but especially when you got into, like, the one that they made specifically for the Super Nintendo, G.K. Osher Berry, Prodeus, where the characters were like, they have the firing pattern from the ship from Darius or. This is reminiscent of a Toapland game. Oh, I didn't know that.

But one of the other reasons it took a break was Xex was the big game. It was its graphical powerhouse. This was the next new game that was going to take the arcades by storm. And it was a flop because it came out the same time as Street Fighter 2 did. And it's hard to underestimate how many games Street Fighter 2 killed, like both in terms of success and games that were just canceled because they didn't do well in office of location. Entire genres. Yeah, because, I mean, it was a boom here and over there. So especially that game kind of floundered.

The same thing with Prodius. Like, I think that's why it switched to the home console for J.K. Oshaberry. Like, it just wasn't bringing in the amount of money they did. And then they kept at it later. There's a couple of other Twinbium Peridus games that I think did okay, but not enough for them to really continue. So I see next tier on the list is Xex.

which I don't know whether we really like there's plenty to talk about with later Gradius games so just so you know it's not really a missing link type thing like life forces it was like it's a super high production value early 90s arcade shooter it is basically a combination of I'd say R-type and Gradius yeah it feels almost like more on a REM game

but then again R-type kind of felt a little bit like Gradyus with its side scrolling and memorization patterns and things like that basically it looks beautiful it's probably not that great of a shooter in terms of like the fairness of the gameplay it's got like kind of slightly pervy between level cut scenes it's got i mean it just does everything and um the cool thing about it is that the ship actually has it's kind of like instead of an option right that just trails behind you or instead of our type where you've got the thing that goes you can move your gun is that the force pod yeah yeah so instead of that what you've got is your ship is called the Flint lock and which is another antique weapon that they just use for no reason so the ship is called the lock and then the flint is this weird like tendril pod that you can have on the front of your ship and if it's attached to the front of your ship you can use like a super powered up kind of like almost melee attack these are more common now than they were at the time but like you know but if you detach it it'll go flying off somewhere else in the screen and uh kind of it can block bullets and so the stages are are all designed around kind of narrow passageways where you can release it at the right point or else you'll die basically and it blocks things and it can get powered up until it has three tentacles, I think. And the stages are insane. There's one that's like a bunch of, it's like a,

it's a take on the broadiest like, you know, fire dragon type level where you can scroll on both axes, except this one, there's all these like islands that have water in them and there are waterfalls flowing down, waterfalls flowing up, oceans that you can enter from the top and then exit from the bottom. It has this really bright like pink color palette, like rainbow dream sort of thing. And it's, it

was a bomb. And on top of that, it never got a home release until salamander collection or something for a PSP. They were supposed to bring it out on the PlayStation 2. Like a hamster, the company that's still putting out all those ACA ports. They did a bunch of

PS2 ports. They're basically just meme on a disc. They release them separately, but that's like the only way you can really get a home port of haunted castle, the castle in your key game. Not that you really want a home port of it. I have it anyway. Oh, I bought it and I got rid of it because it's so bad. But they brought out Thundercross, which is another one of those lost shooters that never got a port, and they were supposed to do XXX, and I think they just couldn't get it to run correctly. So XXX wasn't on the Salamander deluxe pack for PlayStation?

It was only on Salamander portable for PSP. It all kind of blurs together in my mind I think it might. Does it have Does it share like one of the creative figures behind it? Is that how some of the Grady's connection comes in? I don't know. I don't know if they've ever really had like a core guy or team

behind it that I've been familiar with. Not the same way that like Casabini did for a little bit and Contra kind of did. Yeah. Anyway, there's not much more to say about XX, X, X, other than that. The name is crazy. The game is crazy. You should find a way to play it.

and tried out but I think that it also shows that when it kind of it may have felt to Konami like kind of a slap on the rest like

you guys went the wrong direction like stick to the basics stick to stick to what you do best don't try and do something don't be IRM don't do yeah then they try

to make the 2D fighters and almost everything that they put out were bad it was like Marshall Champion and Jagoon fight which nobody cares about or should care about yeah

Konami and fighter is not so not such a good combo where does Where does Salamander 2, the sequel to Life Force, fall on this sort of franchise rubric for you guys? I don't know why they bother to make that game, but it's, it's, it looks so good. It's a nice looking game because it's, it's entirely 2D. It came out, I think, probably before Gradius Guidon, 94-ish, 95, something like that. So it looks pretty good, but they went back to the mechanics of the original salamander where it's two-player, you resurrect automatically.

The weapons you pick up are just regular weapon pickups. And just never felt like it had the same substance as the Gradius games did. Because the first time I ever played it was on the Salamander deluxe pack on the PlayStation. Same here. Where it also included Salamander and Life Force, which I still like the Nintendo version. This was much better. And the game is nice looking. It has an excellent soundtrack.

And a lot of the levels are really cool. But it's just like you play through, you beat it. It's whatever. So, yeah, that's kind of the story of Gratius's journey in the wilderness. Yeah, I was just about to say that. Yeah. Seven years where there was no Gratius. Wandering around.

I think X-Sex is actually better looking than Salamander 2. I think it's, like it came out a couple years before. Hmm. They had it. Yeah. Nobody wanted it. But then after seven years of drought, kind of like, you know, Metroid or Metal Gear, like all of a sudden there is, oh, like light shines down from the heavens.

The Vic Viper descends with an angel halo. I don't know. Gradius Guidon for PlayStation. It's a crime, an absolute crime. that that game did not come to the American PlayStation. I know it was supposed to, but it didn't. And it's basically, like, there's no other way to describe it, but the Symphony of the Night of Gradius.

Like, it is that kind of experience, where it's like the sum totality of everything that had come before refocused and expanded and just made into something fresh and exciting and, like, wow, I can't believe this is happening constantly. Is that what they called a guide-in? Because it's just like a new start or a new... I don't know why they called a guide. It seems like a weird choice.

I just didn't put a number on it, I guess. Because it was a console exclusive entry is my interpretation of it. I mean, granted it was the same thing with like the M-Sexos or console, well, computer exclusive, too. I just think that's the reason why they went with it. I wonder if it's a way of just like lowering expectations for a product they're not too sure about it. That could be it. It's a guide, it's a side story. It's not Alcumajo Dracula.

It's Dracula X. Right. But please, guys. talk about this game because it's crazy. It's so, so good. They were just screwing around with so much cool 2D artwork in the game. So at the beginning, it doesn't

look like really that impressive. And then you're going through the, um, the first level, which is snow themed. And you have the, like, the beautiful like northern lights sort of in the background doing that fancy sort of stuff. And then the gigantic like caterpillar boss, whatever, just shoots out of the ground. It's a segmented sprite thing. And just

looks incredible. And then you end up having to fight it. And then you kill it and it's sort of like turns red and it goes in the background and disloose. And that's just like such an excellent way to open that game. And mostly the entire game like keeps up that level of just inventive bosses that have really cool looking graphical effects. Yeah, I mean, the PlayStation was not known as a 2D powerhouse. But I feel like the, the limitations of the system worked for a game like Gradius because

it didn't have to have like natural human animation in it. So the sprites, you know, they could afford to use sort of. of that like paper cutout style where everything is made out of segments and doesn't necessarily have a lot of detailed animation within the segments. But, you know, like the, like the caterpillar boss. It's, it's a bunch of individual parts. And they tried doing that technology. Like that was kind of a Konami thing on NES and Super NES where they would like have, you know, the tentacle golem in life force or, yeah, or the like the fire dragon and Gradius 3 where it's just like the same Sprite kind of like linked together many times and it moves around and they create a fake animation

that way. They did that, but it's so much better looking on PlayStation with the technology. And then, you know, they could have all these transparency effects and scaling and distortion and they could push more things around because even though there wasn't a lot of RAM like storage for individual graphical detail, they could still have more things moving on screen without slowdown. They could have more projectiles, more enemies, more variety of enemies. It was, it must have been, like, incredibly liberating to work on this console that was not constrained to a 3 megahertz processor and, you know, whatever you could fit onto a cartridge.

Especially, like, in the Super Nintendo area, for as fancy as, like, the Mode 7 effects were, it was really limited about what it could actually do. Like, they could only flip backgrounds. They couldn't actually flip sprites. So, until the Super FX chip, Superfx 2 chip came along. Yeah. The extra map. But this, yeah, like, this is, like, kind of the Yoshi's Island of the Graddeus franchise. So there's all sorts of cool effects.

Like, in the third level, you fight the crystals, which is, again, like, what you fought in the previous games, but they'll, like, reflect and reflect your lasers and stuff. Yeah, like, that's amazing. Like, you're shooting at stuff. And all of a sudden, like, you miss and you hit one of the big crystals sticking out of the ground, and it refracts your laser and shoots it in a different direction, like dark side of the moon or something. And then, uh, when you fight the Moai boss, it's like these two gigantic heads. which are the sides of the screen, the entire screen begins rotating and it's spitting at you in all sorts of different angles. And it's just so cool looking.

Yeah, and then, of course, there's the, you know, they kind of do the, the gradius equivalent of the Castlevania thing where you go back to the introductory stage of the first game. And so you're flying through that sort of rocky zone of the volcanoes, but all of a sudden, like, you get this warning and a black hole appears at the right or the left edge of the screen,

and like there's a singularity that's chasing you as you're advancing through the level and the gravity is causing everything within the stage to break apart and fly into the singularity in the back so yeah you're flying through the first level the first game but oh by the way that big rock prominence that was just like holding onto the ground by a tiny little point now that's a flying obstacle that you have to avoid

or it'll smash into your ship because it's flying into a black hole to be pressed into a singularity it's like it's just full of inventive ideas like that and it's constantly surprising you I think that that level actually demolishes everything if you're not playing it on a regular PlayStation like I think the PSP version is actually quite a bit of slowdown and if you try playing that level like on a PS2 even like it just it just chugs oh it's one of those like it was specifically tuned for the PS1 hardware yeah because I remember back then they didn't want you to use assembly coding on there and I think I mean, they did because nobody, like, checked.

So when anything happened that it didn't understand, then it would either break or just front badly. And that was one of those few cases where it didn't work very well. Interesting. So never, ever released in America? No, it has come to America. You can play it on the PSP collection. I didn't know that came over here.

That was probably over a decade ago. It was. And I was pretty down on the PSP collection when it first came here just because the PSP original screen was not good for the tiny Sprite. that comprise the grottiest games. Like, you almost couldn't see the bullets. It was kind of, it's kind of weird. It's like throwing back to the original Game Boy,

where it's, like, something about the refresh rate or something just makes it really hard to see all those moving objects. So I found the game's really frustrating. But I think if you played it now on, like, a PSP 3,000, it would be totally fine. I only ever played it on a PSP 2000. Okay. I never had a problem with it.

I mean, they was small, but. Yeah, I mean, that's fine. Yeah. Or you could do it on video. out even. Like the PSP 2000 and 3,000 let you do component video out. So you could like upscale it and run it on a TV

now with no no appreciable lag. So that'd be cool. It's kind of available on the PSN but I don't like it's one of those things you have to do something weird. You have to like download it to PS3 and then run it but I don't know if it works on the Vita TV because of like the weird. Damn I need to check into that. I didn't think about that.

It might. Yeah so I was kind of hard on this game when it came out and I reviewed it professionally. But I feel like subsequent hardware revisions of the PSP made it better. So kind of an unfortunate, you know, casualty of the time. But definitely worth getting like that. Did the salamander collection come here? I don't think it did.

No, none of the other ones. Just the Graddeus collection. Yeah. Okay. But, I mean, just for Gradius Gaiden alone. Yeah, it's absolutely worth owning that collection. It was the first time that Grady's 2 came out here. Oh, the original.

Oh, yeah, any version. At all. I mean, it had a European name. It was called Vulcan. adventure over there for some reason. But that was only an arcades. It didn't come to the consoles. No.

It didn't come to PC Engine. Was it only ported to Famicom? No, it came to the PC Engine also. But it didn't come to turbographics, that version. No, the Canami, they never brought any of their stuff over here. Buttheads. And that's why they bought Hudson, so they can just crush all of our turbographic's dreams. So that was kind of like a big breath of fresh air for the Gradius series.

But even though it never came to America, like importers were definitely tuned into it. I know a lot of people imported the radius guided. And then Gradius 4 came along And kind of Like, was that an arcade game? It was arcade. It was, but they called a Grady's four again Because it went back to the arcade.

Okay, because I never saw it, never heard of it, until it came out for PS2. Yeah, it was only in Japan. I had only known about it because I had bought the soundtrack because I was all excited about it. But like I was talking before the break, it's sort of like, you know, how Mega Man X came out, and it's sort of like really advanced a series.

And I went back and brought it. about Mega Man 7 and they're like, where's the wall jump? Why is this all weird and goofy? That's sort of what Gradius 4 is. Like, it's such a downstep from Gradius Guide, and like it uses some 3D graphics in more interesting ways. Like, it's parts of it

look pretty cool. Like, one of the first bosses, like this dragon that's made out of liquid metal from the Terminator, and it looks neat. There are a couple of levels that has like lava flowing and sort of like undulates in ways that it won't be able to do with sprites. It wouldn't look right. But from a

gameplay's perspective, it's not any different than Gradius 2. So it sort of ends up with that same problem as Gradius 3 did. Like, it's also balanced for an arcade game, so it was very difficult compared to Gaiden, which was hard, but they let you continue like a dozen times.

You could have 10 lives. You could customize the power bar so things could go, and it was much more player friendly. And I like the music I didn't think was as good either. It's a little bit too synthene. Yeah, I was watching a playthrough of this, and I noticed a lot of ugly early polygonal characters and ships and stuff,

which I'm sure were very impressive in 1999, but that does not age as good as, you know, the 2D art at all. It just looks so weird. Although if you want to talk about aging badly, there's solar assault. Oh, I was so excited. Was that game only released in the U.S.? It's like I looked up to some info and all I could find was a U.S. release date.

I don't. I think it came out in Japan. Like, I was so excited to play that game because I was so into Grady's at the time. Well, what is it first time? Yeah, I don't even know what it is. It's an arcade 3D version of Grady. So they basically reinvented it as something like Star Fox. Yeah.

And it looks cool. There's something kind of cool about flying around and having the option. Like, it's actually sort of behind you. So sometimes it kind of goes out of view of the camera, but it's still shooting. But at the same time, that's also seems kind of unpredictable. Like, how can you, like, really control the option if you don't always see it? I don't know. Like, I have never seen this game.

I've never been able to play it. But I, you know, I did watch some videos of it, and it seems really hard and really clunky. Yeah, that's a good way to describe it. Just because it's difficult to shoot at things in 3D, like, like, Panzer Jagoon and Star Fox has sort of got down, like, the way that you aimed at something. But this kind of, like, almost goes back to, like, Space Harrier felt back in the mid-80s, where it's just hard to spatially determine. But in ways that are even worse than Space Harrier, because that's still kind of... It still kind of keeps grottiest speed and difficulty, like the big core battle. Yeah.

It seems really hard because it's just shooting these four lasers at you at a time, and they fly out of the screen really fast. So there's no real warning. And it's really hard. Like, it seems really hard to me to judge, like, exactly where your ship is relative to where the big core is while it's firing at you. It doesn't seem fun. It wasn't. Like, I was hyped to play it because, like, when I was graduating high school, we went on a trip to Disney World. And somebody told me, like, they have a solar solid Disney World.

And that was the big thing I was looking forward to. And somewhere out in the Internet, there's still a place. picture of me holding on to a Grady Sit Down Cabinet smiling. I'll see if I could dig it up. It's not a great game. Yeah, okay. My solar assault tattoo did not age too well.

But it's playable on MAME, but it's really glitched. Like, when I tried to play it when I was writing for the Canami book, it crashes partway through the game. And there is somebody who, like, I don't know what he did, but he was able to get past the part where the game crashes

and when I was able to play the rest of the game, and I have no idea how we did it. Interesting. Yeah. So I would, I'd be curious to play that someday just to have the experience, but it's not something I'm going to seek out. It's a, like if I'm at, if I'm at an arcade convention and wow, some weirdo brought their solar assault cabinet, I'm going to play that. But yeah, like it's just kind of a weird forgotten cornerstone of, actually, the last time I was in Disney World, I think they still had a solar assault cabinet. It was like I'm then I'd have to go to Florida. It was in the backs of like Epcot Center, something weird like that. There's a lot of stuff back there.

it makes me think though like it would be really maddening to play Gradius literally in like in cockpit looking at stuff and you can't go side to side you're like stuck going up and down that would be crazy like you would

yeah I mean because it still had like a flight stick and things yeah I know that's not literally what it was but it's just like that would be weird that level of abstraction would not translate well to 3D at all so where do we put Gratius Generations on the Gratius Canon. Is that just considered like a best-of compilation, basically?

It's a new game, but it doesn't do anything new or interesting, except for the fact that it's portable, and it has a really bad soundtrack. Yeah. But it still looks good. As many GBA games do. Yeah. Yeah, so that came out around the same time as Castlevania Circle the Moon and Harmony of Dissinence and Konami Crazy Racers, and it really seemed like they were kind of trying to figure out what to do with the GBA.

It had some cool effects. Yeah, I feel like everyone had kind of shifted to a sort of 3D mentality, like 3D game design mentality. And so a lot of games that came out sort of early on on Game Boy Advance, I feel like really weren't that good. It was like people trying to remember how to make these games and not doing a great job of it. They got better as they went along. Sorry, it was developed by a company called Mobile 21. Yeah. Just a joint venture between Nintendo and Konami to build games that have mobile.

phone connectivity in them or something. I don't know what they did with that. A successful venture, you think? Based on their game on. You don't hear about it anymore. No. No. What else do they make? Did they do crazy racers? No, they did a lot of Japanese stuff.

EX Monopoly, Jurassic Park 3 Island Attack. They were around for like two years, so you didn't miss anything. Yeah, so this is kind of like the weird little blip, I guess, that made it to the U.S. Yeah, I remember like the only thing that sticks out about this game in my memory is the introduction where it like repatriates

a scramble. That's like the one thing that sticks in my memory. I own this game. I bought it. I played I don't know if I beat it, but I played it a bunch. But I'm just like, it's just Gradius that existed and that's it. It was fine. It was a new greatest game that actually came out in America.

It was good for a portable game, but otherwise shrug. Yeah. But then there's Gratius 5. Ah, yes. So maybe that's, we're kind of running into the final stretch here. So maybe this is a good way to end. Like, Gradius 5, developed by Treasure,

PlayStation 2 exclusive, 2.5D graphics, in many ways, like Hitoshi Sakimoto's soundtrack, so many things about it just not like true Gradius. And yet, and yet, it's so good. It was a, yeah, I think at that point, like a lot of these companies had talent drain, especially when it came to Shudemops, Because, like, the shoot-em-up scene amongst Japanese developers,

they've been around forever. They all know each other. They clearly weren't making shoot-em-ups anymore, Konami. So they probably all left the company. So the outsourced the Treasure, which is, like, one of the best places you can outsource something like that, too. Well, Treasure, of course, spun out of Konami. Yeah.

I don't know if anyone from Treasure worked on any Gratius games, but they did work on Quarth. Oh, yeah, yeah. There were some Treasure guys who worked on Quarth, which I discovered when I was researching that for Game Boy Works. And so they had some, like, Konami shooter experience, just maybe not where you'd expect. If anything, there are parts of Gradius 5 that actually feel like Radiant Silver Gun,

especially if you look at the backgrounds and just kind of the approach. Right. And the soundtrack makes a really kind of drives at home, too. Although it doesn't sound like a very Hitoshi, like, everybody is familiar with Hitoshi Sakamori soundtracks based off of, especially Font Fantasy Tactics and Font Fantasy 12, of the very orchestral style, which Radiant also had. This one didn't really have so much. It's a little bit more...

He also has his more electronic sound, and it probably wasn't just Sakimoto. It was probably like bass escape where he worked on it, but also it was like his dudes and ladies. And it's still an excellent soundtrack, though. But one of the main reasons that sets it apart is it has auto resurrection, which you

can turn it off, but for the way the game is designed, it's not really recommended. But you have these different option controls, and And the main thing about that is you can hold down one of the triggers and then aim it in any direction you want with the analog six. So you have the laser and you can sort of like get into nooks and crannies and spin it around. And not only does it look really cool, but just completely changes the way that the game is played. Because before, like you only had forward firing lasers.

So that was where your offense was. And then you could sort of fix it up a little bit between different weapons, but you've never had full offensive control. Yeah, you have the ability to do like the spinning, the rotating option approach. And if you combine that with like the 40 or the 90 degree angle shot in Gradius 3 and then like combine that with the bombs that just go straight down, like you get a pretty good spread, but you're still sort of vulnerable behind. Yeah, and this one you just shoot in any direction where you want, which kind of made like the multi-directional shots kind of pointless because you had all this laser and stuff anyway. But just like the approach to the pacing and things like that made it a lot different than the other games. And it's also much longer. It's like Radiant Silver Gun is pretty long for a shoot-em-up

because a lot of the games at that time were, because they were just focusing on arcade players that would really want to just play five or six levels for score purposes, last like 20 minutes. Radiant Silver Gun is like an hour long and Gradius 5 is also like an hour long. Which, I mean, for an arcade that's a little bit exhausting, but the more you played, the more credits you got in this game.

I can't remember if it lets you start off on previous levels. I don't think it did. I don't know. It's been a long time as I played it. But I do remember I was working at one up at this point when that came out. And I was like, I don't know if I trust Gradius anymore after Gratius 4 and Gratius Generations. But the guy reviewing it was just like, this is so great.

I was like, wow, he's super cynical. How is he enjoying it this much? But it was this crazy game that kind of came out of nowhere. Was it a chain? No, it was Dave Smith. Oh, okay. I was picturing the critic from Rathatoui. Just like his like, the colors.

It's a great looking game and it has some cool looking effects. Like the view of Earth, I guess, when you're flying past, it looks really neat. It also has a really cool concept that like the second level is like the last boss ship. So you go through and you fly it and you find out that there's two separate paths. and your ship alone is not able to destroy it. So something creates a warp thing that sends you back in time. So you play the rest of the game. And then, like, the final level, you're fighting through that ship again,

but through the other paths. So you see yourself from the pass on top. Then when you finally reach the end, then you can both shoot at the same time and then destroy it and then you win the game. Right. But the other you see, well, when you're fighting through stage two, don't you see like another Vic Viper and he's like,

we're going to do this together? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's the way it works. Yeah, and then, like, you, it's been a while. But then, like, the, when you play through the final stage, it has, like, your actions recorded, right? So, like, everything you did in the first loop through that stage, like, that's what the other pilot does. Yeah, record it. It's really cool looking.

Do you think that was inspired by that browser game, what's it called, Curcer 58 or something like that? It's a game where, like, you can't finish the game without failing. And every time you fail, you start. the game over with the other cursor it's like a clicking type of game and so you keep accumulating playthroughs until you can finally finish it it's by the same guy who did the weird box RPG parameters I remember that that's one of the few things I've written on HD 101 anyway that's I think that might predate it and maybe that inspired it or could have been arrived at independently but that's an interesting game yeah the same idea kind

of shows up in Super Time Force by Capabara oh yeah yeah like you can beat it without dying, but every time you die, like, you rewind time. And so your previous play-through with the other character you played as is there. And, yeah, so you can, like, set up all these crazy super barrages of bullets to take out enemies. Yeah, like, it's a really cool concept. And unfortunately, that was pretty much the end of Gradius. Like, there's been no Gradius six. Kind of like there's been no Suikiden six. Konami just sort of backed away. I don't know. Maybe Gradius 2 or 5 didn't do that well for them? What year was the Gratius 5?

What was he? 2005? 2005? I mean, I think Grady 6 is one of those things that popped up on maybe we'll put this at list and then it just disappeared so it must have been canceled internally. Yeah, I mean who was there to develop it for them. They probably would have had to outsource

it and maybe they just couldn't come up with any new ideas. Around that time, Treasure also sort of fell off the map. Yeah, they came back with a couple of like XBLA games and ports and then. Yeah, but they didn't really do anything new after Radius 5, did they?

There's a Bangayo game, which is technically new. Yeah, but it's kind of a reworking of the Dreamcast game. They had that weird tiny tune adventures game. That was actually, that was an older game that they They had Astroboy. Astro Boy, that came out around the same, I think

that actually came first, and it's very similar in weird ways. And what else? Yeah, they were kind of recycling ideas, even though the we'd never do sequels, like Gunn Star Heroes, Guardian Heroes. Yeah, so the company kind of like... Oh, yeah. The Tiny Tunes game is the Game Boy, advanced one that came out,

not the PlayStation 2-1, which is based on another thing. I think that's supposed to be sort of like Rocco Gaki Showtime. That's it. That's it, yeah. Konami kind of like drifted off, Treasure kind of drifted off. There just wasn't anyone to do a Gradius game, but there is one last game.

Go ahead. You seem excited about this one. Odomedius. Oh, what? Let's get into this. I thought you were going to talk about rebirth. Oh, actually, river came out later. Yeah, no, like, I'm saying, like, that was the last Gratius game.

Oh, yeah, that is. All right, go ahead and talk about Otomede. No, I don't know. Okay, so. You seem so excited. I was, it wasn't, it was like, yeah, it was, it was like Schadenfreude. Yeah, so they were noticing the, uh, the explosion of the Akihabra of Taku, Moe, phenomenon. So they decide to latch that onto it.

So instead of playing as ships, you're sort of, like, like, these girls that are riding the ships from Gradius. Or who kind of are the ships? Kind of. Yeah. Please tell me they transform into the ships. They don't. No.

Never mind. It's actually, it hurts the game, too, because you have a character that's basically cross-shaped. You have the horizontal thing of that, and then you have the girl with their top and legs sticking out of the bottom. So where is the hitbox? Actually, there's something like that in Perodius. There's a character you can play as that's a Playboy Bunny girl riding a missile.

So I could see the... It's still, like, vertically. Yeah, she's, like, kind of hudged over it. Yeah, so it doesn't mess it up. Like, I think the hitboxes are still, like, the same. It just feels bizarre to play. They sort of take more inspiration from Prodius. Like, the first game actually has lots of penguins and stuff,

but compared to Prodius, where the levels are filled with penguins doing all sorts of weird stuff, tossing things, is doing goofy things in the background. This, they're, like, just frozen in time, like, playing volleyball, just standing around. Like, that's the way I would describe these games is they just feel sterile. Like, I could get over the, hey, it's a cutesy girl and underwear shooting stuff in space, as long as the games were interesting and creative, but they're really not. They're really, they're lifeless and very uninspired. And they had a weird system in that, like in the arcade game, you only played a level or two

and you need to, like, that would be the end of the game and they need to start over. And they sort of had to adapt that for the Xbox 360 version. And there's another system where it had a touchscreen, and I forget how it worked. But obviously that didn't translate over They released a whole special controller That had a touchscreen that you could sort of use it But it wasn't important in any way So it was pretty pointless

This whole thing seems like a really pointless endeavor Yeah And then they released a sequel for the Xbox 360 Which was slightly better The Kojiigarashi worked on He was put on that one Yeah he was a producer for that one And that's

Beets being a janitor Yeah It's like It was a device to sell a lot of DLC Like there's a lot of music. Like, they, like, did seven different whole soundtracks for this game. For some reason, each from or by, like, different people, um, instead of, like, they got

some chip tune artists, I think, to do. That may be the original Odomenious, but there's so much DLC for that game. So it's not, like, just, like, different, like, J-pop things that are. No, like, I think Motoy Sakuraba did an entire soundtrack for it in his style. And, like, none of them fit. Yeah. But it was still impressive that there's that much music that they made for it, like, just to sells dc and that's just like the main thing i remember about that game yeah i i said i would

give those games a fair shake and i did and they just they weren't good yeah like whatever you know whatever you want to say about the moa thing like at least give us good interesting games uh which these were not yeah i mean death smiles was one of those games that played it off like the thing pretty well yeah and that was a cave game right yeah so it's got that that like bullet curtain thing where it's memorization and crazy and that's a top down shooter so Death Miles is a side view. Oh, is it?

Okay. Which one? Oh, I'm thinking of, was it Ibarra? Almost all their games except for the Death Mouse game and Akka, Akai Katana and Progear. Those are their size go games. Okay. Okay. So that's why I got confused. But yeah, actually, I don't know that I've

played Death Smiles, but that's like a... It's on Steam now. It's pretty Gothic Lolita character. How does that compare to Otomideus in terms of play and style? It just plays like a cave shooter, but inside is cold view,

yeah. It's a lot of bullet held. There's a lot of interplay between like getting a meter to a certain level and then cashing it in so that numbers explode. It's kind of like the core of most cave games. My favorite game mechanic. Fill up the vessel and then expend the vessel.

They hate it. Hate it. What was the game you were saying? You thought he was going to bring up. Oh, Gradius Rebirth. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Graddeus Rebirth for Weir. Yeah, that's developed by M2.

M2 did all of those games. And that one, I think, was... Well, when you say all those... All those rebirth games. Weren't there just two? Three. What was the third one? Castlevania, Contra and...

Oh, Contra had one? I totally missed that one. What the hell? And they were all different... Wait, was Contra Rebirth? Was that done in kind of like a hardcore style with, like, those characters? I think it was a different game.

That was a different game that didn't have the word Contra. No, no, that was just hardcore uprising. This one, it looked a lot like Concord, three, actually. And it was, I think, the best of those three. Man, I might have played that and just totally, like, it slipped, slid right off my memory. Are those even still available? Yeah, it should be.

You can probably end. Okay. And the whole premise of those games is that they were redoing them in the style of, like, an early 90s arcade game, which is kind of redundant, because that's what all the other greatest games And I like it better than Gradius 3 and Gradius 4 just from a design standpoint. As a Canami nerd, it's, it actually, a lot of those games were supposed to be remakes as a Game Boy game. So it actually has a plot line where I think the Dr. Venom guy is a good guy. So it's like a prelude before the later games. And there's just all sorts of weird background stuff.

I mean, the best thing about all of them is the soundtracks because they take music throughout the series, but do it in that like early 90s. arcade synth by that one composer, Manabunamiki, who's like the go-to guy for that sort of music. And it's just a really good soundtrack. You said Dr. Venom was a good guy? Yeah, I think of that game. Because in the introduction, he's like talking to you. He was like, James Burton, we ought to do such a something. Who would have thought Dr. Venom would turn to evil?

I never would have guessed. It was good ones. Your nose and thrope and throat it's going to be in the end. All right. So is there anything else to say about Gradius? What is your favorite part of Gradius? Like the single thing, like if you pointed to one thing, it could be like a level, a piece of music, an idea. What is it?

I mean, the moment that made the most impact was the first level of greatest guidance and how it kept that through the game. I mean, the music was another big part of it because, again, my friend Rob had sent me a music that was just like the recordings of all those games. and I was just listening to him in the car long before I ever got to play them. The Gradius, I guess, is an interesting style because they're kind of almost like laid back, I guess. I mean, it depends on the game. And Gratist guidance is completely different. They'll still kill you, though. Oh, yeah.

They're like laid back. They'll kill you dead. That's why Grady's four, it's just a strange sound check because it was kind of more that like peppy sort of style to it. But heavily synthy, weird. Rob, what about you? Speed up. For me, that is like. As the announcer?

Yeah, yeah. Just that, just like, I'm not like a super fan of Gradius, but that sound and then like the kind of like almost digitized snare drum sound to have in the back. You know, it's like, it just gives me like just warm feelings. And also it just reminds me of like the fun of exploring that pirate game cart and like all this stuff. And that also had the Famicom Quarth. And so, yeah. So it's just, it's a, it feels like it's like comfort food in a way. It's like comfort food that makes you kind of, like kills you.

But it's, I don't know, I don't know. It's like killing you with comfort. Yeah. Macaroni and cheese, I think. Hmm. Like that. My favorite thing is how it spawned parodias. I'm cheating.

But, I mean, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're gladius games. And I think they're better, actually, because of the amount of ships you can choose. And because there's so much variety and, like, comedy and I think some of the best, 16-bit sprite work you've ever seen. Every level is just teeming with activity. There are little stories happening in the background as you're flying through the levels. It's really cool. It's so much cool.

Like, sexy Perodeus has so much stuff going on there. Like, you could just watch the background and see the different goofy things that are happening. Yeah, I forget which game it is. One of the games you go to the moon and throughout the entire level, they're basically just like a mochi making factory. You're like flying through all the different parts of it. It's so cool. Play Perodius. Any of them are all good.

That's the rabbit, and it has the rabbit count. Yeah, he's the boss. Yeah. Oh, no, it was a, it's like a cardboard cutout of one of those Japanese folklore type characters dressed as a bunny, but it's revealed to be just a maiden underneath it. Yeah. And then it, like, knocks over and it's just like a penguin with a microphone in the back with like a box. Yeah. I think that's a sexy Perodio. That's my favorite one. Chatting Prodeus, yeah. That's the, it goes, Proteus, which is the MSX one. Peridius da, which is the arcade one that got all the different ports. Goku Jo Prodeus, which is also kind of called Ultimate Prodeus. Jikia Oshaberi Purdeus, which... That was on the Super Famicom and PlayStation and Saturn had the voice actor, like, gabbing over it.

And then Sexy Peridus was the last one. And that was Saturn only? Saturn PlayStation Arcade. Oh, okay. Well then. And for myself, my favorite thing about Gradius, I think that keeps me coming back is the great sense of almost invincibility,

that empowerment that you get when you're, really like you finally get that last option and you get the missiles and you get the weapon of your choice and a shield and you're just like tearing through everything and I love the fact that at that point the greatest enemy in the game is you because you get complacent you get cocky you're like nothing can touch me and again that tiny little diamond bullet flies in and gets past your guard you might even fly right into it if you're using like the front shields and it's your own stupid fault Like, I love that.

And then, of course, you're reduced to nothing and it's terrible. We have to claw your way back up. Exactly. But just that's like they're, I don't know, I guess, you know, some of the Hudson PC engine shooters kind of get that feeling a little bit. But it doesn't feel quite the same as Ingradius because it's more of an automated system. It's more just like, you know, it's progressive. Whereas InGradius, there is like this sense of a journey. Like, how will you power up your ship?

And for me, it's pretty much always speed up one option, missile, second option, better gun, shield, more options if I can get them. But it, you know, it changes. Sometimes it's different. But there's always that, like, sense of progression. And it takes almost an entire level to get to that point, sometimes even more than that. Yeah. So it's not, you know, it's not like some kind of like you start and all of a sudden you're powered up. Like you really have to earn it and you have to keep, you know, like it incentivizes.

learning the levels, learning, you know, the most efficient routes to kill the red enemies and take out the patterns and so forth. Like the, you know, it's like the Gallego wave bonus stages, but with something better at the end than just a score bonus. Like if you get all the enemy formations perfectly, you become God. So yeah, great series. I've really enjoyed revisiting the games, Gradius and Gradius 3 for the videos I've been producing lately. And I really want to go back and play Gradius Gaiden again. I need to track down a copy of the PSP collection before this episode goes up and we cause the price to spike.

You can probably find it at the convention. We get over there real quick. I'll buy every copy and then I'll sell it to you, the listener. Damn you. So yeah, anyway, thanks everyone for listening to yet another episode of Retronauts. As always, I am Jeremy Parrish and I am on the internet on Twitter as GameSpite and at Retronauts.com. where you can find articles and videos and podcasts.

Retronaut itself can be found on iTunes, on the Podcast One Network, and the Podcast One app. And we are supported through Patreon. Your funding helps us make these videos, helps us fly to... Where the hell are we? New York. Long Island.

So we can come out and record videos and not videos, podcasts with cool people who know stuff about games that we don't. So that's great. please help support us guys why don't you hemp yourself I'm on Twitter really fast

this will go out after your Kickstarter is over so I wouldn't mention that it's actually it doesn't end oh doesn't it yeah it keeps going wow I do that

well it's not it's not through Kickstarter so I think they realize that most books are not going to be funded within like a month so they just kind of leave it going until

like it either it's completely plateaus or it's public Got it. It's like the friend who begs for money and won't leave until he gets it. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of that in the next couple months. Yeah, I'm on Twitter at HG underscore 101. We have a Patreon also at patreon.com slash HG 101, new underscore there.

We also have a series of books, including one, the unofficial guide to Canami Shooters, which includes complete coverage of Gradius, Prodius, Ultimidius, Twinby, all the other stuff that we didn't kind of mentioned, including Quarth, actually. because that counts. And I'm also working on a book, the Japanese Video Game of Securities book, which is currently crowd-defunded through a website called Unbound. I don't think there's much Canami stuff in there because I've written about it so many other times,

except for the game Yume, Penguin, Monogatari, which is heavily penguin-themed because it's about the hero of the Antarctic adventure games who between running around the continent's got fat and his girlfriend demands that he loses his waiter, so she'll break up with him. And just the most ridiculously cute Famicom game ever made. And I'm Rob Russo, okay Xerxes.

I do the Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast, the Top Games podcast. I'm on Twitter at GC9X. And, oh, I wanted to correct myself. I said Curser 58. I don't know what that's referring to is Curser 10, and it's by Neko games. You're probably thinking Meridian 58. Yeah, I think so. Maybe.

And, yeah, so that's, you can find a link to the Japanese game obscurities thing and a link to our podcast on the Hardcore Gaming 101 website, probably near the top. And I'd love to hear back from you. Hey, this is Bob Mackey, and I'm suffering from a lot of jet lag.

So I hope I can remember things about myself. One of the things I do remember is that I'm on Twitter as Bob Servo. And I have another podcast. It's called Talking Simpsons. It's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. That's every Wednesday at TalkingSimpsons.com. We've got a Patreon at patreon.com

slash Talking Simpsons. Tons and tons and tons of bonus podcasts. We're going through the entire run of The Critic there, too. So if you enjoy our podcast, that's a place to get more of them. And finally, of course, this episode is brought to you by thick-necked dudes driving their $100,000 sports cars around in circles in a parking lot. I hope you enjoyed that. I certainly did.

I mean, you can just pretend that as the sound of the Vic Biper revving up. Actually, I think that's the Road British out there. Yeah, the Road, for sure. So thanks again for listening. We'll be back one week from now with another full episode of retro Retronauts and at some point with some microphones. The Mueller report.

I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess, from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral.

Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect. the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.