|
Bucky24's Gradius 3 (SNES)
|
| [January 23, 2008 10:11:13 PM]
|
Gameplay:
During the second 45 minutes the game got much harder and also much more fun. I was able to collect enough powerups to get an 'option', which at first I thought was some sort of extra rocket (it's a little orange ball), but is really a nifty little thing that will fire when you fire, doubling your fire rate. The game allows the player to have up to four options, and those, along with a missile upgrade, lasers, and a shield bonus, allowed me to progress quite swiftly through the next two levels.
However, the increased amount of friendly fire on the screen made it much more difficult for me to see the enemy fire (it didn't help that their shots looked exactly like my missiles), and so I never managed to progress much further than that.
Design:
One of the best features that I saw in this game was the ability to use the options to increase not only the rate of fire, but the area that I could cover with them. This made shooting through a swarm of enemy craft a whole lot easier, as well as the boss levels.
As stated above, this made the enemy shots a lot harder to see. However, that could be looked upon as the penalty for the ease of killing, and if so would be a credit to the design, rather than a flaw.
The levels (those that I saw) mostly consisted of the same alien ships and turrets, though there were other enemies that varied from level to level.
The game creates conflict by throwing wave upon wave of enemies at you from all sides, which forces the player to move in all directions, instead of just up and down. On the other hand, the boss fights didn't really seem that hard, but there wasn't much space to maneuver, so perhaps that is more of a blessing than a curse.
On the whole, Gradius III is a good diversion, a game that is good if one has half an hour to kill, but not something that a gamer would spend hours on, trying to beat the next level.
read comments (1)  -
add a comment 
|
| [January 23, 2008 10:10:45 PM]
|
Summary:
In Gradius III, the player operates a spaceship fighting against hordes of alien ships, creatures, and elements of nature. There is no story that I could see, except for a very brief intro movie of the fighter being dropped off by a larger mothership. The one very distinguishing feature I saw is that the powerups are leveled, so to get higher upgrades, the player must collect more powerups, instead of getting a single powerup for a certain power by killing a high level enemy.
Gameplay:
At first the controls were very difficult for me to figure out, though this was probably because I was running the game through an emulator on my PC. Still, I would have liked a tutorial at least. When the game started, I found myself frantically pushing buttons, trying to find out what did what before I was swamped by enemies.
In addition, I found the loadout screen, where the player chooses the type of upgrades that powerups will give them, rather hard to figure out. It was only after the third game I played that I realized that pressing the arrow keys would choose options. Now, I know this probably should have been obvious, but I have played other space shooters where the controls were different (ie, pressing A moved up and B moved down), and the purpose of the loadout screen was not very clear, since I did not start out with the selected upgrades. It was only much later that I discovered that this was the powerup selection screen. For example, choosing if a level two powerup would give me a single powerful missile, or multiple weaker missiles.
At the very beginning of the game, I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn't seem to survive longer than a minute every single time. However, this was fixed by changing the difficulty setting, which for some reason had been set to “Hard”. After that, I was able to enjoy the game much more, since the enemies and enemy missiles didn't move so fast, and there weren't so many of them as before. Not to say that it still wasn't hard. At all times I felt tense, wondering what was just up ahead, and if I had enough powerups to get through.
As I said above, there was really no story to the game. However, I didn't miss it, and in fact felt a little relieved at its absence. Other space shooters that I have played had storylines which were very shallow, or just didn't fit the genre. Having no storyline allowed me to continue to the next level after defeating the boss without having to endure a long cutscene showing me why I was going there.
add a comment
|
|
|
 |
Bucky24's Gradius 3 (SNES)
|
|
Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Monday 21 January, 2008
|
|
