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Thursday 24 January, 2008
Entry #2:
GAMEPLAY:
Once I decided to check the options screen to see if there was a way to adjust the difficulty, the game became a heck of a lot more fun. The gameplay was changed considerably. On easy mode, many of the enemies that were at your throat on normal simply fly by as if saying "Hello, player whom I'm supposed to kill, how are you today?" Dodging projectiles became simple. Attaining power-ups was no longer a chore. I was able to get to the third level without losing a single life. I wouldn't have even dreamed of doing that on "normal" mode. Pfft, normal...more like "nor-hell"...
DESIGN:
The designers of this game must've had a field day on the testers. I feel sorry for the guy whose job it was to play it on hard mode. The game requires the ability to look in more than one direction, which human eyes simply can't do. Enemies mostly come from the right of the screen with a few exceptions. Unless you completely destroy every last one, you've got a lot of work to do. If you, by chance, let an enemy get past you, you have to contend with the enemies coming at you from the right, and the enemy that got past you along with his bullets. Let more than one enemy get past you, and you've ruined your life. The thing that makes this a prolem is that a collision with enemy units results in instant death. At this point in gaming history, they didn't like the idea of a "life bar" or a "health system" because that would be too FUN. So you can't go back to kill the guy you missed, you just have to grow another set of pupils. Sounds easy right?
With design like that, there's no skill involved, only memorization. A monkey can memorize stuff (not as much stuff as in Gradius, though), so all you have to do to be good at this game is memorize the locations of all the enemies, when EXACTLY do they appear, and what do I need to have to kill them.
The power-up tree is the unholy union of genuis and "effing retarded". The first branch is always "Speed Up", and without that, the game would literally be impossible. You have to be at a certain speed to get to the enemy locations on time in order to prevent them from getting behind you. And if you suck too bad, the game will highlight the Speed Up brach when you restart, because the game knows that if you don't speed up at least once...YOU HAVE NO FRIGGIN' CHANCE!
The first boss on normal mode CAN NOT be defeated unless you've earned the laser weapon and a couple of "options" (little balls that mimick your weapons). Well, it could, it would just take a little less than a MILLENIUM. The object of the game then becomes "speed up" or "get the laser", instead of "get to the end".
Gradius has a lot of things going for it. Even though it's completely unforgiving, it can still be pretty addictive. I still think Contra's Konami's best shooter series, though.
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