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Friday 25 January, 2008
Gamelog #2
Personal Gameplay Critique:
As the Gradius III progressively gets harder, Vic Viper’s customizable upgrade-set keeps this game a synch. With the help of several rewarding power-ups, players are able to improve and upgrade their ship to make it virtually unstoppable.
Gradius III’s reward system is what earns the game its rank on the podium. By killing specific rows of enemy starships or by destroying any orange colored starship, players are left with flashing orange “power-up” thingies at the site of death. These “power-ups,” are meant for the player to accumulate and spend accordingly on ship upgrades. Each ship upgrade is separated into 7 levels of classes. Within 6 of these classes (“Speedup” does not count) lie 4 different ship upgrades, which the player must select wisely before the game even begins (players will be stuck with this upgrade throughout gameplay). As the players accumulate power-ups they can either spend or save, depending on which class they want to upgrade. Each power-up only increases by one level at a time and upon receiving a power-up at lvl7, the power-up loops back to lvl1. The classes and an explanation of each are listed as follows…
• lvl1 Speedup *5 - (speeds up the ship)
• lvl2 Missile *1 - (An additional weapon. Useful for enemies cruising along the top and bottom of the screen)
• lvl3 Double *1 - (Adds an additional machine gun [Vic’s Stock Weapon], but removes the Laser upgrade)
• lvl4 Laser *1 - (Turn Vic’s main attack to lasers, but removes the “Double” upgrade)
• lvl5 Option *4 - (Adds an orange ball that hovers around Vic and copies all its attacks [including missile]!)
• lvl6 ? *1 - (Player decides whether Vic adds a protective full-body force field, reduces Vic’s size, provides a frontal protection shield, or generates a rotating protection shield)
• lvl7 ! *1 – (This class is weird for me to explain, because it’s composed of 4 random/useless skills)
“*”- Shows how many times players are able to upgrade the specific class. (ie. Option may be upgraded 4 times)
I won’t go into details about the 4 specific upgrades within each class, but I personally beat the game with 2 levels of speedup (most of the game), hawk wind missile, E-laser, circular rotation option, reduce, and speed-down. (Tap "B" for semiautomatic E-laser when plowing through a level and hold "B" to destroy bosses) This combination brings new meaning to "Haxxorz."
Despite its amazing reward system, Gradius III also has amazing creativity as far as level design and enemy design. Each level contained new themes, new environmental obstacles and new enemies. An often overseen famed gameplay feature of Gradius is its centralized aiming. Each detailed boss requires players to aim accordingly (typically at the blue orbs for spaceships or some random body parts for the monsters) while maneuvering in order to kill the boss and stay alive. However, I sometimes found myself baffled at certain boss battles that did not utilize the “blue orbs,” as the centralized aiming point. For example the big brained final boss was just randomly defeated by me flying around the screen.
Another thing that I noticed during gameplay is that it would really suck if I died. Like its Konami bretheren Contra, Gradius doesn’t have too much mercy. Gradius’ death penalty strips Vic from all upgrades and puts him back at the last achieved checkpoint.
Throughout the game, Gradius III kept me enticed and encouraged me to keep playing. Regardless of the repetitious maneuvering and my imbalanced spaceship that obliterates bosses in a matter of seconds, I enjoyed devastating level upon level just to see how hard Gradius was really going to get. Another interesting point in the game was towards the end, in which I had to face 5 bosses in a row. After defeating the bosses another level began and it gave me incentive to play on. In reality, the reward system is what made Gradius III fun for me. However, even though I maxed out Vic’s upgrades by the second level, Gradius kept me on my toes for more action and adventure.
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