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Thursday 21 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY:
Well, my opinion is reaffirmed. This game is absolutely abysmal. If I have to play another hour of this game, I might have to destroy my counter. The ridiculous gameplay mechanics with the unbalanced difficulty makes this an infinite chore to go through. I can’t even get past the first level. They only give you about four lives to survive on, which is truly not enough.
The odd thing about the music is that at the beginning and at checkpoints where they start playing this odd blend, you can’t hear the sound effects no matter how much you shoot. Only when it is playing the regular music can you hear the sound effects. This is probably a limitation of the Nintendo, but it is such a relief to get away from the sound effects which are just loud pinging noises in its different variations. Sadly, this is the only good part about the game.
DESIGN:
The game throws you into the ship with four lives to count on. Unfortunately, your ship might as well be made out of junk. It flies like a rock, and requires that you are forced to spend your first power-up on speed, regardless of your skill level. First of all, the power up system is a unique system that is only used in the Gradius series. There is a bar at the bottom with several power-ups that you can choose to activate, provided you have picked up enough power-ups. This would have been a supposedly good system for this game, if it weren’t for the fact that the enemies were incredibly difficult.
The enemies are much, much quicker than your ship, able to fly across the screen at speeds that are hard to keep up with, especially when your own ship flies like a giant rock in space. Often times, I found myself killed by the enemies ramming their ship into my ship. Even their own gunfire is much slower than they are, so much so that it will leave you wondering why they don’t just fire ahead of their ship and rush into it to kill themselves. It would have made a much more satisfying gameplay than this. Your extremely slow rate of fire allows the enemy to also be able to just gang rush your ship. The fact that they are able to gang together and rush at your ship in a straight line while you are constantly firing and still kill you leaves me mystified. What’s even more annoying is the jumping ground units that somehow even faster than the ships, and can jump through the landscaping such as mountains that, somehow, have a tunnel through the middle.
You are given four lives with absolutely no continues, making it important that you stay alive. Each time you are killed, you start back at the checkpoint with only a single power-up to spend before you are faced with an onslaught of speedy enemies. An odd part of the landscaping is that if you go to the top of the screen, you are okay, but if you touch the landscape at the bottom of the screen, you will be killed.
There is not much else to talk about since I can’t much further. My final opinion is…I hate this game.
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