Gradius

I'm continuing on the Nintendo Entertainment System today with the very arcade styled Gradius.  Developed and published by Konami, Gradius was released on the NES in December 1986 (very good year).  It is an arcade style side scrolling space shooter (say that five times fast) where you move forwards gathering power until you face a boss at the end of each level.

Gradius is different from most space shooters (such as Galaga) because of it's power up meter.  The meter is six bars long and each time you get a power up, instead of just getting a boost, your option on the meter goes up.  At any time during the game, you can choose what is highlighted on the power up meter and get that bonus.  An example, if you get one power up, the meter goes to level one.  You can choose to get the level one boost, or wait for another power up and get the level two boost.  It gives a bit more strategy to the game, making you decide about better weapons or a faster ship.  The meter also gives a huge downside to losing a life, because you lose all of your power ups, making what may have been difficult to almost impossible. 

So, because the game is very straight forward, I'm just going to describe the power ups avaliable (I'm also quite bad at the game, so I never actually got to the first boss).  So the options are Speed Up, Missile, Double, Laser, Option, and ?. 

The first option (Speed Up) is easily the most useful, you start off slow.  I mean really slow, so being able to boost your ship's speed is a huge benefit.  You can also boost it multiple times, so it it's still too slow after the first boost, you can keep boosting it.  I know there's a limit to how much you can boost it, but for the life of me I don't know what that limit is. 

The next options until ? are all offensive boosts.  Missile simply adds a downward angled missile to each shot you take, effectively covering the bottom of your ship.  If the missile hits the ground though, it actually starts to fly along it until it goes off screen or hits an enemy.  Double gives you an extra shot at an upward angle as well, much like the missile, except without the ground sliding.  The Lase boost transforms your regular shot into a powerful laser that smashes through enemies (I should note that the laser cannot be used with Double, only one or the other).  

The last two boosts are the interesting ones: the first being Option.  Option gives you an extra glowing sphere that flows you around, it shoots when you shoot and can destroy enemies.  They follow you in a snake-like manner and have all the power ups you have, giving you substantially more firepower.   The final boost (?) seems like it should be much cooler then it is, it's simply a shield that sits in front of your ship.  It absorbs a few enemy shots before disappearing and making you gain it again. 

And so I've played another game and tomorrow is the end of the weekend.  I'll continue with something else tomorrow, maybe jumping back up to another platform.  Adios for today though.