Gradius (PC-Engine version)
©1985, 1991 Konami

Once again, yay for video files that I didn't touch for days before uploading. At least it wasn't as long as the run with bonus stages.

Ah, the TurboGrafx-16/PC-Engine... granted, most of you Westerners probably aren't too familiar with this platform, but it has some pretty great ports of arcade games on it. (I imagine it has some good original games as well, but I only know it for its arcade ports.) They might not be 1:1 recreations of the originals, but they stay very faithful.

Gradius is a shining example of that. The graphics look spectacular (though the colors are a bit on the dark side), the stages are recreated faithfully, and the music? A serious upgrade over the arcade version. There's even a few other enhancements, such as the Option behavior being fixed and the ability to fire multiple shots with the Double at a time, making it a much more useful weapon. And on top of it all, there's an added stage midway through the game taking place in a graveyard, which manages to seamlessly fit. Sure, there's some vertical scrolling required to maintain proper aspect ratio, but it's so minimal that you hardly even notice it when playing. The Laser is also made more powerful (see how quickly Big Core and the Tentacle Golems are demolished)... and also longer, which often causes collision detection issues with large objects.

And that's really all there is to it. Until the Sharp X68000 port and Gradius Deluxe Pack came out, this was the closest you could get to the original arcade experience, and it does the job just fine. There's a "Near Arcade" ROM that was included in the TurboGrafx Mini that, as the name suggests, tweaks some stuff to make it more like the arcade version, but whether or not I try that is not set in stone.

This run was recorded to be a counterpart to my run that uses the bonus stages hidden in this port ([ Ссылка ]), only without using them. Funnily enough, I made it just as far as the last run, despite getting fewer lives throughout. I learned while practicing for this run that farming from Nucleus until it times out actually gives you almost TWICE as much score as taking the bonus stage, which explains why the gap between scores in my two runs isn't as large as you'd expect.

Played using the Wii U Virtual Console.

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