Shmups love arcades, and arcades love shmups.
They’re the optimal arcade games: Brutally difficult, a spectacle to watch, and invite
rote memorization by repetition, thus bringing in quarter after quarter after quarter.
So when I put my hands on the PlayChoice, I knew that it would need shmups.
And while Captain Skyhawk isn’t bad, and 1942 is well-regarded...
I wanted Gradius.
The Konami classic, now available in my living room, instead of making me play through to
the game center in Legend of the Mystical Ninja.
I needed the Vic Viper, blasting crap apart, picking up those weird Red Lantern power-ups
and... slaloming through a field of spectral Moai heads.
Because why the hell not.
That’s right, Gradius.
Your goal is simple: Fly to the right, and blow things up, using an array of weapons
including missiles, lasers, and split-shots that give you some coverage of the top wall.
Also featured are the oddly-named options, red balls of energy that trail your ship and
double or triple your firing output.
You enable these various weapons systems by collecting the aforementioned red things,
each of which increases the cursor on the power gauge at the bottom of the screen.
At any time, you can “cash out” your power-ups by hitting the B button, yielding the selected
upgrade and resetting your gauge.
You’re probably gonna need a couple speed boosts, two options, and, ooh, the shield
at the very end under the question mark.
But all that’s going to take a load of bread to capitalize, so go out there and shoot all
the hostiles!
ALL OF THEM.
And that’s not even counting the random volcanoes of destruction.
Yes, even geographical features want to kill you.
It’s a shmup, what did you expect?
Of course, you could just cheat.
And while you might know it better as the Contra code, it in fact got its start right
here in Gradius: Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A. BAM.
Fully loaded and ready to rock.
And when you say ROCK in Gradius, you’re talking about Moai heads.
Inexplicable Moai heads.
No, I can’t really explain it either.
But now they’re in my PC-10, singing doo-wop.
And I’m going to have to pilot a spacecraft around them for the foreseeable future, because
don’t think I’m not gonna be playing the paint off of this one.
Not if I’m going to get the knack for knocking down the Big Core bosses inside five seconds
to hit the warp.
I’d played this game plenty back in the day, but nothing compares to feeling it on
a genuine joystick, with all the clicking of switches it truly deserves.
Sure, this is just a port of the NES version and not the full-fledged arcade original,
but that’s a cabinet and a project for another time.