There are occasionally games that remind us that the enjoyment of a shooter doesn’t have as much to do with crazy, intricate graphics and spectacular explosions as some may think. When was the last time someone said “The controls were awkward, the combat slow and boring, but the rendering of the debris when I blew up the mothership made this a great game?” If all we wanted were ships with real life detail and eye-candy fire fights we could watch the myriad of sci-fi movies that have these things.
There are occasionally games that remind us that the enjoyment of a shooter doesn’t have as much to do with crazy, intricate graphics and spectacular explosions as some may think. When was the last time someone said “The controls were awkward, the combat slow and boring, but the rendering of the debris when I blew up the mothership made this a great game?” If all we wanted were ships with real life detail and eye-candy fire fights we could watch the myriad of sci-fi movies that have these things.
Gradius and Gradius II are not games for people who buy their games based on how good an imitation it does of a sci-fi movie with a multi-million dollar budget. If you see a box with the words “deeply engrossing story” or “beautifully
rendered vistas of reality” and immediately reach for your credit card, these are probably not the games for you.
Instead, these games are what all shooters should aspire to be. Each is an incredibly entertaining battle through overwhelming odds. There is no point at which one feels as though the enemy lets up, and no level that one feels is not an achievement. They have an intuitive system of controls that is quickly mastered, allowing the player to jump into the game and get very quickly to the point where no thought is required to dodge and weave while blasting away at the hordes of enemies, engaging newly acquired power-ups via the weapon selection bar.
And you will need those power ups, especially the ones that let you shoot in multiple directions at once and give you extra forward guns to cut through swathes of enemies in one volley. Using the word “hordes” to describe the enemies in these games is not an exaggeration. Early on, it will be these swarm tactics that give you the most trouble, because the first couple of bosses (especially in Gradius I, which just has the same mothership repeated) are a bit disappointing.
Once the games decide to ramp it up a bit, though, you will begin to dread the moment when the screen clears of all the little enemies, signalling the arrival of the boss. The later bosses, in fact, are the only part that can get so difficult as to be a little frustrating. Most of the time, dying just makes you want to get back into the fray, but knowing you are coming up against a couple of the incredibly fast or relentless boss levels can get discouraging, especially knowing you will probably be coming into it with a less powered up ship.
Nonetheless, these games are highly addictive, and even when level designs seem eerily similar to previous levels they do not disappoint or feel repetitive. That may be because by that point you don’t have time to think about anything other than how to destroy ten enemies in three seconds while avoiding guns and missiles from multiple angles.
The graphics are serviceable, interesting enough for what they need to do, and they let you distinguish among the different enemy types rather than blowing up one enemy thousands of times. While the graphics in Gradius II are somewhat more sophisticated, you may find yourself preferring the more Technicolor approach of Gradius I, with its bright primaries and pastels. While Gradius II is just as much fun, and its graphics work, it sometimes seems to be trying too hard to get to the next generation of “impressive” graphics as opposed to simply improving upon what its predecessor did.
These games are probably the definitive side scrolling shooters. I strongly recommend them to anyone who’s into space games, shooters, or genre classics.
