![]() ![]() ![]() Not Recommended to: anybody who judges games based on amount of content or refuses to replay a short game multiple times. Very Much Recommended to: anybody who has never played a Gradius game. Recommended to: any shmup enthusiast or Gradius fan, novice or expert. Gradius Rebirth is good, but not an eighth coming of Christ. Worth clearing hard drive space?: Only if it requires removing one or two games tops. Wiimote, Nunchuck, GC, and Classic supported. Nemesis has absolutely no problem with giving you a hundred lives, if that's what you want.Wiiware. And not like in, say, Contra III, where you can go up to seven. ![]() (You can only see the ending by starting from Stage 1, but it's unsurprisingly incidental.) By default, you launch with three lives and absolutely no continues, but you can select your starting number of lives, too. Preemptively outdoing Operation C, you can also freely select to begin the game from any stage on either the normal difficulty or the marginally-harder second loop. Foes and bullets alike pass through the ship harmlessly, and you'll frequently reel back in defeat from what looked like a definite collision only to glance down and realize that you're still in the game. That issue alone could have been a game-breaking flaw if not for the fact that Vic's hitbox in Nemesis is somewhere on the smaller side of minuscule. Years later, Gradius ReBirth would reprise both the boneyard and Stage 2's boss, the Crawler.) The graphics might be a bit too close to those of former games, though: enemies such as the Zub, which love to teleport right on top of the player's Vic Viper, appear nearly identical to power-ups when there's no color to differentiate them. (In fact, Stage 4's dinosauric boneyard is an original evolution of an MSX Gradius setting, and would go on to be emulated in the PC Engine port. The few elements that don't seem recycled, such as hidden bonus stages where you can collect point bonuses and 1UPs en masse, are actually just taken from the series' obscure MSX installments. Nemesis presents an ordinary, if truncated, Gradius experience, including all the expected touchstones, from the volcanos to the Moai. Fortunately, they understood the physical limitations facing them on Game Boy and responded with an unlikely but nevertheless ingenious decision: they made the game incredibly easy. They'd certainly have been remiss, then, to leave out Gradius, their most enduring arcade hit and shoot-'em-up pioneer. In the Game Boy's early years, Konami was enthusiastic in developing portable entries for their most popular franchises: Castlevania, Contra, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - even Goemon, in Japan. But such tiny visual elements could also be easily lost in the blurry miasma of an unlit passive matrix screen-and in games about avoiding deadly moving objects, that meant the difference between life and death. In some ways, the genre was a great fit for the format the sprites typical to side-scrolling shooters already tended to be small enough that they could easily be scaled down to the screen's resolution and still retain a sense of familiarity. And while low-impact, non-scrolling games such as Tetris weren't affected much by the system's visual shortcomings, something like a shoot-'em-up posed an obvious liability. The thing could also be murky as hell, even after you fiddled with the contrast knob. ![]() Likening the Game Boy's screen to pea soup isn't just a reference to the greenish tint of its overlay. ![]()
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