The tunes are good, but not nearly as infectious as the 8-bit Gradius music. There's no excuse for being killed in this one, there's no enemy fire you "didn't see." Being on the PlayStation, the game has a CG-rendered intro, but it's not as good as the intro to Gradius Deluxe Pack. With most of the stages in Gaiden having a black (or almost black) background, shots are more easily discernible against background elements. Shooters with multiple layers of colorful backgrounds sometimes make it difficult to maneuver around enemy fire. Leaving the game in 2D means the series can get more detailed than it's ever been before, but the graphics aren't over the top like some 32-bit shooters. Aside from that, the graphics are spectacular. With two completely powered up ships on the screen simultaneously, the game slows to a crawl. Two-player games do cause it to slow down, depending on how many power-ups each ship has. The size of your ship has shrunk so more enemies, graphics, and so on, can be put on the screen together. There's also an option to save your configuration and high scores to the PlayStation's memory card. Each power-up has two levels of strength, and each fighter has the good old "speed up" and "option" power-ups. A new addition in Gaiden is the ability to edit your power-up gauge, so if a weapon you really like requires you to normally get four power-ups, you can move it closer to the front so it only requires two. Collecting power-up capsules lets you select which weapons you'll fight with. Your fighter powers up in stages, just like the previous games in the series. For the first time, Vic Viper has help defending the galaxy with three new fighters: Lord British, Jade Knight, and Falchion Beta each equipped with his own weapon configurations. As the last hope, four fighters are sent by the Gradius Army to penetrate the Dark Nebula and bring peace to the galaxy once more. The story is about what you'd expect - an unknown force is terrorizing the galaxy and has wiped out 99 percent of Planet Gradius' forces. That brings us to Gradius Gaiden, which is a step in a different direction for a series that has gained Konami notoriety as a master of shooter design. For the past few years, Konami has rereleased its classic shooters as "Deluxe Packs." Gradius Deluxe Pack contained the first two games in the series (the second one was never released in the US), and Konami just recently released a pack of Salamander games (aka Life Force). US gamers have been without a Gradius fix since Gradius III hit the Super NES, but there's always been a market for Konami's line of shooters in Japan. Games for the PlayStation continued to sell until Sony ceased production of both the PlayStation and PlayStation games on 23 March 2006 – over 11 years after it had been released, and less than a year before the debut of the PlayStation 3.Konami's got a great thing going in Gradius - shooters are a dying breed these days, and not many companies can keep a series as consistent as Gradius has been over the past 17 years. The last PS one units were sold in late 2006 to early 2007 shortly after it was officially discontinued, for a total of 102 million units shipped since its launch 11 years earlier. The PlayStation 2, which is backwards compatible with the PlayStation’s DualShock controller and games, was announced in 1999 and launched in 2000. In July 2000, a redesigned, slim version called the PS one was released, replacing the original grey console and named appropriately to avoid confusion with its successor, the PlayStation 2. The PlayStation is the first “computer entertainment platform” to ship 100 million units, which it had reached 9 years and 6 months after its initial launch. It primarily competed with the Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn as part of the fifth generation of video game consoles. The console was the first of the PlayStation lineup of home video game consoles. The console was released on 3 December 1994 in Japan, 9 September 1995 in North America, 29 September 1995 in Europe, and 15 November 1995 in Australia. The PlayStation (officially abbreviated to PS, and commonly known as the PS1 or its codename, PSX) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment.
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