GRADIUS 2 REVIEW - July 1993
| So there you are. You've invested £300-odd in a brand-new grey import
Turbo Duo, you've bought a new table to put the TV on so you don't have to sit with your
nose pressed against the screen (what IS it with the bloody Japanese and their ridiculous
six-inch joypad leads?), you've scoured the small ads to actually find yourself a copy of
a game to play on it, and what have you come up with. Oh great, Nemesis again. Hardly the
state of the art, is it? Essentially a 1985 8-bit shoot-'em-up, spiced up with different
levels, but with the gameplay more or less unchanged. The words 'money', 'waste',
'complete' and 'of' spring immediately to mind. But wait. Nemesis (oh alright, if you really must, 'Gradius') was a truly groundbreaking shoot-'em-up, and a bloody brilliant one at that. This is actually a version of Vulcan Venture, the third coin-op in the 'Gradius' series, and it comes complete with all the fantastic 'flaming fireball planets' and 'moving ice-block maze' sections (and without slowdown, no matter how much is going on onscreen - except, bizarrely, early on when the big snaky plants with Venus Flytrap heads appear) that you know and love. Many of the levels will be familiar to anyone who's played the SNES' Gradius 3, but all the more fun for the more-or-less constant speed. The only bugbear here is the slightly uneven difficulty - even on 'Easy', it's really terrifyingly hard towards the end, and if you do get killed (as you will), your chances of building up any power-ups again and making further progress are minimal. But then, maybe that's just extra encouragement not to get killed, yes? The whole thing is topped off with some truly fabulous CD sound, using Roland's Sound Scape system which, if you play with headphones on, gives you a truly frightening surround-sound experience. The music and speech itself is great, as you'd expect from a 'Gradius' game, and basically the whole thing's still more fun than practically any other shoot-'em-up on any other system. It won't win any technical awards, but for pure gameplay, you can't do better than this. |
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