While there are stages and bosses in Gaiden from the first three games, there's plenty of new stuff. Speaking of familiar faces, the enemies and bosses in Gradius Gaiden are a mixed bag of old and new. Konami hasn't changed many of the game's sound effects, which will be familiar to fans of the series. In the options screen, you can choose to have a male or female announcer tell you what power-ups you've selected, alert you to boss attacks, and taunt you when it's "Game Over." There's even a Star Wars-style scrolling story that plays if you let the game's demo run. 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. 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.
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