Gradius III (Arcade/PS2) - 1-ALL Clear (Wait Level 0) - 590,020 to 2-1
4Just when it seems like I've run out of things to do with the Gradius games, I'm reminded of another challenge I haven't yet attempted: clearing this game without slowdown.
For the uninitiated, Gradius III (both its arcade and SNES counterparts) is quite notorious for how much slowdown occurs when too much activity is on screen. The PS2 and PSP ports of the arcade version have a "Wait Level" option that controls how much slowdown is emulated by the game. By default, it's set to 2 (the highest level), which is the closest to the arcade original, but you can also set it all the way to 0 for no slowdown at all.
As you could expect, this greatly bumps up the difficulty of this already punishing game. Areas like stage 2, stage 7, and Crystal Core become so much harder without the convenience of being able to lag the game to make navigating through everything easier, and when you're so used to occasional framerate drops throughout the game, playing at full speed the entire time can be jarring and offputting. Nonetheless, a few people have managed to 1CC the game without slowdown before, most notably @PEG back in 2014 ( • Gradius III (Arcade/PS2) Full Run on Wait ... ), and with Gradius being at the forefront of my mind since the release of Origins last month (how has it already almost been a full month?), this seemed like a challenge I should try out.
And, well, I got some heavy beginner's luck here. Before this run, I did a couple of unrecorded test attempts, and I happened to pull it off on my second attempt (with the first dying to stage 2). That run was far cleaner than this one; the stage 7 deaths were expected, but I got stuck on Choking Weed for quite a while (honestly, it's kind of a miracle I was able to time it out at all). Thankfully I got a second try crystal stage and no-lifed stage 10, so in the end I still pulled it off, which was my only real goal for this challenge. I've used the Gradius Origins Training Mode feature to practice certain segments of this game (particularly the cube rush and the final checkpoint of stage 10), and I definitely felt it paying off here. It's kinda surprising how this didn't take anywhere near as long as I expected it to, but hey, I'm not complaining.
Played on my PS2.
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