Gradius (NES) Playthrough
218A playthrough of Konami's 1986 shoot 'em up for the NES, Gradius.
This video shows two loops through the game, with the second beginning at 18:15. I show most of the game's secrets in this video, including the boot-up test screen, hidden point bonuses, 1-ups, the autofire upgrade, and two of the three warp zones. (No Konami code, though!)
Gradius was a huge hit for Konami, and it was quite a leap forward from the types of games it shared the arcade floor with in 1985. The graphics, sound, themed level designs, and flexible upgrade system were all amazing in their time, and the game's influence can be plainly seen in nearly every 2D arcade shooter that came along in the decade following its release.
Before the nigh perfect X68000 port dethroned it in 1987, Gradius for the NES was the best way to play Konami's arcade hit at home, and it was the only official way to play Gradius on a console until Konami brought the game to the PC Engine in 1991. There was, however, an unauthorized port of Nemesis, Konami's MSX adaptation of Gradius (https://youtu.be/bzw-HhTF79A), for the SG-1000/Master System released in 1987 in South Korea.
This 64K cart was part of the first wave of games that made use of a memory mapper chip to expand the capabilities of the base system, and the game looks impossibly good for a nearly forty year old NES game. The clean sprites, the smooth scrolling, and the sheer number of moving objects on-screen at once all come together to pull off a convincing facsimile of the coin-op original. There are a few compromises - the levels have been simplified, the graphics are less colorful, you're limited to two options at a time, the slowdown is rough at times, and the music constantly gets cutoff by the ear-piercing shrieks of the laser gun - but those are all petty complaints when you consider how far ahead of the curve the game was.
Gradius did for shooters what Super Mario Brothers did for platformers, and like SMB, it still feels great to play now. It's tough but satisfying, it's full of secrets, the controls are smooth, and the mechanics and flow of the game will instantly feel familiar to anyone who has played something from its genre in the past several decades. Excellent game!
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