Game:

Gradius ReBirth (2008)

Duration: 36:30

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4

When I was looking for shmups to buy on my Wii a few years ago, Gradius Rebirth was one of those I got and played. Well, to be honest I am not a hardcore Gradius fan for a few reasons :

-Powerdown sucks regardless of how balanced the recoveries are, especially against bosses. It's usually fun until you die once 'cuz being stuck with the basic peashooter is not a good time

-Most of the earlier and most-played games have very boring black BGs and look very formulaic and "level pack"-style from afar. Not a lot of non-gameplay based "character" either

-Infinite looping. Not like I would go far in loops anyways, but I usually do value it when games actually end after all stages have been cleared once.

Regardless, I had a pretty good time back then going through this game and clearing the first loop. It has actually nice-looking BGs (even the space ones have a lot more detail), doesn't feel too long, and is overall enjoyable to play since the basic Gradius formula is solid. Gradius Rebirth is apparently heavily based on some older MSX/GB Gradius games but I have never played those so I can't tell how close they are

Even though I already cleared it on console, for some reason I felt like revisiting this game and actually recording a video of it in the process. While the WiiWare game allows you to save replays and I could theoretically copy my old console save on PC to play it and re-record it, I couldn't be bothered lol. Also actually playing it again and possibly beating my score seemed like a more interesting proposition.

And it seems like I wasn't too rusty, as I got the 1-ALL back fairly quickly! Even beat my console PB which was 2-1 with 408k. The game isn't suuuper hard if you know the Gradius playstyles and enemy behaviors so it is not that surprising, but it still feels nice. I had some deaths, or chain-deaths even, and had to recover, but at least I didn't die on the Moai boss as I remember that one feeling so sluggish and boring to fight at default power that I used to just reset there in case of a death lmao.

My ship of choice is B, as its tools are fairly versatile and not bad at all for at least a first loop. Ripple doesn't seem useful though, or maybe I activated it in a stage where it has little utility (also it apparently really sucks against that turret wall boss lol, at least if like me you forgot the safespot strats). There are two other unlockable ships as well from what I recall, and while I tried E in the past, I didn't like the different music tracks that play when you pick it as much

Loop 2 started putting revenge bullets and while I didn't fare too badly at first, the pseudo-Gradius door in 2-2 crushed my momentum and I didn't have tons of lives to try again anyways.

There are some secret extra stages you can go through by touching specific hidden entrances in the regular stages (we Illvelo now??? yoooo), and it also should allow you to skip some regular stages. Even though I love the music in those, I wasn't familiar with them enough to go for them, but perhaps it would have been the better 2-2 strat as it bypasses the segment that ended my run. Something to keep in the back of my mind if I play this again in the future

Played on Dolphin (EU version), recorded with OBS Studio
#stg #shmup

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