This took just under an hour to beat. Good game but not as smooth as other games in the series. I had to modify my strategy for the first boss as I could not stay with him and shoot him in the center. The movement of the ship is too choppy. Meaning it moves ahead a small gap rather than fluidly , with each movement. I wasted probably over 10 lives on the first boss because of that.
I set it to 99 lives and had maybe 50-52 remaining when I beat it. When you die you start back at a checkpoint. There seems to be only one checkpoint per level, maybe half way through. I edited out deaths and also when I needed to pause to shake out my hand. The left hand went numb alot during this playthrough. So there may be some hiccups there. Im sure some deaths were caused by barely being able to feel the directional pad, so sometimes I have to shake the hand out.
This game loops after the 5th level, so I stopped playing for now. Maybe I will resume the second loop some time, as I made a save state just in case. Im assuming it would be harder.
Nemesis games are games in the Gradius series just named differently, and under the Ultra Games label in this case, a division of Konami (creators of Gradius).