Game:

RetroArch (2022)

Duration: 10:48

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34

The normal clocked footage was also captured from SNES9X since it does very accurately represent Gradius III and all of it's issues with slowdown.

This is a newly added feature to the SNES9X and SNES9X 2010 cores in Retro Arch. It definitely piqued my interest as soon as I got wind of this feature because there has always been one game that I've always wanted to play without the crippling slowdown that plagued many early SNES games, and that's Gradius III. For those who have played this game you know that almost the entire game runs at half speed which I believe we all accepted back in the day because it made a very hard game much more accessible. My brother and I always joked that the game would probably be impossible without all the slowdown. We always used the E.Laser because of it's ability to create a grinding wheel against incoming enemies and it was the best weapon to also bog down the frame rate to better see incoming bullets. We'd say "Light'em up!" and the frames would drop and we would plow through the enemies with ease while avoiding their fire.

Well imagine my surprise when I engaged the overclock feature in SNES9X! I had to learn how to play Gradius III all over again since I've been conditioned to count on the slowdown being present whenever things get heated. I first thought that the overclock had made the enemies more aggressive because they seemed absolutely merciless. Nope. It's just that much easier to see and dodge incoming enemy fire when things are slowed down. Without that slowdown I was forced to rethink all my strategy of how I approach enemies. It's much harder, but it's still alot of fun, and the game now matches the pace of the music which makes things even more fun.

This overclock works very well with Gradius III and Bio Metal, but it doesn't play nice with some other games like Top Gear 1 and 2. Those who've played Top Gear remember how smooth the game ran whenever the other driver would pit. Well I applied the overclock to Top Gear and not only did it run smoother, but the A.I. turned into a complete aggressive asshole and my car sucked fuel twice as fast than on normal clocks. Same for Top Gear 2. Also the game had a very hard time switching back to the main menu after a race. So this feature should be used with the understanding that quite a few games on the SNES depend on it's CPU clock speed to regulate other things in the background. Anyway, give it a try and thanks for watching :)

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