![]() The game isn't worthless, but it is a bit of a letdown. You can even show off your general badassery (hey, it's a perfectly cromulent word!) with an online ranking mode. ![]() ![]() It's still a shmup and gathering power-ups can give you that badass feeling that only Japanese shmups can. It gets more enjoyable if you turn on autofire and stick with it for a while. So what's good about this game? Well, the basic gameplay is intact. The configuration screen is a bit convoluted, but it's there. (Sorry Konami, turbo-fire is not standard on controllers anymore!) Thankfully, there is an option to turn on rapid fire. This is a strange omission that nearly had me tearing my hair out. Oddly, the game comes configured without autofire on. If you lose your power-ups, you're going to find it difficult to move forward. The game retains the classic challenge of the Gradius series, which can be summed up like this: If you screw up even once, you lose all your power-ups. I died quite a few times because the Vic zipped too quickly in the direction of movement, slamming me right into an enemy or wall. This makes the ship jerky at higher speeds, thus making it difficult to properly judge your movement. The control scheme appears to rely on full pixel units for movement with no acceleration/deceleration curves. You can use the speed-up power-up to move faster, but the improvement is not without issues. If you've played a shmup any time within the last 20 years, you're going to be frustrated with how slow the Vic Viper is. Which is both its strength and its weakness. It's very much a throwback to classic Gradius. What about the gameplay? Well, it's decent. Modern MIDI music sounds better than the FM synthesis shown here. In result, it sounds dated and not particularly impressive. It's bright, it's cheerful, not too grating, but it's obviously intended to evoke the feel of the NES/C64 days. But they seem to have decided to take the easy way out. (!) If Konami had redone the artwork in a higher resolution and used the Wii's graphical capabilities to smooth it out with proper alpha-blending, this game would look incredible. In fact, it appears that Konami may have reused some of the artwork from earlier games. At 480p, you can make out the individual pixels without much difficulty. I had high hopes for the graphics based on the Youtube videos, but the truth is that Konami didn't put much effort in at all. Instead, they simply stretch the image making its 16-bit graphics look even worse. Konami didn't even bother to extend the viewing area of this side scrolling shooter for widescreen TVs. While harsh, Gabriel has pretty much nailed it. I'll be playing despite these crappy graphics, definitely not because of. Don't disgrace your classic franchises anymore with this kind of visual crap. Even cutting the Wii slack for having to realize this game in limited storage capacity doesn't excuse it. They looked like this because the technology sucked. Games didn't look like this back then by choice. Compared to R-Type Dimensions, Omega Five, or Triggerheart Excelica, this title is absolutely laughable. It's a modern game which was intentionally crippled to look like a 20 year old game. From that perspective, it's hard to find fault with it. And I've paid to download quite a few shooters from the Virtual Console service which were only a couple of dollars cheaper. If I were to view it as a classic game for something like the SNES or SegaCD, it seems worthwhile.
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