Battle of the Ports - Gradius / Nemesis (グラディウス) Show #94 60fps 

You are joking, right?

Its no joke. The MSX version was amazing at the time. I never noticed the scrolling or had any problems avoiding bullets. The MSX version was much more playable than the NES

@@JesterEric Yeah when I was a kid I never noticed stuff like that. The NES sprite flickering was something I never payed attention too and it didn't bother me a bit.

Yes, this is a another game were retrocore only cares about the "choppy" scroll. This is the easiest Nemesis game, and it isn't hard for the scroll. I grew up playing this game, it wasn't a problem. The problem is trying to play them at 60 hz now instead of 50 hz.

@@reerjgiorge Well, if you can show me an MSX game that looks more impressive than that released before Gradius, be my guest :)

That must have been quite a challenge.

My left thumb was definitely sore afterwards.

When you actually played the game you did not notice the scrolling on the msx version. The nes version had better graphics and scrolling but was a worse game because the sprites were too big for the size of the screen

Believe or not but my first experience of Gradius was also on a Famicom pirate multi cart way back in the late 80s.

Retro Core same but I was play in a gba multi cart

Yep, Gradius is sure on if the classics. It can be annoying at times however it does keep you coming back for more.

I do like the translucent Famicom carts for Gradius.

@@RetroCore Exactly, this is quite unique style cross all Famicom cartridges.

I don't truly know why that happen, but I guess that the music of the intro (Beginning of History) is using all of the Voices of the NES sound chip?

+RyuHayabusa06 Cheers man. Please spread the news about my channel to your friends.

Ken Wheeler that's strange, coz it took me a couple of months to beat it, specially when I was playing other games

Also the NES version only lets you have two Options/Multiples/whichever fans prefer to call them. Sucks, don't it?

I can take or leave the PC Engine version because I have the Saturn version but I do love the audio on the PC Engine game.

No worries. thanks for watching.

Thank! Yeah, Gradius can be a real pain if you loose your weapons in a tricky area. But I don't find it that frustrating for some reason.

That's pretty cool.

Yes I know but it's just the same game but with a warmup countdown timer at the start. The Saturn, PlayStation and X68000 versions feature this timer.

I've play both versions but Nemesis is a little bit harder due to enemy patterns and a lot more enemies shooting at you.

Then again, the bubble system gradius is the ONLY version that Konami ever ported to home console and not the international version.

Ah, you maybe thinking of Salamander / Life Force. It's easy to mistake the two as they are quite similar.

Thanks. Hope you stay and can recommend the channel to your friends.

+Retro Core Yes, i have already have, alot of people in the retro arcade community. I am from Blackpool so have big retro arcade roots.

Oh man, I would go to Blackpool a lot! I'm from Liverpool originally. The best places we had for arcades were the Bright Spot in New Brighton, Southport and of course, Blackpool. Rhyl had some good arcades at one point too. In Liverpool we had two pretty good racdes being Las Vegas and Aladdins Palace. Aladdins Palace has th massive Virtua Fighter 3 on release but some dick smashed the screen only q week later. They also had a cool two player Manx TT set up.

+Retro Core We had Corel Island and Mr B's and Funland 😀

I think it's a case of the rose-tinted glasses when it comes to the Amstrad version. I've though so many old games were great conversions only to play them recently and have all my memories destroyed :)

***** Ooh, that commoent won't go down with the Speccy fans :p

I feel the Amstrad had the same fate as the Amiga with its constant Atari ST ports, the Amgia was capable of better conversions of games but 80% of the time just got sloppy Atari ST ports, much like Amstrad go down ports of the speccy code

Funny how the Amiga got ST ports when the Amiga was meant to be the better system and better sellin system. You'd thing developers would make games on the Amiga then port them to the ST.

Yep. They tend to call it the Contra code too I've found.

Retro Core Since the 1983 North American Video Game Crash, most Americans lost interest in space shooters, including Gradius. Before guns became very prominent in American video games such as from Wolfenstein 3D and DooM to Halo and Call of Duty, Contra was their best choice that's not a FPS due to FPS did not exist in excellent quality back in 1987.

Mario G Hernandez gradius V?

Gunma the retro gamer No, Gradius III and IV. I have those on one disc for the PS2.

To me, i have Gradius Collection on My PSP.

Thanks, Byron Law. I'm happy that you like my videos and channel!

Cheers man.

+TheMathius78 That's because many of the idiots in the gaming press weren't even born when the PCE was in it's prime. Or if they were they must have been about 10.

+Retro Core I was at least 12 when it came out in the US (as the TurboGrafx-16) and I thought it sounded pretty good versus other systems then. I'm sure it comes down to how developers use the capabilities of the hardware to the best they can be, and obviously Konami was able to work within the PCE's capabilities to produce quite an equal port, if not more, than the original. The music certainly has a lot more push with the percussion beats unheard before.

Yeah, the PC Engine version is pretty impressive in the audio department. Hudson were another company that could produce good sound from the PC Engine. Yuzo Koshiro made the Mega Drive sound like a Konami SFC game on Slap Fight MD.

+Retro Core If anyone needs a refresher on how amazing the soundchip in the PC Engine can be just load up Dungeon Explorer. By far my favorite on the system audio wise.

Thanks. I turned 40 yesterday. Celebrated by going out on the town until 6am!

It makes you appreciate what the PC Engine could do!

@@ChristopherSobieniak Are you saying the X68000 is a PC Engine?

@@iwanttocomplain No, I meant that the PC Engine was capable of playing ports of classic arcade titles as good as the x68000.

@@ChristopherSobieniak OK. Well JVC had a brilliant dev team it would appear, going to show how important knowledge of the hardware and programming talent are in these things. I'm playing a game called Kawasaki Superbike Challenge on the Mega Drive (Fusion) and all the opponents are scaled and rotated perfectly smoothly when Sega didn't do that in Super Hang On. It just has horrifically chosen colours and the visor is not rotated. I'm sat here thinking, if Domark rotated the visor and dash, this game would have been one of the most recognised on the system.

That is so true but I have to be careful about what I say when it comes to the PC Engine :p Even with its slowdown the PC Engine port is excellent. I'm still not a fan of that screen scrolling on stages that shouldn't use it :)

I own Gradius III on the SFC. Great game but man, is it poorly programmed or what! That has to be the worst game for slowdown on a console that's well known for slowdown.

+Retro Core Yes I imported it back in the day playing it on a PAL modified SFC in 50hz! Slooow as feck, but that music was great though :)

leeboy2k1 Indeed. The SFC Gradius III music is legendary!

+Retro Core Still, at least they didn't try to compensate by shrinking the sprites down to fit, I see that as a decent trade-off.

+Tempora158 That's right and Xexex was in Goemon 2 or was it 3?

Retro Core Second Goemon game has Xexex

Tempora158 Thanks for the reminder.

NEMESIS

Very cool. There have been a few noodle based game promos in Japan over the years. The most common being the UFO Super Famicom fighter.

Thanks. I'm sure I may have missed some Japanese obscure PC ports.

You can never have enough Gradius ports. 😉

Actually the C64 did use 2 buttons on some games. Not many but there were a few. The thing is, the old home computers were built with one thing in mind. Make them cheap and sell them high! This is especially true for all the 8bit systems.

Yes, but the analog lines were already present on both the C64 and Amiga, companies just needed to make use of them. It wouldn't have cost anything extra because those machines already had them. On the C64, these lines were used for things like paddle controllers, the Koala Pad and mice. On the Amiga, they were used for analog joysticks, although there's no technical reason that they couldn't have been used for paddles as well. After all, an analog joystick is really just a set of paddles hooked up to a handle. Connecting a single button to each line would have been trivial and in addition to the original fire button would have resulted in a 3-button controller. When you consider that the analog lines registered from 0-255 (on the C64 at least), with each one being represented by a single byte, you could theoretically have up to eight buttons connected to each line, by adding resistors so that each button registered a different bit pattern. As I see it, this didn't happen because of a catch-22; Hardware makers didn't want the expense of adding additional buttons when there was no software to take advantage of them, and software makers weren't going to support a piece of hardware that didn't yet exist. I suppose a company could have created both a game and the controller, but it probably wouldn't have seen widespread adoption.

I guess it boils down to the game developers being lazy too.

Might have helped if the systems came with two-button controllers. I think a lot of people were just keeping their old joysticks and devs tend to develop for the least common denominator tech wise

Saturn Owners could play Gradius. Well, sort of. it's part of the Konami MSX collection for Saturn.

At least the TurboGrafx 16 Mini will include both Gradius 1 and 2! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboGrafx-16_Mini

Cheers man.

I was going to cover that but never did in the end due to time constraints :(

I'd never thought of that. Could be a possibility.

@@RetroCore Yeah well if you write gladius in katakana it's グラディウス, Guradiusu. Which is exactly how gradius is spelled in Japanese, So actually it's kind of funny when I see English speakers correct other English speakers for saying 'gray-dius' instead of 'grah-dius'

Indeed they were. Or they just had far better developers.

Is a port.

😕 The amount of times European children must have been disappointed with computer game ports

Thanks.

Thanks for watching, makaras. I'm afraid I don't remember where I got that music from. This is quite an old video. Being a C64 fan you might like yo know that the most recent video in the Battle of the Ports series looks at the Sega game S. D. I. The C64 version wipes the floor with the speccy and CPC versions.

Yeah, sure. There are many shows I'd still like to do. One day I'll get around to it 👍

Saturn got a lot more recognition in Japan as it's clear to see with all the Japanese exclusive titles. I didn't cover the PlayStation version mainly because of time restraints plus I know that Saturn version is superior and I own that :) really though the main reason was due to time. This episode took a total of 11 hours to produce excluding the time it took to encode the video. Wow, 11 hours for a 30 minute video!

This is very true. I remember that story well.

Which is an emulation.

😢😥

Yes, this is so true. I remember reading a Web site about this a while ago.

Salamander also suffered this. Both Speccy and CPC port in the back used C64 screenshot (actually a very good port) but damn, the Speccy and CPC could have been handle better things!

Yep, sometime down the line that will be happening

@@RetroCore neat! ^^

Can't wait. (Please don't use Vulcan Venture. It's a stupid name.)

I think the Master System could have pulled off a pretty good port but no doubt the music would have been awful unless it made use of the FM channels found in Japanese systems.

+Retro Core Actually a Korean SMS (the SG-1000 for being more precise) port was discovered, is even for download in theisozone.com The port itself is less or more than a simple MSX port for the SEGA console, the music uses the PSG Music so it's not that bad but it's not at the level of the SCC sound obviously.

MetalSonicodraco7342 yes, I k ow about this version but since its basically an illegal port of an inferior MSX game I don't really count it. I'd love to see a real Master System port using the FM audio.

Retro Core Yeah, I also will like to see a proper Gradius SMS port with FM sound, maybe using a engine like the one used in R-Type could have done some justice

MetalSonicodraco7342 yeah, a revamped version of the R-Type engine would work well. Oh well, unless some talented Master System fan takes on the project we'll never see it.

None. I'm not really a fan of Gradius. IF I had to choose one it would be uld be the PS2 Gradius 5

Retro Core And why are you not a fan? What other shoot em up series fo you prefer? What was your favorite entry in THAT series?

Homebrew I won't cover unless i know about it.

It's a later sequel, and not a port of the original game.

Wow, I never noticed that. Maybe it was due to the captured video. I'll have to check that out.

+Retro Core I checked another video and the stars are present....

Lord Alfajor Yes, you are right. Looks like an emulation glitch. As if one of the background layers was missing.

Konami sure did make their games tough. I think this is doable but it is a right kick in the balls if you loose all of your power ups.

Well, arcade games. Trying to take that money and all.

They may do in some cases. Better still, system like the C64 can actually make use of two buttons so why not use them? They really were penny pitchers back then.

@@RetroCore Honestly, between this series and Chinnyvision, I get the picture of Euro home computers as being the domain of companies that gave no fucks about delivering a passable product, nevermind quality. Maybe the 83 crash was a blessing, since America was largely spared the trash...

@@RetroCore Don't know, why it would be bad to grab the spacebar. The Competition Pro with Auto-Fire on sitting on my lap, left hand goes to the spacebar. BAM!