[SNES] Gradius III SA1 - Arcade Mode Clear (No-Miss) - 578,400 to 2-2 

Turn on captions for some extra comments.
Gradius III is the third game in the famous Gradius series. It first came out in arcades in 1989 and quickly became infamous for its absolutely brutal difficulty.
The game was then ported to the SNES in 1990. In response to the difficulty of the arcade version, the entire game was rebalanced and redesigned to be much easier.
It was redesigned so much in fact, that it's basically a different game now. Stage layouts are vastly different and entire stages were replaced with new ones even.
However the game was plagued with an obscene amount of slowdown almost all of the time, which turned a lot of people off from playing the game.
In an attempt to remedy this, SA1 was made. SA1 is a hack that came out recently which removes all the slowdown and graphical glitches from SNES games.
It makes the game much, much harder as a result, but it's also a lot more smooth and fun to play.
Arcade mode is the hardest difficulty in the game. It's hidden away in the options actually, you need to highlight 'Game Mode' and then press A 16 times in a second to unlock it.
Arcade is significantly harder than Hard and even adds a few extra surprises. The rocks in stage 3 and the laser turrets in stage 9 are now invincible, likely a nod to the Arcade version.
System is your standard Gradius system. Picking up powerups moves the slider in the powerup meter and you press the button when you want that specific powerup.
A common technique to use is to keep the slider on the Shield powerup, so you can replenish it immediately when you lose it.
The more speed you have, the more spaced-out your options will be as well. This gives you more screen coverage at the cost of making it harder to dodge.
Something that wasn't in the arcade version is the inclusion of blue powerups that give you a mega crush to destroy all enemies on screen.
These appear somewhat randomly and are quite annoying honestly, as they can mess with your powerup route.
Reduce is very good in this version. It gives you two free hits while also decreasing your hitbox significantly. You barely get any i-frames though, so you still need to be careful. If you get hit once, you grow a tiny bit with a bigger hitbox and the 2nd hit will revert you back to normal size.
The smaller size makes it much easier to dodge and there are also several Reduce-exclusive safespots in the game too. For safespots you have to keep all three ship sizes in mind.
Should also mention that there are a lot of static patterns in this game, but the static pattern changes completely depending on rank. Patterns are different between Normal/Hard and Arcade/loops. Patterns are also different if you died and lowered rank. So safespots that work on Normal/Hard can not work on Arcade/loops and vice versa.
If you die you lose all your powerups and recovering is quite hard, especially with this hack. You get a lot of score extends at least.
Got a Twitch highlight this time for those that want to see it:
www.twitch.tv/videos/45277776...
(Different No-Miss because I messed up the recording and had to do it again.)
Instructions and download for the SA1 hack are here:
github.com/VitorVilela7/SA1-R...
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