The legend returns. This sequel to the greatest series of shooting games for the NES begins right where the others left off.

This time the battle is even more insane. You must pilot your lone starship into the heart of the Bacterion Empire and destroy the evil Motherbrain. The odds aren't that bad though, because you have 25 different power-ups at your disposal. Gradius 3 is filled with shoot-em-up action from beginning to end. Huge end bosses that take up the entire screen await you at the end of each level. You must blast your way through 11 levels of pure action in order to save Gradius. Dustforce free download.

Prepare to jump head first into the Super NES danger zone in Gradius III, one of the premiere Super NES releases from Konami. In this ten-stage, two-field, multi-scrolling super shooter you man a mega high tech spacecraft through the depths of outer space. To save Gradius and the other neighboring planets from the deadly Bacterion, of course. There are three levels of difficulty, so you can tailor the challenge to your skills. Customize your ship with a variety of super weapons (13 in all) by blasting open special blue and orange crystals, which whiz through the atmosphere. Space fighting takes on an entirely new dimension in Gradius III.

Turning back the clock to 1985, when Gradius first started out as a stand alone arcade game. It looked like a typical side scrolling shooter at first, but upon playing it, was much more than that. Also known as: Gradius III: Densetsu kara Shinwa he (JP) Developer: Konami Publisher: Konami Platform: Arcade (Custom) Released in JP:.

Finally, the 16-bit version of the game that put Konami on the video map. Gradius was the game that defined horizontally scrolling shooting games for the NES. Gradius 3 adds some different features and boasts some new ones, but is it all enough?The game opens with a nice animated sequence of the ship departing from a big mothership and flying away. After picking the number of players, there is a unique weapons-selection screen.

Here there are four sets of power-ups to choose from and two shield types to pick. If you don't like the weapon sets provided, there is an edit mode where you can pick weapons for each of the seven power-up slots.

It doesn't make much of a difference which one you pick, since the categories stay the same no matter what (i.e., the second slot is always a two-way shot of some kind). Once the game really starts, you'll see the same old horizontally scrolling game you've seen before. The backgrounds are great, and there is some nice variety. I couldn't tell which I liked more, the Arabic-looking sand dunes or the spacelike techno level.The enemies come out in the same kind of groups and the power-ups are found the same way as in the other Gradius games. You collect the numerous power-ups that allow you to activate the various weapons and options. The bosses are all large and well animated- this is something we have been seeing with most of the SF games.Now this is the tough part.

Everyone loved Gradius, everyone loved Life Force and those of us that got to play it loved the Japan-only. Now comes Gradius 3, the 16-bit Gradius. We should all love it, shouldn't we?

In the words of the immortal Bartman, 'I think it sucks.' ,The problem is, the game is much too similar to the NES Gradius. The graphics are the same, and the play is the' same. While there was so much room for improvement, Konami chose to keep the: game the same.

Besides the play and design problems, the game has some serious technical shortcomings: At variety times during play, sprites flickered and disappeared, and when the action got too intense, the graphics slowed to a near standstill. This was annoying and should be unacceptable for a $60 cart on a game System that's as well equipped as the SF. We all know how great the Super Famicom is supposed to be but not until now can we actually see how spectacular it really is!

Konami has just make a near perfect translation of the most recent version in the arcade series - Gradius 3! And got it to fit in just a 4 meg cart! Many of the features are similar to the previous games. You can select the types of options you'll use from a list in the beginning of the game; the ground based enemy are virtually identical and the procedure for upgrading your weapons remains the same, but there it ends. Everything else, from the finely detailed graphics, the perfect game play to the spectacular stereo soundtrack put this version of the game in a class by itself!

Gradius IIIAlso known as: Gradius III: Densetsu kara Shinwa he (JP)Developer:Publisher:Platform:(Custom)Released in JP: December 11, 1989Released in AS: December 1989This game has.This game has.This game has.This game has.This game has.The first two games were difficult enough, but Gradius III goes out of its way by making its stages more hair-pullingly hard than ever before. There are no continues either, as no 'easier' localized version was released overseas (well, not completely) as the previous entries, so don't think you can just money your way out of this one. Contents.Unused Graphics Power-UpsThere are eight unused Edit Mode power-up icons in the game ROM. Unfortunately, none of them seem to have been properly coded, so the icons are all that's left of them.Power-UpPrevious GamesNotesMissile-typeSalamander (MSX)Nemesis 3 (MSX)Would home in on enemies, naturally.

This is the only unused power-up that has unique graphics in the ROM:N/AThis would drop floating mines behind the player ship instead of missiles. A similar concept was used ten years later in Gradius IV.Double-typeN/AStandard three-way shot. This could be an early version of the Spread Gun (which can be upgraded to a three-way shot) or an entirely different power-up.Since there's no telling exactly how the three-way shot would work, an icon can't be properly constructed.Option-typeNemesis 3 (MSX)Options would surround the ship in an arrow formation. This was later implemented in.There don't seem to be any graphics for this icon left in the game besides the name of the power-up.Nemesis 2 (MSX)Nemesis 3 (MSX)This would make Options rotate counterclockwise around the ship. Another power-up that made its way into the SNES version.?-typeN/AThe shield in the icon looks larger than the normal Force Field graphic.

Maybe you'd be able to stack multiple fields?N/AThe last unused power-up that was later added to the SNES port. The shields rotate. Whoa.N/AAn interesting concept that never made it to any Gradius game: These Shields would actively home in on and destroy enemy bullets.EnemiesNew Enemies. In the final game, there are two different enemies that come out of the silver hatches in the final stage.

This third enemy design didn't make the cut.Having a relatively impressive 18-frame animation count wasn't enough to keep this spider beetle-looking thing in the final version.Returning EnemiesEnemies from previous Gradius games and spin-offs. Most of the graphics are ripped directly from those games, and it's not clear whether or not they were actually intended to be used in the game. The only exception is the small Moai head from Life Force JP, which has new graphics and was likely meant to appear somewhere in the game proper.EnemyNameGradius.

UrolistOther SpritesThe title screen image is 320×240 pixels, but since the game's resolution is 320×224 the last 16 lines of the image get cut off.The blue screen-clearing power capsules seen in previous Gradius games are conspicuously absent in this one. They did make it into the SNES port, albeit using the same design as the power capsules instead of two separate sprites for each.Two unused enemy hatch designs, both of which have the same retractable base.Two unused rock designs for use in Stage 3's underground section. Even though there are three different designs, the final game only uses one of them. Kind of a waste, eh?Small and large boulders, likely meant to be used in Stage 3's digging section.

Even though they both have special falling animations, the final game still uses the same rock design used everywhere else in the stage. That design isn't even animated!Rock pillars of varying thickness. Could have made good obstacles in the underground section.

Maybe they could have dropped down from the ceiling or jutted up from the floor or something. No such luck, though.Small and large vines shriveling up which would have been used after the Choking Weed boss is defeated. In the actual game, those vines just explode like everything else in this game.A whole mess of crystals. Similar, less-detailed crystals appear in Stage 3 of Gradius II as destructible objects. At one point in development, the Crystal Maze might have been more closely based on the Gradius II Crystal stage.The palette for this object is loaded during the flying crystal section of the Crystal Maze and might have appeared as an added obstacle.

Dig that 12-sided die!The ships from the first Gradius and Salamander are in the ROM. The Gradius ship uses the default ship palette, while the Salamander ship actually has a custom palette loading during the Salamander stage (Palette 16) that's not used by any other object in the game.It's plausible that in the Gradius and Salamander stages, those ships would be used in place of the standard Vic Viper design.

It would certainly explain why the player loses all of their power-ups after being transported to either stage.The volcanic rocks used in the first Gradius games. Uses palette 1B in the Gradius stage which, again, isn't used by any other object.

The developers might have originally planned to keep the volcanic eruption that prefaced the Big Core boss fight in the original game.Small and large blue plasma balls in the same style as the energy balls shot out by Bacterion at the end of the game. It's possible that he was mean to actually attack the player, but given the history of Gradius games' final bosses being completely ineffectual, this was likely meant to be used by some other boss.A strange metal disc. No clue on this one, and that's probably not even the correct palette. Weird.MiscellaneousThese filler tiles are in the Cell stage tileset. アキ means 'empty'.In the previous international releases of Gradius and Gradius II, the 'Option' power-up was renamed to 'Multiple'. Since this game was never released in Europe or North America, this graphic was never used. But oddly enough, this game's announcer always says Multiple when selecting the power-up.High score numbers taken from Gradius and Gradius II, respectively.

Gradius III has its own, larger font that it uses for the high score table, making these graphics superfluous.In Gradius II, players could enter their gender and age in the high score table. This feature was taken out of Gradius III and instead uses the differently-gendered heads from Gradius, but the differently-aged heads are still in the ROM.This lion enemy is used in Stage 1, the Desert level. However, Stage 7, the Fire stage, has an unused palette that matches up with the lion design perfectly.

Considering that the dragon enemy is used in both Stage 1 and Stage 7, they might have planned to reuse this enemy as well.While the Crystal Maze stage in the final game only uses blue crystals, there are palettes for at least four other colors. The cubes on the left are the sprite-based cubes, while the cubes on the right are the tile-based cubes.Palette 1DPalette 1EThe small vines that the Choking Weed sucks up actually use the wrong palette! Palette 1D is used by the Choking Weed's bulb, while palette 1E is totally unused in-game and fits the vine graphic a lot better.Unused MusicThe IDs listed here are internal track IDs and don't match up the ones used in the game's sound test.IDTrackNotes90. (Source: ) Regional Differences IntroThe Japanese version goes through a pictorial history of the Gradius series (the arcade games, anyway) before transitioning to the title screen. Twilight zone roses for sale. In all other sets, the game immediately transitions to the title screen.The actual title screen sequence is the same length in all versions, leading to an odd experience in non-Japanese sets where the game just stays on a static image for more than a minute before the music ends.Title Screen JapanInternationalAll non-Japanese sets delete the game's subtitle, 伝説から神話ヘ ('From Legend to Myth').Beginner CourseThe Japanese set has an additional mode select before the Weapon Select screen. The option on the left is the normal game, while the option on the right is a special beginner mode that ends after Stage 3. Another thing that differentiates them the most apart from the limited stages to be played, is that when the player dies in the beginner mode, they gradually lose whatever power-up they have equipped with each death as opposed to the series' traditional die-and-have-nothing that is also present in the normal mode.Despite the fact that the non-Japanese sets don't have this selection and the player is thrown into the full game directly, the gradual power-up losing routine from the Japanese's beginner mode is actually present in them and is in it throughout the whole game!

So in a way, the non-Japanese versions can 'slightly' (big emphasis on that word) be considered the easier versions of this hellishly hard mess of a game.Select DifficultyTechnical(Normal)Beginner (Intro to game)Ends after 3 stages.After defeating the boss of Stage 3, a special message appears.You've cleared the beginner course.But the world of Gradius is much morethan just that. Now try challengingyourself with the technical course!!We pray for your success.