You want some Gradius? Come get some Gradius. I think it's pretty safe to say that the Emotion Engine isn't terribly taxed by the demands placed upon it by Konami's retro collection, but serious shoot-em-up fans will not, as they say, be counting. Now it's finally home, on a console that can very clearly do justice to the arcade original, and it's got an exact arcade port of its cousin Gradius III in tow (since the SNES version was just this side of perfect). Gradius IV did its thing in Japanese arcades, but due to evident technical difficulties, it never made it home to the PlayStation or any other console. The original Gradius and its sequel, Life Force, both made it to the NES, and Gradius III subsequently saw a cracker of a home port released in the early days of the Super Nintendo, but after that the flow of Gradius ceased. Gradius, for the younguns, is one of the oldest classic shooter series, having originated in the arcades back in the early-to-mid 80s and subsequently developed a console following on the MSX, Famicom, and Nintendo Entertainment System. Konami's pride and joy in the early Reagan administration, the Viper shot up his share of bad guys in his prime, wasted everything from big-ass germs to giant floating Easter Island heads and came back for more. There were some famous spaceships way back when, but we'll always remember one of the first ones to have a name: the legendary Vic Viper.
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