Is that good
(It's not very good, I can do better at home gradewise if nothing else. In my defense I was adjusting to a new control surface?)
They had everything I was looking for here! Gradius II, Salamander/Lifeforce, Gradius III. The cabinets were all modded for auto fire, with little knobs to adjust autofire rates. My RSI appreciates it.
NES Gradius II was Japan exclusive for mapper reasons; it is lightyears beyond the US Gradius. But it turns out when this impossible-feeling NES title is a pale shadow of the arcade version. I have no words for the scale of this thing.
Now, Gradius 3 on the other hand.
I learned things. About the world, and about myself. I thought I was good at Gradius. I am not good at Gradius. I am nothing.
The Gradius III for Super Nintendo is a cheat. A lie. The world made soft and survivable, for us fragile fleshy things. The true Gradius III, the arcade Gradius III, is not for beings of flesh. You must ascend to something greater to survive in that space. I spent $9 and could not escape level one.
So this is "Quartus", the game that asks the question "what if Tetris were a shmup?". It does *not* ask the question "*should* Tetris be a shmup?"; and for this hubris, I love it.
EDIT: That is a typo, it is Quarth
Oh, arcade Gradius III is a bullet hell game. It's fuckin INSANE. Supposedly, you can unlock that mode by hitting 'A' very very rapidly at the title screen on the Super version, but I could never get it to work.
I do remember loving the music. Wonderful music. TBH, I play it every now and then almost exclusively for the music and a pretty distraction (I love the level designs, too). I cannot play fast twitch or real bullet hell games, so I don't even bother going on anything but Normal. 😅
They had some VERY good t shirts here, but this lead to only frustration for me as
- City Connection shirt but no City Connection cab
- As with every graphic tee I've seen in Japan, and in general almost every graphic tee in nerd space, only the unisex cut!! No baby tees, no tanks. How do you make a City Connection shirt that girls cannot wear!! How *dare* you!!
The Nintendo Store has the same problem.
Oh, and speaking of the Nintendo store—
I am about to make an *extremely* poor financial decision.
Ooooooh. I too would make a poor financial decision.
I don't gamble for money but I'm a sucker for randomised trinkets.
Which one(s) did you get?
@The4thCircle Actually, this is just about everything I'd hoped for.
The only thing I'm missing from the set that I actually wanted is an AB from an NES controller. But my estimation is that if I were to play the gacha until I got that particular item, I'd have spent more money on the gacha than it would cost to buy the AB by itself on ebay or something. EV is everything.
Cool you got the best one (analogue stick from a N64 controller).
https://jp.mercari.com/item/m77521225636
Need to count time to make sure the person ships if to you on time (if you’re in a place a week that should be good enough, usually people are good enough to do a couple days especially if you message them)
@The4thCircle Update: ヤッタ!
(It turns out the Japanese local equivalents of eBay are really good…)
So uh.... What search term should I use if I wanted to find one of those gacha N64 analogue stick units online?
@mcc the autofire mod sounds pretty sick.
and gradius 2 is a blast, i have the saturn port which i think is pretty accurate to the arcade?