or Street Fighter II of side-scrolling spaceship shooters. Gradius is easily one of the most influential games of the 20th century. Until now, however, I’ve never actually attempted to go back and finish what I started with the first Gradius. I’ve completed and reviewed nearly twenty additional shooters since then and now greatly regret my prior view that the genre as a whole was just too difficult and repetitive to be any fun. It wasn’t until early last year when I started to reconsider my longstanding prejudice, thanks to falling head over heels in love with Compile’s NES classic The Guardian Legend. My first encounter with Gradius was formative in that it was enough to put me off the scrolling shooter genre as a whole for decades to come. I must have burned through a hundred lives in about as many minutes and I don’t think I ever saw past the opening level. My initial giddiness quickly turned to annoyance and then animosity as I died over and over in rapid succession, each time losing all of my little spaceship’s precious power-ups. I promptly latched onto that cabinet, determined to put each and every one of those miraculous free credits to good use. I can only assume one of the arcade staff had been messing around on the machine after hours or during a break and simply forgotten to clear it when they were done. Passing by Gradius, I did a double-take when I noticed someone had left a ton of credits on the machine! Around thirty of them! What a once-in-a-lifetime windfall this felt like for a broke kid like me. Video game-obsessed kids actually did that quite a bit back then. My hard feelings date back all the way back to one fateful afternoon sometime in 1991 when I was wandering the aisles of the Aladdin’s Castle arcade in the Redlands Mall, out of quarters and just killing time. I’ve long nursed a grudge against Konami’s celebrated 1985 shooter Gradius.
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