![]() What’s going on in the game? About what you’d expect. ![]() Whether this technical limitation was the sole reason Gradius II never saw an international release is an open question, though it seems likely to have been a significant factor at the very least. In stark contrast to the “anything goes” Famicom scene, Nintendo prohibited third party developers from manufacturing their own cartridges and custom mappers for the NES. Spectacular as the end result is, the VRC4 itself may have also limited the game’s distribution. Konami relied on a custom memory mapper chip called the VRC4 to push the Famicom beyond its normal limits for Gradius II. It’s not a perfect re-creation of the arcade game, which was one of the most cutting edge cabinets out at the time, but it’s a sight to behold nonetheless. Experienced players will recognize many of the same level concepts, power-ups, and enemies from Gradius and Life Force, just presented with a greater degree of intensity and audiovisual polish than ever before. The Famicom Gradius II is the epitome of the bigger, louder, faster, harder approach to sequel design. As a nice little bonus, I get to play this Famicom port, which is famous for being both one of the most technically impressive games for the system and one of its highest profile Japanese exclusives. Now it’s finally time to move on to the first true numbered sequel with Gradius II. I’ve gone back to finish the original Gradius and even took a delightful detour into the Parodius sub-series of comedic shooters. Ever since I set my reservations aside and ended up having a blast with the Gradius spin-off Life Force in the summer of 2017, however, I’ve been hooked on laying waste to those Bacterian scum in my trusty Vic Viper starship. Much to my surprise, as a frustrating adolescent experience with the arcade original put me off the series for decades. KONAMI-VRC-1 (75) using multiple Konami VRC*.I’ve grown into a huge Gradius fan over the last couple of years. I tested my Famicom games with Konami mappers and got similar results. The eyeball and the skull look mostly correct, as well as most of the border. Most of the bird looks correct when its wings are in this position. There are also some graphics that are correct or partially correct. This is a solar flare which has its tiles replaced by letters and numbers. I found where many of the text letters and numbers are used. This is the escape sequence, where your ship flies through some kind of rectangular tunnel. I'd really appreciate it if this could be fixed. I included some more screenshots below.Īnyway, this is the only official licensed game of mine released during the lifespan of the NES that doesn't dump correctly, aside from a few overdumps that were easily fixed by using a hex editor to truncate the file. The sound and music all seemed correct, as far as I could tell. So the dump does contain the game, just with mostly the wrong graphics tiles being loaded. Just thought I'd update to say that I managed to play through to the end of the game (with rewinding). ![]() An 8 KB save file is also created, even though Gradius II doesn't use a battery save and I didn't select the battery option when dumping. I dumped using the firmware "ntmv2_firmware_verJB6.2.bin" and later with "ntmv2_firmware_verJB6.6" and got the exact same file as output. The correct ROM file occupies 256 KB the dump I get of the game occupies 384 KB. My dumped ROM of the game runs (I haven't tried getting past the first section because the messed up visuals make it extra difficult, so I don't know how much of the game can be played) and the sound effects and music work in the portion of the game I have been able to test. Opening graphic of the player's spaceship, which appears to use the correct color scheme within the boundaries of the ship's form, thus resembling the actual ship's graphic.įor comparison, here is the normal version of the opening graphic. I used the corresponding "Konami VRC4.BIN" CopyNES plugin, and as you can see in the screenshots taken from the dumped ROM, the graphics are scrambled but bear some resemblance to at least the outline of the actual shapes. According to, Gradius II uses KONAMI-VRC-4, mapper 25.
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