In all honesty, Parodius should have been a Super CD. As an 8 meg, it's impressive. But apart from a fantastic special stage, pales in comparison to the SNES version in all aspects.
The pce port has much better animation, the scaling fx (frames) on each of the playable characters in the pce game, is far better, the huge walking women in stage 2 has more frames of animation, the rotation of the smaller enemies are once again better(more frames) the pig enemies butts jiggle in the pce port, the large female boss who blows bubbles also has better animation,and it goes on and on and on. the first level is far better looking in the snes port, but the 2nd level is a bit better looking in the pcengine game, I ask myself, which is the better game, the one with the extra stages or the one with better animation, less slowdown, oh and the better opening cutscene:), I don't know.... I remember that shmups.com and most of the people who were on the forums thought more highly of the pc engine game, but again I don't know.
BlackTiger
It's a cool game, but much better as a GT title than yet another SCD shooter. We already have Gradius II.
I just did a comparison of between Gradius 2 pce and Gradius 3 for the snes...and let me tell you, Gradius 2 for the pce is a fantastic game, its a far better port of gradius 2 than the snes port is of Gradius 3.