If I ruled the world, saying anything bad about 80's/90's era Konami would carry the death penalty.
I know- it's not something I was expecting to feel, but compared to an earlier game like Xevious, I just don't rate it so far. I mean, to get past the first guy, you take a certain position and just keep pressing fire the stop the lava balls getting you. There's no rhythm or movement in it at all. And if you die in certain places, the game is hopelessly hard, as you don't have the weapons to carry on to the next stage. I'll keep playing, but It's not looking great right now.
I think there is more to the design here than you are giving credit for. Sometimes the path of least resistance is not the most obvious one.
The first boss is a chump. You actually don't sneed a SINGLE POWER UP to defeat him. That's right, not one. If you want to school him, go immediately to the upper right hand corner before the lava comes. Hide there until it stops. Be careful not to touch the rocks up there, though.
After the lava stops, drop down. It will take 4 or 5 carefully placed hits to own this weasel. You need to aim for his exact middle. There are three or four barrier-things that protect the inner core. These take one hit each but you need to be precise with your shots. One, two, three, they're gone. Now as soon as the core turns blue land a hit or two on it and he's dogmeat. Again, you can do this easily without a SINGLE power up.
Gradius for PCE is better than Gradius in the Arcades! We(The Turbo Loyal) Got the best Gradius Ever IMO.
Ah, but what about the slowdown? It's pretty bad at times.
I find you'll only experience this if you're using the "Double" weapon and have 827,456,980 options around you. I tend to use the laser weapon most of the time which isn't as prone to cause slowdown and is actually a better weapon for most things. I also try to take it easy on the options since too many can clutter the screen and make it easy for me to lose track of my ship. There is one place in stage 4 the "Double" weapon is a must though.
