difficult, a spectacle to watch, and invite rote memorization by repetition, thus bringing

in quarter after quarter after quarter. So when I put my hands on the PlayChoice, I knew

that it would need shmups. And while Captain Skyhawk isn’t bad, and 1942 is well-regarded...

I wanted Gradius. The Konami classic, now available in my living room, instead of making

me play through to the game center in Legend of the Mystical Ninja. I needed the Vic Viper,

blasting crap apart, picking up those weird Red Lantern power-ups and... slaloming through

a field of spectral Moai heads. Because why the hell not.

That’s right, Gradius. Your goal is simple: Fly to the right, and blow things up, using

an array of weapons including missiles, lasers, and split-shots that give you some coverage

of the top wall. Also featured are the oddly-named options, red balls of energy that trail your

ship and double or triple your firing output. You enable these various weapons systems by

collecting the aforementioned red things, each of which increases the cursor on the

power gauge at the bottom of the screen. At any time, you can “cash out” your power-ups

by hitting the B button, yielding the selected upgrade and resetting your gauge. You’re

probably gonna need a couple speed boosts, two options, and, ooh, the shield at the very

end under the question mark. But all that’s going to take a load of bread to capitalize,

so go out there and shoot all the hostiles! ALL OF THEM. And that’s not even counting

the random volcanoes of destruction. Yes, even geographical features want to kill you.

It’s a shmup, what did you expect?

Of course, you could just cheat. And while you might know it better as the Contra code,

it in fact got its start right here in Gradius: Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A.

BAM. Fully loaded and ready to rock. And when you say ROCK in Gradius, you’re talking

about Moai heads. Inexplicable Moai heads. No, I can’t really explain it either. But

now they’re in my PC-10, singing doo-wop. And I’m going to have to pilot a spacecraft

around them for the foreseeable future, because don’t think I’m not gonna be playing the

paint off of this one. Not if I’m going to get the knack for knocking down the Big

Core bosses inside five seconds to hit the warp. I’d played this game plenty back in

the day, but nothing compares to feeling it on a genuine joystick, with all the clicking

of switches it truly deserves. Sure, this is just a port of the NES version and not

the full-fledged arcade original, but that’s a cabinet and a project for another time.