A Shooter in the Dark - Gradius, Game Boy, 1990

Let me start off by reminding you that the Game Boy is hardly the system to host a fast-paced arcade shmup. Like a poor man’s NES with a three-inch black and white screen, the Game Boy is best suited for the puzzle games and insipid platformers that made up much of its early library.

Despite being graced by multiple R-Type and Gradius titles as well as a decent variety of other shmups, the Game Boy did not deliver. Neither could the Atari 2600, if they tried to release Gradius for it, and that’s what the Game Boy ends up feeling like too.

Anyway, I’ve stalled long enough. Now I am forced to actually review this god-awful illegitimate member of the Gradius family. First of all, the music is good. It sounds surprisingly like the 1985 arcade music. That’s the only good thing I have to say about the game.

There is some parallax scrolling which, at first, seems like a treat for the Game Boy. Then I discovered that if your ship runs into one of the mountains, or what look like bunches of grass, in the background scrolling layer, it immediately explodes. Yes, the  background scrolling layer is actually in the foreground. Either the programmers didn’t understand what parallax scrolling means (imagine burning into a fiery crisp when you walk in front of the sun at sunset), or they thought to themselves, “Hehe, it’s a crap Game Boy title anyway, let’s make the game even worse and see if anyone notices.”

Actually, I didn’t even figure out I was colliding with the background layer until the third time I died doing so. The graphics are so lacking in detail that it’s difficult to do the kind of precise maneuvering alongside obstacles that Gradius requires.  Add in evil background layers and the game feels more like a boot camp obstacle course than one of the best sidescrollers ever made.

Like almost all Game Boy shooters, Gradius also has an uneven, haphazard feel to the controls. It’s like there’s slowdown, only ALL THE TIME. The enemies  jerk along the screen dropping half their frame rates, and your ship’s controls have a very noticeable lag. That kind of slow processing power can pass on a platformer (Sonic notwithstanding) but not a shmup, and certainly not one that was so awesome in the arcades it essentially started the entire genre.

Gradius on the Game Boy is like if Heinz started making tomato-flavored mud and sold it to poor people who can’t afford real ketchup. Johnny can’t afford an NES? Well then, Johnny gets to play Gradius on Game Boy! I can imagine that being a more effective punishment than a good spanking.

I honestly can’t tell you how the boss battle is because I died before the boss appeared and don’t care to finish the first level to find out. If the boss battles have any of the same mechanics as the rest of the game, they’re probably not much fun and barely playable.

It’s admirable that Konami tried to raise the quality of the Game Boy library with Gradius, but it’s painfully clear that the primitive handheld simply cannot handle an arcade-style shmup. Anyone who thinks otherwise can go put tomato-flavored mud on their next hamburger.

Final Rating: 4/10
Final Comment: It's playable, but hardly. Bad controls, frame rate, and collision mechanics are a constant reminder that this game asks more of the Game Boy than it can give.