As a kid, the slowdown never bothered us- it honestly felt like a feature. It' was like going to slo-mo to highlight how crazy the action was at that moment in the game!

I can almost forgive this game's shortcomings as the music is some of the best Gradius music ever, even best video game music ever!

I think Konami realized that the slowdown made the game easier. If you input the traditional Konami code during gameplay the Vic Viper explodes. Sure, there's an updated version that swaps L and R for the left and right inputs, but you get trolled hard the first time you attempt to cheat.

There's a ROM hack of the game running on a Super FX 2 cart and it's finally running at full speed 100% of the time.

I'll always remember the bubble stage. Frustrating yet also wonderful to look at. The slowdown seemed more helpful than annoying there too.

The slowdown was definitely my best friend in this game, especially on that aqua planet!

I think the slowdowns on initial Snes titles are overstated, obviously devs won't know how to push the hardware at the very beginning of a console's lifecycle. In the later Snes games particularly, I notice way less slowdowns in most games even though many of them push the hardware even harder than the initial titles. I concede that the Snes was slower than their 16-bit competitors CPU-wise, but clock-rate alone does very little to determine that. You have to account instructions per cycle, RAM/ROM size and speed, etc... The Snes had a complex architecture with variable CPU-clock, a weird bitplane format for graphics and lots of auxiliary chips so it was less straightforward to program. If I remember correctly the Snes could do a lot more instructions per cycle than the Sega Mega Drive, so the raw difference in CPU speed is much less drastic than you'd think, though the Mega Drive is still much faster, not necessarily only because of the CPU Fun fact: I remember in an interview, the programmer of the SNES port of Another World complained she almost couldn't make it run on the Snes not necessarily due to the CPU, but because of lack of fast memory: "Since Interplay wouldn't pay for a Super FX chip, I found a way to do it with static RAM on the cart and DMA which got me a great frame rate. Interplay wouldn't pay for the static RAM either, so I ended up using Fast ROM instruction. Interplay wouldn't pay for a 3.6 MHz ROM either. So, frustrated, I shoved my block move code into the DMA registers and use it as RAM running at 3.6 MHz. It worked. I got fast block moves on slow cartridges and made a game using polygons working on a 65816 with pure software rendering."

I've woken up to Mechanical Base from the SNES version of Gradius III for 6-years now, and regret nothing. This isn't just one of the SNES's best soundtracks, but one of Konami's as a whole.

This is crazy, this game always seemed perfect to me. For me it was especially sought after because I only got to play over my cousins house.

That soundtrack

I'm definitely one of those fans who looks back on it fondly. Yeah, the breakup & slowdown were certainly disappointing. But the dark sci-fi glow of its graphics and that soundtrack that's burned into my brain to this day really set the tone for what the SNES was going to be about.

Sorry to be "that guy", but Solar Assault came out in 1997. Your videos are truly awesome, though!

Dude another amazing video! And you are the only guy to I have ever heard in recent years to say that the severe slow down in GIII actually aids in making it easier. I got this game back in December of 1991 when I was 14 years old. I was obsessed with Gradius on the NES and HAD to have this game. But because I was only allowed a new game every 6 months or so back in those days I played the living shit out of this and got so good that I can now master a full run in the hardest mode "ARCADE" with almost no death. I still own the cartridge to this day and replay the game every now and again. Great work man keep it up!! Your video on Kid Icarus also struck and emotional and nostalgic cord with me.

I played the living daylights out of this when I was a kid. Compared to the other hardware I had access to at the time (NES, Atari 2600, TRS-80 Model III, and Apple //e), even this on the SNES seemed outstanding. I remember we didn't get a PC until around 1992, and it was a slower 486 with no sound board until we installed one a year or two later.

Gradius 3 for the SNES is kind of a hybrid of the arcade version and Gradius 2. The Moai stage for example plays much more like a remix of the Gradius 2 Moai stage than the Gradius 3 arcade version. Same thing with the speed rush stage, which is also much closer to the Gradius 2 version. Its like Konami plugged in Gradius 2 concepts in place of Gradius 3 concepts that were just too much for a first generation SNES cartridge to handle.

I recently did a pretty deep dive on Gradius III on my own channel, and my conclusion was similar to yours: yeah, it slows down a bunch, but it's ultimately more playable than the ridiculously difficult arcade version. Also, I'm reminded of the time someone told me Space Megaforce (Super Aleste) wasn't that impressive, because "Gradius III doesn't slow down on the SNES." I wasn't sure if he'd ever actually played Gradius III.

That SNES Gradius III speed zone always felt like it was a straight rip from Gradius II, minus those huge mechanical spheres that you had to shoot at in 2's speed stage.

One of my favorite SNES games

Looooove this game. My dad bought an SNES pretty soon after it came out, and there weren't a ton of games, so he got this game so we wouldn't just have Mario. Was a good choice. Brings back such good memories.

This is my favorite Gradius. I've only played the NES original and Life Force (suggestions on the best, anyone?), but this one is near and dear to me. The soundtrack is phenomenal, and as a 12-year-old at the time I didn't care about the slowdown. I actually wasn't made aware of it until years later when I played through Gradius III on MAME. Anyway, great video and looking forward to Final Fight (another favorite)!

The SA-1 mod sure adds an interesting postscript to all of this. The SNES class of '91 ports did feel a little shoehorned due to the slow CPU and lack of Looking forward to the eventual (hopefully!) entry for Famicom Gradius II. Bummed that it never showed up on VC outside JP.

When Sega were poking fun at SNES games in their advertising campaign, it seems weird they never mentioned this game whilst talking about blast processing, they could've compared it to the Thunder Force games or something!

Good time for me. I was in a used game shop the other day and saw SNES Gradius III for $10. I hadn't previously ever owned it. The slowdown is noticeable, but isn't game breaking. Sometimes slowdown can ruin games - but that isn't the case here in my opinion.

You have to walk before you can crawl. Konami definitely fell short with Gradius 3, but they would absolutely knock it out of the park a couple years later with Axelay.

I still have my original SimCity cart from when I was kid. This and SC3000 are my two favorites. Also I really feel like SimCity 3k takes a lot more from the SNES SimCity than 2k does. From the tranquil music and the use of special rewards, etc., It just feels more SNESy than the earlier PC versions.

Excellent video as always. Keep up the good work, Jeremy! As for me, I am so looking forward to the Legend of the Mystical Ninja Episodes :)

Great video! I have a lot of nostalgia for this port. I bought it at launch. The slowdown is bothersome, but it does make the game easier. For a launch window title, you could do a lot worse.

Great video Jeremy, I really enjoy this SNES series. It was a fair overview of Gradius III, for me even though it's flawed it's one of my favourite games on the system, probably because I really enjoy shooters and it was one of the first games I got back in the day.

I'd like to weigh in on those two stages that were cut from the SNES version of Gradius III. My guess is that the High-Speed, StarFox-esque level from the AC version was taken and retweaked to become Stage 7, also known as Accident Road/"The Greased Lightning Round". Or as user @BloodReign1 said, that stage could've come from the Maximum Speed level on Gradius II. As for the Crystal Labyrinth stage, I want to say that it was cut from the game because of the high difficulty level; the arcade version of G3 was some nasty work in terms of playability (game being a bullet hell from the start), but the SNES version still gave players a challenge while being a tad more lenient. Lastly, I see the slowdown of the game as more of a benefit than a letdown, especially when clearing the Bubble stage. A trick I use is spreading out my Multiples in Formation Option mode to get my enemies out the paint. Just my thoughts on a classic shooter I've been playing since 30 years ago 😊

The Compile Test is prove that SNES never had much potential for shooters. Compile made at least one Blazingly fast shooter for just about every system at the time, including Game Gear. Their SNES game Space Megaforce is the slowest one out of all of them.

you know, it is rumored that samus from metroid was piloting the gradius wing when she blew the effing crap out of the final boss... there is a hidden ending where she sucesfully discards her broken ship and uses the bacterian tech to assemble a new ship and suit

It's amazing how Nintendo's most prolific third-party publishers both stumbled in their 16-bit debuts. Despite the issues Gradius III had, it's not as outright disappointing as Capcom's first SNES offering.

It's a bit sad that you only take on stateside released SNES titles, because Parodius (which only came out in Japan and Europe) fares WAY better than Gradius III did. Way less slowdown at an equal amount of enemies, bullets and even more stages than the arcade version. If I remember correctly the PAL version runs even at the same speed as the JP version, not quite sure about that one, though. Still, I love Gradius III. You mentioned it being easier because of all the slowdown which is exactly why I like it. The arcade version is next to impossible for me to beat. The slowdown of the SNES is an absolute godsend in that regard.

That speed maze always kills any playthrough I have of this game dead, it rings true just how helpful the slowdown is

I've only played the Arcade version on MAME, and the SNES port looks just okay. But Gradius 3 was a major step up from Vulcan Venture/Gradius II, which was just horribly frustrating and unfair.

Still an awesome game I still play it pretty often I suck at it but it's fun

Channel is a hidden gem.

Gradius 3 was a head scratcher. The SNES was a powerful system. How did the programmers not shave down some of the game to avoid the slowdown? It was very slow. I will say that the slowdown did help a ton during the intense parts haha

Great episode Jeremy.

Many of 90s Danmaku barrage shooters rely on slowdown as an easing mechanic, going as far as artificially creating slowdowns intentionally even on non-emulated, genuine PC ports and remakes. I'm not sure if SNES Gradius 3 intentionally relies on it, but it surely helped circumvent notoriety of unfair difficulty of AC Gradius 3 (which, in the end of the day, the developer listened to hardcore gamers a bit too much).

With recent romhacks that fix the slowdown, I can no longer beat this game even on easy. The slowdown is a must for me lol.

Been playing since a kid. Finally beat it today using save states on an emulator

Love this game!

Slowbeef has a playthrough of the arcade version which consists of him basically cursing every aspect of that game (he loves the SNES version). Apparently it was rushed out in 9 months. Also as bad as the slowdown is, it's no R-Type Final.

Very good overview, but Gradius III in the arcade used twin 16-bit 68000 CPUs, not a 32-bit processor. Still, good work here.

Wait wasnt Super R-Type out before this in the US?, in the UK Super R-Type was one of the 6 launch titles

The stuff cut from the arcade version were by and large, no great loss. Especially that crystal stage - watching people play through the infamous "cube rush" makes me never want to try another Gradius game. I'm OK with the slowdown too - using it to your advantage sometimes almost feels like it's part of the difficulty curve. A friend of mine recommended I use the rotating options with the charging laser because of how badly that combo taxes the processor!

There is a modded rom version that eliminates the slowdown and, at least for me, makes the game far more punishing in many spots. It's the only version I play now.

Jeremy, I love your content! Keep it up! Super Nintendo has some of my favorite video gaming memories! Do you plan on doing any videos on the Rpgs of the system aside from FFIV?

Another Nintendo only channel? How many more Ninty centric channels are we gonna get on youtube? But hey despite that, your productive value is top notch and your passion and knowledge is very respectable, which is really great. Cheers man, hopefully someday you'll do a Sega Genesis works series as well. All the great retro systems of the past deserve fair, balanced and passionate coverage.

hmmm gradius 3 having slowdown is a feature not a bug, this game is more fun in slow motion for me

The missing two stages are actually the stains of the original version in my opinion

I always thought the slowdown was helpful

This game has got to be one of my favorite nostalgic trips.... so I'm really surprised to take the nostalgia goggles off and realize that the slowdown was because of underperformance... and that it was way easier than arcade. (HOW?! I still haven't beaten it even with constant cheat use) 😰

The only game with slowdown helps you to beat Gradius 😂 Still one of the best difficult game

By the early 90s, it was just a given that some of the best games up to that point were going to get bogged down by sprites, so I barely ever noticed when they did.

Gradius 3 is a good 2d shooter. 😀👍🎮

Looking forward to playing this. Wonder what the final boss fight is like... oh... never mind...

i guess u played with the konami code activated...i do that myself xD

Besides a few exceptions (Darius Twin, Axelay, UN Squadron, Super Megaforce), the SNES was just not a great console for shooters. Genesis and TG-16 were far superior machines for these kinds of games (and I say this as a huge Super Nintendo fan).

Some people might complain about the slowdown, I don't mind it. In fact, overall, I enjoyed this game quite a bit. But I'm not a hardcore shmup fan.

This game was also ported to gba

I wish someone would do a video like this about How and why Konami did Gradius/life force/salamander/nemesis they way they did. I mean, you look at Gradius for the nes, 2 options. Okay, chalk that up to the fact that its a early release game for the nes and they ran into graphical issues. But then you look at Gradius 2 for the famicom. Okay, they figured out how to do 4 options. But life force (nes) only has two, but its japanese counterpart Salamnder, (famicom) it has 3 options. I would declare that Salamander for the famicom is easier than life force for the nes. So why would they do that? Also, why wasn't salamander/life force called gradius 2? I want a mini doc. lol Life force/Slamander (at least as far as I can tell) flies in the face of this theory that games were mostly toned down in America. So i'd like to know why...in a very entertaining video. I know, im lazy.

Waiting for you to cover the Ranma 1/2 fighting games, and Strert Combat also.

I rather enjoy this game. Slowdown and all. And yeah, ironically the slowdown is useful enough to make the game easier that it almost feels like a deliberate feature to make the game more playable. Almost. It's quite funny observing what does and does not cause slowdown. When you learn about how the SNES works, and particularly it's sprite handling limitations, you start to look at slowdown problems rather differently. Consider the second stage of Gradius III and all it's bubbles. Depending on situation you could have as many as 3 or 4 different size of bubble onscreen at once. What's the problem with this? Well, the SNES only allows 2 sprite sizes to be onscreen at the same time. This means that if you have more than 2 sizes of sprite, you're drawing smaller sprites as though they are larger ones, but with blank space (wastes VRAM and contributes to graphical glitching when you exceed the sprite limit on a line), or, you have to compose larger sprites of a bunch of smaller ones. (wastes CPU time since you have to coordinate anything movement of say 16 small sprites instead of one large one. If you think moving 16 sprites as if they're one bigger one is 16 times the work for the CPU, you'd be wrong. Because of the coordination required when moving the bits, it's MORE than 16 times the work, because you have to calculate offsets from a single sprite coordinate to 16 smaller ones, apply them, then write 16 sets of coordinates to sprite RAM. Nasty stuff.) In other words, the SNES has an achilles heel when it comes to sprite handling, and when you see stuff like Gradius III or Super Ghouls & Goblins with their horrific slowdown, it's easy to argue that it's the CPU's fault... But I'm just as likely to think it's the fault of sprite hardware limitations. Have you ever noticed that Super Mario World throws 40+ sprites onscreen at times with NO slowdown? As does Contra 3 for that matter (that game has slowdown, but you can still observe some 40 onscreen sprites minimum with no slowdown), and a bunch of other games? That's well short of the 128 sprites the hardware can draw, but it's still a lot when you consider that Super Ghouls & Ghosts seems to hit slowdown already at 10-15 sprites. My theory is not abiding by sprite size limitations is a major factor here. SNES sprites can (officially) be 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, and 64x64 (some accounts suggest unofficial undocumented usage allows 8x16) On the face of it that isn't so bad. However, By contrast, the Mega Drive supports any combination of up to 4x4 tiles. (each tile being 8x8). That's 8x8, 8x16, 8x24, 8x32, 16x8, 16x16, 16x24, 16x32, 24x8, 24x16,24x24, 24x32, 32x8, 32x16, 32x24 and 32x32 to be exhaustive. That's a lot more, so already we see some cracks in the SNES's abilities. It gets worse however. Of the 80 onscreen sprites the Mega Drive can draw, you can, if you feel like it draw ALL 16 sizes at once onscreen. The system doesn't care. It will just do it. The SNES though? Well it's drawing logic only understands the concept of 'small' and 'large' sprites. 2 sizes. 2! yes, you can configure, as a global setting for the sprite hardware, which of the 4 available sizes constitutes 'large' and 'small', and basically any combination is valid. But nonetheless you still hit that 2 size limit. Consider how likely it is that you'll need to compose sprites on Mega Drive from multiple smaller parts - the only reason to ever need to do this is if you want a sprite larger than the upper limit (32x32) On SNES, you have to do it (or waste space with larger sprites) the second you try and have 3 different size of object onscreen at once. Can you imagine how much of a limitation that is? And how much of a headache it is to work around that if you want to do it anyway? Yeah... Honestly I really think the Sprite engine is where the SNES falls apart, NOT it's CPU. Slowdown more often than not is caused by the interaction of the two, not just the CPU by itself... The problem with sprite limitations is bad enough that I expect if the SNES and Mega Drive had identical processors running at identical clock speeds the SNES would STILL have ended up with games that have slowdown compared to the Mega Drive. Because ultimately the CPU is not the primary cause, it just has to pick up the pieces...

Ah, difficulty. I remember making it all the way through Gradius Advance, and deciding from that point on to play it with one life and no continues. I could get to stage 4 or 5 that way while I was actively doing that a lot. (the worst stage for no death playthroughs is the high speed one, since you almost NEED maxed out speed powerups to survive it, and yet I find too many speed powerups to be unpleasant for most of the game) Of course, Gradius 3 is far more brutal than Gradius Advance, even on hard difficulty Gradius Advance doesn't bombard you with crazy homing shots. Also Gradius 3 has difficulty scaling, which I hadn't realised until recently. Regardless of what difficulty you set it to, if you do consistently well enemies start firing WAY more shots at you, and if you do badly the game goes easy on you and pulls it's punches, with enemies firing little, if at all, and even bosses going down easier than they would if you had been doing better. It's weird that way, in how it shifts difficulty around dynamically...

Rendering Ranger ahd some impressive shooter stages. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/jNejp5ij2rbRY4E.htmlm56s

gradius iii is hardly indicative of what the SNES was capable of in the shooter realm in the hands of more well-versed developers. while the genesis and TG16 may have had more shooters overall, the idea that they were more capable of running shooters i find more than a bit iffy. there isn't a single game on either the genesis or the TG16 that can hold a candle to stuff like axelay or r-type iii on the SNES in terms of graphical capability or otherwise. while the genesis and TG16 may have had more shooters overall, when the SNES did do shooters right, it did them better than any other console of that generation. i don't even think that's debatable. especially when you look at stuff like r-type iii. NOTHING on the genesis came close to that.