THanks for the kind words VG Dad. I tried some new things with this one, and I am glad it's paying off.

Derik Moore thanks man! I had a good time putting this one together.

What? The FC version is hard? The port of the first game is actually harder despite having no boss rush stage, and that's all because you're limited to two Options and the Laser works differently than the arcade original, which Gradius II does replicate faithfully. FC Gradius II is in fact the first game in the series I've beaten and why I started to enjoy a series that I hated with passion. If you want really asskickin' challenge, try the arcade Gradius II - you shall never return alive!

They had to work hard to rework Castlevania 3 for a NA release since it used that chip for some audio and graphic enhancements. I had no idea either.

Actually the VRC4 chip was not in the Famicom, but in the Gradius II cart itself. The issue Konami had getting it over here was the cost as each cartridge had to have the chip. Same thing with VRC6 in Akumajou Densetsu, but Castlevania was popular enough a franchise in Konami's eyes to warrant reworking the game to a less expensive NES mapper chip game, renamed Castlevania III.

Akis Piknis Good information. Thanks for sharing, and for watching.

RewindMike Thanks man! I like them both.

What does a Retron5 count as? for the sake of my video, I used an emulator.

Emmitt Despain Ah of course! The Retron 5 😜

Now I know. Thanks for the comment. 👍

This is one I wish had been brought over sooner. Thanks for watching.

All they should do was to allow licensed game developers make their own mapper chips for the NES and Gradius II would make its way overseas. However, with the US game market crash still being a fresh memory they didn't want to repeat the history so only Nintendo-made mappers were allowed to be used by US and PAL games. That's why Contra was stripped of the additional cutscenes and special effects so it could fit onto a cartridge with a motherfuckin' UNROM board (that is used by numerous earlier, less sophisticated NES/Famicom titles).

Having ZERO experience with Chinese pirated carts, I cannot speculate further on this inquiry. Sorry.

The famicom had an audio pass through or something where the carts had special sound chips and the NES didn't have that feature. They could have nerfed the audio and brought it over. This was true of contra ports and Castlevania 3.

No, VRC4 doesn't enhance the audio of the Famicom, the soundtrack you hear in Gradius II is glorious work by Hidenori Maezawa, who also arranged the legendary sountrack of Contra for the home version. And this particular mapper, first and foremost, expands the memory available to the console as well as adds certain other gimmicks such as four-directional scrolling, something Nintendo's MMC3 does but Gradius II came out before the first game using this chip was released. For the NES, Nintendo only allowed mappers and PCBs manufactured only by them, whilst in Japan developers were free to make their own expansion hardware and of course Konami, being a seasoned arcade manufacturer had been leading in this field. They had a thing for custom cartridge hardware for other systems such as the SCC chip found in several games for the MSX2 line computers. Man, Konami was really THE shit back in the 8-bit and 16-bit era.