Posted on March 16th, 2008 by JMT.
Categories: Articles.
I just picked up Gradius III and IV for the PS2.
At first I thought something was wrong with the system. There was audio playing during the opening CG cinema, but it all went silent when it launched into the games.
Eventually I figured out that when the game is in the arcade emulation mode, audio is only output via the analog audio. There is no audio coming out of the digital optical output.
How is this even possible? I thought that that was a system feature, I didn’t think that a game itself could enable or disable the analog/digital audio output independently.
Also, the games seem to have some control flaw. Once you gain a couple of points of speed, the motion feels just too quantizes. When you tap UP, even lightly, the ship jumps up too far (jump distance is of course proportional to speed). Also, the diagonal motion feels awkward, like it’s jumping into a diagonal position instead of smoothly flying.
Scrolling shooters, even when you’re at faster speeds, should have solid ship motion. Holding down a direction may go faster, but you should be able to tap lightly to get a shorter motion. And the diagonal motion should be more proportional, and not feel like such a jump.
In comparison, the SNES version of Gradius III doesn’t have these control problems. but the SNES version is a modified game, and not the original.
Does anyone know if the original arcade had these control flaws too? (In which case, the PS2 is just correctly emulating the original arcade flaws).
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