Anyway, the Sharp version of Nemesis '90 Kai features some new levels, and sound and graphical enhancements over the original. I've never played the original, but this game looked and sounded pretty nice to me.
Nemesis '90 Kai
(Made in 1993 for the Sharp X68K according the Title Screen Below. And the original was released in 1987. So how does '90 make any sense? I'm no giant brain doctor, but I think I'm missing something there... Maybe this was a re-release or some nonsense...)
Just to start off, a glance at the options menu shows that the game has 3 difficulty setting; easy, nomal, and difficult. No, that's not my typo, the game misspells "normal," which vaguely amuses me.
Nomal Mode
There's also a sound test, which is a nice feature because Konami games in general have pretty nice music, and this one does as well.
Anyway, there's been a ton of Gradius and Gradius spin-off games, and they're still being ported and made for newer systems, so the gameplay style should be pretty familiar to fans. It's a horizontal scrolling spaceship shooter where you blast your way through a hellish obstacle course of space baddies. Your spaceship can be powered up by collecting red power-up points from enemies, and every 15th enemy or so (not exactly sure) has a blue power-up that destroys all minor enemies. One interesting feature of this game is finding time-limited power-ups at certain points that give abilities like slowing down the screen, a plasma wave attack, and rotating options.
Cool Head Enemies On Level 1
Your ship starts as a horrendous lunker, so I almost always go -speed boost- -missiles- -option- -laser- -option x3- -force field-, at which point I collect enough power-ups to be ready for another force field when necessary. But, that's only if you last that long. I played through this game on normal mode, and it's SOOOO HARD!! I think the Gradius series in general is extremely difficult, and this was no exception. I didn't even want to try for Hard Mode, and I consider myself to be a fairly skillful gamer.
Luckily you can continue as many times as you want, but every time you lose a ship, you have to start from a progress point in the level. I prefer the instant respawning found in Salamander (Life Force), especially because that game lets you keep your options if you're fast enough to collect them again, and I hate having to power back up from scratch EVERY TIME I DIE! Yes, you can start with ONE power-up point on your bar if you had any left when you died, but that's only enough to speed up and then die again. The progress points don't always have easy power-ups, so basically if you can keep your ship powered-up, the game is fast and easy enough, but die once and boom it's over man!
Level 1 Boss Kills Me
So the bosses in this game are pretty tricky, because every time you shoot one of their protective barriers, they release the storm of shots seen above. Plus the whole time they're shooting different forms of lasers at you, and your shots also follow the movement of your ship, which makes dodging and aiming even more complex. There's very little room for error, so it can be a bit of a hassle, although experienced Gradius gamers should be able to handle it well enough.
When you destroy the level bosses, they will take a few seconds before exploding, at which time there's a glowing white spot in their cores. If you touch this spot, you can go to a bonus level, and if you make it through, you'll get a weapon upgrade. I didn't know about this the first time I played through the game, so I tried it later, and sure enough I got a rad laser upgrade that can take out enemies above the ship. I assume that there's a variety of weapons available, but I don't have it in me to play through the whole game again at this time to check.
Bonus Weapon
Basically every level has a theme, like plants, ice, inside a ship, etc. There's about a million ways to die at every moment, and the enemies are relentless. Here's a screencap of level 2, although it hardly does this fast-moving and extremely dangerous part of the level justice.
Near Death Again
Only 8 shots in the screen at the time, but probably about 15-25 right before that. Just so much to avoid. Also many enemies, like the plants in this pic, enemy spawning stations, and so forth can be destroyed before they unleash a torrent of shots or smaller enemies, but even if you're ship is powered-up it can be hard to attack everything in time to stop the barrage.
One sort of glitch trick that I found was that when you power up, you're invisible for just a split second, and you can't take damage. So if you know you're going to bite it, it could save you just to use whatever power-up you're on. Except Double, cause freaking Double is the weakest assiest weapon ever. Don't know why the space engineers welded garbage onto the Metalion (ship's name), but they must of been drinking the space hooch that day! Don't ever use Double. Just crash. Trust me!
And Get Used To Seeing This
In any case, the game is extremely DIFFICULT, but it's also pretty fun :) I spent a nice chunk of a day getting through this one, and had to continue over 100 times (I know because there's a counter at the end for continues used and I think ships lost). About halfway through the game, there's a cut-scene where a whole bunch of story is explained, but I couldn't read the Japanese so I don't know what's going on with that. Aliens are attacking stuff and you needs to kill them or they be killing you fools. I think it's kind of like the Ghost 'N' Goblins series, where you think you won, but then you need to play the whole game again to "really" win. In this case, the levels aren't exactly the same, but all the graphics are recycled so the last half of the game looks very similar to the first. As I said above, there's also apparently a couple bonus levels that weren't in the original version of this game.
Just as an afterthough, I really wonder why the HI SCORE is automatically set to a freaking MILLION points. It's hard enough to get 100,000 in this game!! Guess they don't want you to put those initials in on your home computer unless you earn it!
I'd give this game a 7. It's not for everyone, and it can be pretty repetitive and super-challenging. It also has great sound, and it retains it's fun even though it's moronically hard. The graphics are really nice, and it was cool to find a game from around the Gradius III era that I didn't know existed until a week ago.
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