 Ssssssssssssssss.... ...that's drunk. The Game Boy Advance is pretty much just a smaller, more powerful Super Nintendo, and as such it was the perfect way for developers to make good on past games that suffered due to hardware constraints. Take Gradius 3, for example. It's a solid game, but slowdown comes and goes out of nowhere. There's a crazy amount of flickering, and it was like you could practically hear your Super Nintendo screaming like Goku as it's trying with all its might to get this game to run at all! If you've played a lot of Gradius III like I have, then you'll find it extremely satisfying to play Gradius Galaxies for Game Boy Advance. Hey, how do you pronounce Gradius anyway? Let's check the commercial. Alright, that kinda sounds like Gradius, that's close enough for me. Gradius Galaxies is also known simply as Gradius Advance, and it was made by Konami in November 2001, and yeah, it's Gradius. Same ship, similar pacing, similar power-up structure, a lot of familiar layouts and enemies, and it's every bit as good as any other Konami SNES shoot-'em-up, or any shoot-'em-up on Game Boy Advance for that matter, and there's no flickering and not nearly as much slowdown. To start out, the manual says the story takes place between Gradius III and Gradius Gaiden. Wait, Gradius has a story? Since when? I mean, I knew Vic Viper was a thing, obviously, but I didn't know stuff actually happened. You get 3 lives and Unlimited continues to get through 8 levels, and best of all, there's checkpoints here that are actually forgiving and respect the player's time. Imagine that! Even continuing is forgiving, and the game gives you the option to pick up exactly where you left off or start at the beginning of the level, and that's important in Gradius because it allows you to build up your power-ups, which by the way are all the bog-standard Gradius power-ups you've come to expect. Although rather than having a bunch of different options you can cobble together, in Gradius Galaxies you have four different set types of weapon upgrades, two different kinds of barriers, and a choice between automatic or manual power-ups, and I always default to manual, but it's nice that automatic is there, I guess. The controls are excellent, as they kinda have to be for a shoot-'em-up like this to be any good, but there have been other Game Boy Advance remakes or sequels like this where the controls are really loose, like in Contra 3, or your character's range of motion is completely out of whack like it is in Magical Quest during Mickey and Minnie. I'm sure if you're one of those folks who's put thousands of hours into shoot-'em-ups you might notice some minor flaws, but for me the controls were totally fine, and it plays just like a Gradius game should. Best of all though is the level design, the second level has you blasting through ice walls and dodging falling platforms, you have a huge-ass volcano slowly falling on top of you, a giant Easter Island head barfing smaller Easter Island heads at you, then you're blasting the cholesterol out of someone's arteries. Really the themes here are pretty much in step with Gradius 3 while working in elements from other games in the series. There's the fire level, the earth-like level, a level inside another creature, that sort of thing, and it's all really well done, made with that certain kind of polish that Konami games used to have. The difficulty is surprisingly fair, even if you don't usually play shoot-'em-ups you'll find this one pretty approachable, but I have to mention a couple things, one is that holy crap, your ship is slow before you get your first speed power up, like painfully slow, so if you die where you restart at this point here, you are screwed. And that's the other thing I gotta point out, the last couple levels in this one are stupidly hard. One level does the thing where you gotta keep speeding up and you have like a thousandth of a second to react to everything coming in your way, then you have to manage these narrow corridors while getting hit with wave after wave of enemies with projectiles flying all over the place, all while moving from one huge boss to the next, it is brutal. But yeah, I mean it's Gradius, you expect these games to be hard, and if you're into shoot-'em-ups, Gradius Galaxies is well worth checking out, it's up there with Iridian 2 and Steel Empire as one of the best shoot-'em-ups on the Game Boy Advance, and if you did Gradius 3 for Super Nintendo, then you owe it to yourself to play through this one. Alright, I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.