
Rakugaki Showtime has a large emphasis on throwing items, with direct attacks limited to moves that are mostly designed to knock away opponents. The most immediately similar title would be Capcom's Power Stone games. One of the few games Treasure produced for the PSX, it was subject to short print run and never left Japan. Combine that with a simultaneous two player mode (a feature that only returned in Gradius V ) and four unique ships to choose from, and you’ve got a shooter than stands with the best of them. To this day there aren’t many shooters that hold up to it. Gradius Gaiden also sports some of the best level designs and set pieces of the series.

Personally, I like to front load it with Options and shields to help tank through difficult areas. Gaiden solves this problem by allowing you to reconfigure your bar, putting more desirable weapons upfront and making it easier to get reequipped. It also lead to a balance issue where you’d be overpowered at one moment, take a hit, then have to start over with nothing. It gave a sense of strategy typically absent from other shooters. While in other shooters you’d typically just pick up power ups, Gradius’ power ups advanced a selection bar at the bottom that would allow you to customize your loadout on the fly. Gradius' unique gimmick (aside from the weapons fire duplicating Options) was always the powerup bar. Personally, I find this one wins out, simply because it sticks closer to the personality and mechanics that are the series’ trademark. In a toss up for best Gradius titles, it comes down to this and Gradius V (made by none other than previous Konami employees, Treasure). Despite that, Gradius Gaiden never made it to the states, while it enjoyed success in Japan.
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While it never reached the level of popularity that Contra did, the Gradius series shone for a while as one of the premier action series, especially for fans of the shoot-em-up genre.
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The beautiful math of Ridge Racer's trademark drifting physics return in this entry, but there’s a certain weight to the machines that is missing from the rest of the series.įrom the streets to the menus, R4 is sick with a sense of color and style. The first Ridge Racer made a case for 3D racing games, and R4 refined it in every way. Fifteen years later and this is personally still the finest entry in the Ridge Racer series. I own a playable copy for every Sony console I own. There’s no way I could make a list like this and leave this game off.

While I didn’t experience it firsthand, a lot of the titles from that era would go on to become some of my favorites. In addition, Sony’s debut console had a huge variety of games in every genre. While the Saturn dominated the sprite based scene, and Nintendo set the format for 3D adventure games with Super Mario 64, the Playstation undoubtedly led the charge for 3D videogames. By Omar ( PSX was undoubtedly a milestone for games.
