Hellhound (X68000)

 There's a little sub-sub-genre of doujin shooting games, especially ones that came about before the Touhou series, that is "I'm gonna make my own Gradius game!", and Hellhound is one such game! It's got a few mechanical ideas of its own, but they're all built upon a scaffold made of the bones of Gradius, like the third Mechagodzilla being built around the bones of the original monster from 1954. And, like you can see just by looking at the screenshots, it's definitely very heavily inspired by the aesthetics of Konami's series: space moai, organic tunnels and all.

 

The first big difference makes itself known before you even start playing the game: you're presented with a menu from which you pick two normal weapons and two sub-weapons. Then when you're in-game, you'll collect orange power-ups to upgrade your weapons, like in Gradius. Unlike Gradius, though, you don't get to choose when the power-ups activate. Instead, each upgrade has a bunch of little boxes, one of which filled up when you get a power-up. When all of an upgrade's boxes are filled in, you get the upgrade. There's definitely an order to how they fill up, though, it's not random.

 

So how do those choices from the start come into play? Very rarely, a blue or green power-up will appear. The blue one pertains to your main weapon, the green to your sub-weapon. If you haven't yet collected enough orange power-ups to get the related upgrade, you'll be given it straight away, but if you do have the upgrade, it'll switch to the other one of the two choices you made for that weapon at the start. Annoyingly, it does feel like there's one choice for your main weapon that's significantly better than all the others, but there's no way to only have one weapon choice.

 

One thing Hellhound's developers have improved upon compared to their inspiration is the difficulty level. It's still difficult, of course, but it doesn't feel brutal or unfair in the way that the Gradius games can. It especially does a good job of alleviating the infamous "Gradius Syndrome", the slippery slope whereby losing one life, and with it all of one's accumulated upgrades means that you'll quickly lose the rest. It does so through two small changes. The first is that your weapons are all rapid fire by default, so you're never left frantically hammering the fire button with all your might trying to desperately kill anything higher in rank than a basic popcorn enemy. The second curative, which is one I think actually turned up in later entries of the original series, is that sometimes you get to keep your options after you die. (I'm not sure exactly how this one works, but I think that if you had more than one option on death, you only lose half of them.)

 

Hellhound is a pretty good game! If you like Gradius (and I'm sure pretty much everyone likes Gradius at least a little bit), it's definitely worth a look. One final thing I have to add is that I think I discovered not only a glitch, but the game's built-in defence against it! In the first stage, there's some asteroids, that do what asteroids do in videogames and split into smaller pieces when shot. At their smallest size, they usually just fly offscreen before you can destroy them, leading me to assume that these smallest chunks were indestructible. However! There was one occasion where one such chunk just stayed in the same point on the screen. After several seconds of shooting it (a significantly longer time than they're usually onscreen, remember), it was eventually destroyed! Isn't that interesting?