Topic: Gradius (NES)

[TerraEsperZ]

Well, this is the mystery project I was referring to when talking about correcting errors in a game's original maps.

I really wasn't interested in mapping this game at first. The whole thing started when browsing the Internet for my name combined with maps and I found a reference on a Gradius message board mentioning an error on one of my Gradius II map. This was followed by a temporary surge of interest in the Gradius franchise and seeing that the first game hadn't been mapped fully, I decided to do it.

This was relatively easy to do. As I mentioned in the other thread, I did some minor "corrections" so they won't look exactly as they are in-game, but like an ideal version of them. My obsession for mathematical and geometric precision pretty much required me to slightly move all the standard enemy sprites by 1 or 2 pixels to align them to the 8 x 8 pixels grid. I also moved an enemy in Stage 6 that obviously wasn't appearing in the right place, and flipped vertically two tiles in Stage 7 which were upside down.

I also chose to add a few notes like the *official* names for the bosses and sub-bosses (which is why some aren't plural when they should be) as well as notes regarding how to get the 1-ups and access the stage warp.

[TerraEsperZ]

The last four.

[TerraEsperZ]

Oh, and the reason I was hesitant to mention this project was because there are two maps already on the site made by Will Mallia and I wanted to clear it up with him before continuing.

Another thing I forgot to mention in my opening post. This game has made me well aware of the NES' sprite limitation and how some games will simply not spawn new enemies if there are already too many on screen. To capture everything, I had to make sure to kill everything as soon as it got on screen in order for the game to spawn every enemy, and this is not the first NES game to do this. If you're planing on adding enemies in your own project, be sure to think about this.