In the original sets, this increments every 1000 frames. TimerVar is the amount of time elapsed since the player's last death.The actual game difficulty is calculated through the following formula: ( TimerVar + LevelNum + BonusVar + OptionsNum + DipVar) / 2. The final boss self-destructs in 688 frames in Gradius and 656 frames in Nemesis.At the end of stage 6, the boss barrier will self-destruct after 260 frames in Gradius.This wait was completely removed from Nemesis. At the end of stage 5, it takes 1016 frames for the boss to show up in Gradius.The enemy rushes in stages 3 and 4 last 1004 frames in Gradius and 768 frames in Nemesis.
In Nemesis, they will erupt just once at the slowest speed before suddenly switching to the fastest speed. In Gradius, the volcanoes will first erupt slowly, then speed up every 128 frames. The volcanic eruption at the end of stage 1 lasts 1024 frames in Gradius, but just 512 frames in Nemesis.The orange orbs that follow and fire with the ship are called Options in Gradius and Multiples in Nemesis.Ĭhanges that make the boss fight portion of each stage take less time. Note that in nemesisuk, the text for the continue screen is still in the ROM, unused. In gradius and nemesisuk, losing your last life means you're dumped back to the title screen, this is also the case with nemesis but only after continuing 3 times. The nemesis set is the only version with a Continue feature. In nemesisuk, this was changed to 2/3/5/7 lives. Players start with 3/4/5/7 lives in gradius and nemesis, depending on the how the "Lives" dip switches are set. The demo ends with the player dying to Big Core's first shot. The demo player also gets three Option pods compared to nemesis' two. The nemesisuk demo is basically the same as the nemesis demo but with more skilled play. The demo ends with the player destroying the Big Core and the Vic Viper. This is also the first demo to show what the blue crash capsule does, and how the Option pods can let the player take shelter while shooting. In the nemesis demo, the demo player uses every power-up but Double and Shield. The demo ends at the start of the volcano section.
Still, it's the only one of these three demos that demonstrates the Double power-up. In Gradius, the demo player starts out with three options and never uses the Speed-Up power, which is maybe not the best way to show off how the game works. In addition to the obvious title change from Gradius to Nemesis, the title screen in the overseas version has a background that the Japanese game doesn't.Įach version of the game has a different demo. In the nemesisuk set, the text "EVERY BONUS", used for subsequent bonus lives, was rewritten to the more accurate "AND THEN EVERY". If it's the latter, they missed the Demo Sound and Coin A / B dip switch variables. It's not clear if this is a bug or some kind of attempt to make the text more readable. Text in the test mode screens uses palette 0A in Gradius and palette 00 in Nemesis. This game plays like a hybrid between gradius and nemesis, using the former game's difficulty level with some of nemesis' gameplay and aesthetic changes. nemesisuk is assumed (by MAME, anyway) to be a "World" version of the game.It has a number of coding changes, some of which it shares with nemesisuk.