Darius Gaiden

The Good
Ahhh...Darius. Sweet, sweet Darius. One of the finest shmup (short for shoot-em-up) series created, and coming from Taito (who has always made plenty of excellent shooters in the day), the Darius series has never wavered, never screwed up, and has always been a personal favorite of mine. Darius Gaiden, which originally appeared in arcades in 1994, and then later in 1996 on the Sega Saturn, and then once more for the PC in 1999 (and at this time, I'd like to personally thank Interplay greatly for picking up this title for U.S. release!) is in my opinion the best one of the series, right next to G-Darius and Super Darius CD (which appeared on the PSX and PC Engine CD, repesticely). Read on to find out why.

First off, if you've played any Darius game before, you'll get the gist of Gaiden's gameplay. For those who haven't yet played a Darius game, here's how it all works. On the top of the screen, you have two bars which indicate the strength of both your shields and your missiles. By shooting various colored enemies, you can pick up different shields which either power up your missiles (green), your shields (blue), or your main lasers (red). When you grab a certain amount of any different Power-Up, one of the systems will upgrade. As an example: grab three green shields and your missiles will power up a level. The main lasers power up a little differently in this game: instead of powering them up like your missiles and shields, every laser Power-Up you grab changes them. So you can go from a little pellet cannon with single shots to a triple shot with two Power-Ups, and the third will give you a double laser shot. However, when you die, you lose whatever Power-Ups you have obtained, but thankfully, you don't lose all your weapons; you just return back to the base power of everything you currently have.

Now that I've gotten the weapons system down, what about the difficulty and such? Well, the Darius games have NEVER been easy games to beat, and Darius Gaiden is no exception. Even with the difficulty set to Easy, you'd better still have a damn good set of eyes and a fast trigger finger to best this one. Thankfully, however, the game eases you into the higher difficulty settings by starting you out easy, and then working you into (eventually) harder and more challenging levels.

Now, onward to cosmetics...for those people who are just buy games for graphics, they're going to hate this. I'll give them a second to go find an entry for some crappy PC game with pretty flashy graphics and no substance. Are they all gone? Good! Darius Gaiden uses good old, 2D, hand-drawn sprites, but the graphics are still VERY damn good! Everything moves quickly and is drawn extremely well, and the effects...man oh man, the effects!! Scaling, twisting, warping, pallette shifting, HUGE explosions!!!....it's all here, and I love it! One of the great things about seeing this game in both the arcades and on the Saturn was that it showed exactly what more powerful hardware could do to both enhance the graphics and the game, and this game is a prime example of it!

Sounds and music? Well, the sounds are indeed excellent, cleanly sampled and crisp, and explosions that are so loud that they may make the whole room shake! And as for music...my God, the music...the music in this game is just simply indescribable, but I'll try. Beautiful, spacey, dreamy tunes by Taito's in-house band, Zuntata, fill the ambience of being in space. There's not one bad piece on this CD, and as a matter of fact, this is music you would want to listen to even outside of the game. It's just simply amazing. I would recommend searching for Zuntata on Napster and grabbing a few songs; their work is just too good for words.

The Bad
There's absolutely nothing to hate about this game, at all. Really. Serious!

The Bottom Line
Darius Gaiden is just plain amazing, no other way to say it. It's a true hardcore's game, and I highly, highly recommend picking it up if you ever see it!