entertainment. But sometimes, you don’t want that. You want ABSURDITY. You want a

bunnygirl riding a missile, shooting carrots, and slaloming through a giant crane game.

Konami knows that feel. So they stuck all their eggs in one blender, set it to “side-scrolling

SHMUP,” and thus Parodius - the Parody of Gradius - was born. And... we here in the

states never got to play it. Skipped right over us and headed to Europe. But I’m not

bitter! Fortunately, friend of the show Osamu in Hitachinaka sent us a copy of the first

Super Famicom offering in this moderately deranged series, Gokujo! Parodius. If you

have any aversion to strangeness, absurdity, or the binomial theorem, look away NOW.

I always knew algebra was good for something. Yes, that’s the Twinbee wreaking havoc upon

a... um... cake. Look, if you’d watched my review of Bio Miracle: Bokutte Upa, this

wouldn’t seem as strange! I mean, he’s even a playable character here! As are a number

of other Konami figures, from the obvious choices like the Vic Viper to hangers-on like

Goemon and Kid Dracula. But while the cast may be diverse, the general concept is the

same: It’s just like Gradius, with the same power-up capsules and weapons track across

the bottom of the screen, the same slew of enemies coming from all sides, and the same

huge bosses. It’s just... um... weirder. I don’t know how else to describe a ballet-performing

panda wearing a tutu whose only weak spot is the duck on his head. I don’t even think

that sentence has been constructed before in the history of the English language. That’s

the kind of game this is: Anything-goes ridiculousness. And it’s fun as HELL, so long as you’re

willing to laugh.

Yes, some of the tricks may seem a bit cheap. The game may slow down to a crawl if there’s

too much action on screen. The soundtrack might consist entirely of stuff they could

grab from the public domain. (Seriously. Who goes into a SHMUP expecting to hear The Stars

and Stripes Forever?) But that doesn’t matter. You’ll be ENJOYING yourself too much, just

waiting to see how the game outdoes itself next. And once you’ve seen everything it

can throw at you... it’s still a well-built SHMUP from a storied lineage that does well

by its own genre’s standards. It’s just not a serious, world-hanging-in-the-balance

battle against enemy aliens. Instead, you get... well, you get very American-looking

eagles shooting beam cannons at you while disembodied heads fly in formation, before

some Xevious-looking tumbling rectangle things come after you (and apparently require 256

shots to destroy). And then a giant mouth wielding pastry bags does its best impersonation

of a Big Core from Gradius. You can’t make this up. All you can do is lean back and enjoy

it. Just watch out for falling rocks. And falling deer. And falling punctuation.