Gradius II
Gradius II[a] (also known as Vulcan Venture in arcades outside Japan) is a side-scrolling shooter game developed and published by Konami.The player returns as the role of the pilot of the Vic Viper spaceship to battle the second onslaughts of the Bacterion Empire, under the new leadership of Gofer, the giant head.Presumably this was due to the fact that the Famicom version employed a custom memory mapper dubbed the VRC4,[1] which enhanced some of the game's graphics, such as animation, thus converting the game to a standard memory mapper (as Konami later did with Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse) would have been too time-consuming (since the original Gradius was not as popular overseas as it was in Japan).In Japan, Game Machine listed Gradius II on their May 1, 1988 issue as being the second most-successful table arcade unit of the month.[3] Review aggregator GameRankings scored Gradius II at 80%[4] IGN gave the Virtual Console release of the PC Engine version an 8 out of 10, praising the ability to choose which power-ups the player character has access to before entering a stage and the inclusion of useful cheat codes "to offset the otherwise potentially overwhelming difficulty".