5 games from Konami's best loved shooting series.

User Rating: 8 | Parodius Portable PSP
By jayuk | Review Date:
As the name suggests the Parodius games are a parody of Konami's other shmups including Salamander and Gradius. Many of the levels have been remade into crazy cartoony and comical versions. The enemies are of equal madness with spaceships replaced by cute birds, clowns and penguins. Lots and lots of penguins. This continues with some of the craziest and wackiest bosses ever to grace a video game. The penguins returns in giant form along with pandas and many naked ladies. In the first game 'Parodius' (actually a remake of an old MSX title) you play the second boss at a game of paper-rock-scissors. Win and you go past unhindered. Lose and you have to replay the final section of the level again. A draw and the boss attacks you. It's these weird situations that will put a smile on your face and keeps you playing to see what they they come up with next.

The Japanese text only ever gets in the way in with Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius (the 4th game in this bundle). There are many options here with many different modes of play. However there is the default PSP option screen in English and available for all 5 games where you can finely tune the difficulty, screen size, buttons and most importantly turn on the auto-save.

Now the bad points. In a few parts of the games there is horrendous slow down which is completely and utterly unforgivable. This is a PSP playing horizontal shoot-em-ups from the 80s and 90s and for it to slow down anywhere is a shocking and lazy oversight on Konamis behalf.
The lack of extras is disappointing. Many compilations offer many unlockables to keep the gamer playing. With Parodius Portable we're just given a music player.

Overall this is probably the best collection of retro shoot-em-ups available on any format and is an absolute must for fans of the genre. Casual gamers may find the hardcore nature of the games off putting.
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