Gradius Iii Rom Download

• Type: Shoot
• Available: September 1991
• Levels: 11
• Difficulty: Average

DOWNLOAD Gradius 3 ROM. Have fun playing the amazing Gradius 3 game for M.A.M.E. Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. This is the USA version of the game and can be played using any of the Mame emulators available on our website. Download the Gradius 3 ROM now and enjoy playing this game on your computer or phone.

The Vic Viper is on the call once more! Another hot sequel created just for the Super Nintendo, Gradius 3 offers larger end bosses, longer levels, and more objects on screen at once! The Vic Viper itself is now equipped with even more types of weapons and power ups, like the ultra-powerful Megacrush!! Pound through 11 diehard levels to reach the final confrontation with the alien boss!

People say:

Gradius 3 uses the 16-Bit power of the Super NES by increasing the detail of the landscapes ard enemies (especially the Bosses which fill the screen), hype the stereo sound and incorporate some conventional play that is pocketed with flicker. This detracts, but the game remains good.

One of the better shooters for the new system. Though it slows down when the action gets intense the game does get better in the last two rounds. Dash dash run game. Great music when piped through a stereo. Definitely one of the games to buy when you get the system.

My favorite series of shooters has finally gone 16-Bit. Tne graphics are truly an upgrade to the NES versions and the music very cool. Tons of cool new weapons to use. The game lacks intensity and seems only to pick up in the later rounds. A very good shooter, but not the best.

Definitely, Gradius III is one of the best shooters to hit the shelves, and I recommend it to shooter fans, but I am sorely disappointed by the slowdown and flicker! Otherwise, the music is excellent and the graphics are great. Unfortunately, I always found myself reaching for Gaiares..

The first two games were difficult enough, but Gradius III goes out of its way by making its stages more hair-pullingly hard than ever before. There are no continues either, as no 'easier' localized version was released overseas (well, not completely) as the previous entries, so don't think you can just money your way out of this one.

• 1Unused Graphics
• 3Regional Differences

Unused Graphics

Power-Ups

There are eight unused Edit Mode power-up icons in the game ROM. Unfortunately, none of them seem to have been properly coded, so the icons are all that's left of them.

Enemies

New Enemies

Returning Enemies
Enemies from previous Gradius games and spin-offs. Most of the graphics are ripped directly from those games, and it's not clear whether or not they were actually intended to be used in the game. The only exception is the small Moai head from Life Force JP, which has new graphics and was likely meant to appear somewhere in the game proper.

Other Sprites

The title screen image is 320×240 pixels, but since the game's resolution is 320×224 the last 16 lines of the image get cut off.

The blue screen-clearing power capsules seen in previous Gradius games are conspicuously absent in this one. They did make it into the SNES port, albeit using the same design as the power capsules instead of two separate sprites for each.

Two unused enemy hatch designs, both of which have the same retractable base.

Two unused rock designs for use in Stage 3's underground section. Even though there are three different designs, the final game only uses one of them. Kind of a waste, eh?

Small and large boulders, likely meant to be used in Stage 3's digging section. Even though they both have special falling animations, the final game still uses the same rock design used everywhere else in the stage. That design isn't even animated!

Rock pillars of varying thickness. Could have made good obstacles in the underground section. Maybe they could have dropped down from the ceiling or jutted up from the floor or something. No such luck, though.

Small and large vines shriveling up which would have been used after the Choking Weed boss is defeated. In the actual game, those vines just explode like everything else in this game.

A whole mess of crystals. Similar, less-detailed crystals appear in Stage 3 of Gradius II as destructible objects. At one point in development, the Crystal Maze might have been more closely based on the Gradius II Crystal stage.

The palette for this object is loaded during the flying crystal section of the Crystal Maze and might have appeared as an added obstacle. Dig that 12-sided die!

The ships from the first Gradius and Salamander are in the ROM. The Gradius ship uses the default ship palette, while the Salamander ship actually has a custom palette loading during the Salamander stage (Palette 16) that's not used by any other object in the game.

It's plausible that in the Gradius and Salamander stages, those ships would be used in place of the standard Vic Viper design. It would certainly explain why the player loses all of their power-ups after being transported to either stage.

The volcanic rocks used in the first Gradius games. Uses palette 1B in the Gradius stage which, again, isn't used by any other object. The developers might have originally planned to keep the volcanic eruption that prefaced the Big Core boss fight in the original game.

Small and large blue plasma balls in the same style as the energy balls shot out by Bacterion at the end of the game. It's possible that he was mean to actually attack the player, but given the history of Gradius games' final bosses being completely ineffectual, this was likely meant to be used by some other boss.

A strange metal disc. No clue on this one, and that's probably not even the correct palette. Weird.

Miscellaneous

These filler tiles are in the Cell stage tileset. アキ means 'empty'.

In the previous international releases of Gradius and Gradius II, the 'Option' power-up was renamed to 'Multiple'. Since this game was never released in Europe or North America, this graphic was never used. But oddly enough, this game's announcer always says Multiple when selecting the power-up..

High score numbers taken from Gradius and Gradius II, respectively. Gradius III has its own, larger font that it uses for the high score table, making these graphics superfluous.

In Gradius II, players could enter their gender and age in the high score table. This feature was taken out of Gradius III and instead uses the differently-gendered heads from Gradius, but the differently-aged heads are still in the ROM.

This lion enemy is used in Stage 1, the Desert level. However, Stage 7, the Fire stage, has an unused palette that matches up with the lion design perfectly. Considering that the dragon enemy is used in both Stage 1 and Stage 7, they might have planned to reuse this enemy as well.

While the Crystal Maze stage in the final game only uses blue crystals, there are palettes for at least four other colors. The cubes on the left are the sprite-based cubes, while the cubes on the right are the tile-based cubes.

The small vines that the Choking Weed sucks up actually use the wrong palette! Palette 1D is used by the Choking Weed's bulb, while palette 1E is totally unused in-game and fits the vine graphic a lot better.

Unused Music

The IDs listed here are internal track IDs and don't match up the ones used in the game's sound test.

Regional Differences

Intro

The Japanese version goes through a pictorial history of the Gradius series (the arcade games, anyway) before transitioning to the title screen. In all other sets, the game immediately transitions to the title screen.

The actual title screen sequence is the same length in all versions, leading to an odd experience in non-Japanese sets where the game just stays on a static image for more than a minute before the music ends.

Title Screen

All non-Japanese sets delete the game's subtitle, 伝説から神話ヘ ('From Legend to Myth').

Beginner Course

The Japanese set has an additional mode select before the Weapon Select screen. The option on the left is the normal game, while the option on the right is a special beginner mode that ends after Stage 3. Another thing that differentiates them the most apart from the limited stages to be played, is that when the player dies in the beginner mode, they gradually lose whatever power-up they have equipped with each death as opposed to the series' traditional die-and-have-nothing that is also present in the normal mode.

Despite the fact that the non-Japanese sets don't have this selection and the player is thrown into the full game directly, the gradual power-up losing routine from the Japanese's beginner mode is actually present in them and is in it throughout the whole game! So in a way, the non-Japanese versions can 'slightly' (big emphasis on that word) be considered the easier versions of this hellishly hard mess of a game.

After defeating the boss of Stage 3, a special message appears.

You've cleared the beginner course.
But the world of Gradius is much more
than just that. Now try challenging
yourself with the technical course!!
We pray for your success..