Gradius 3.

One of my all-time favorite games, Gradius 3, as I mentioned in my Demon's Crest review, is fucking hard. It's difficult to think of modern parallels, because (no elitism intended) modern games are so tame by comparison, and because, well... I'm kinda outta touch with this generation. I did a lot of console gaming in the Xbox/Gamecube/PS2 era. Panzer Dragoon Orta on hard comes to mind, especially if you were gunning for S ranks. But even that allowed some room for error. If you played Mega Man Anniversary Collection a few years back, that'll give you some perspective too.

Gradius's concept is fairly simple. Go from point A to B, blow up anything in your path. Certain foes drop powerups you use to upgrade your weapons. Gradius's weapon system is awesome. Before you begin, you can choose some preloaded weapon layouts, or customize one of your own. A few preset schemes have unique missile options, but you'd be better off choosing your own.

Upgrades come in 7 flavors. (Speedup, Missile, Double, Laser, Option, ?, and !), which are arranged that way on your bar. Each powerup you pick up moves the highlight along your bar, so as you can see, you've gotta pick and choose which you gain first.

The Vic Viper (your little ship) turns quickly from a sluggish, pea-shooting thing to an agile weapons platform that melts piles of enemies on one burst. It's pretty empowering. Unfortunately, you're always fragile. Even the force field (one of your possible ? upgrades) only lets you take a measly two more shots. Beyond that, one strike will toast you. And death means losing all your upgrades. Even if you were close enough to the end to come back right at the boss. Brutal.

I must play more!