Best Home release of Parodius Da! From myth to laughter

[KimagureMachibuse]

I have not played Parodius Da! outside of MAME a few times and would like to know which home port could be considered the best home release i am mainly looking for a somewhat comprehensive comparison between the Super Famicom, Family Computer ,Gameboy, PC Engine, Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn versions released as i heard each version aside from the PS1/SS Releases have their own unique stages and bosses

[EmperorIng]

I had the Parodius Deluxe pack on the Sega Saturn very briefly, but I soured on it pretty quickly when I found that you couldn't remap any inputs in the options menu for either game (Da or Gokujoh). It was a dealbreaker for me (using the small little X button for autofire? yuck), but it might not be for you.

[Sumez]

If you want to go for arcade "accuracy", the Saturn/PS1 version is very good. But somewhat amusingly it's not as arcade perfect as it looks, with the game's rank being much less aggressive. Personally I think it's an improvement, as the arcade pcb goes quite over the top in this regard. Especially the way it punishes using speed-ups.

There's also a scoring bug, but it's not really a problem as long as you only compare against other scores of the same version.

Personally I really like the SNES version too. It's translated almost as perfectly as you can imagine on the platform, and manages to feel very close to the arcade experience.
Of course this one is also a bit easier, and one massive difference is that there's no upper limit to score extends. That means that not only will you be racking in a lot of lives once you start playing well, and in turn that also means rank will be even less punishing. This makes it a perfect "console" translation of the game IMO, fitting of a home release.
The new stage added to this version is only a cherry on the top, the original game already has a lot of great stages

Stay far away from the NES version

[davyK]

Have the Saturn version and it's excellent. I read that the PS1 version is just as good. Both come with Gokujo Parodius aka Fantastic Journey on the same disc.

Konami seem to like making each port have their own exclusive bits - so I believe they might have different Omake modes or have one of the levels unique to each port. Nice touch. The SNES port is nice - I used to own it but it struggles a bit when the screen gets busy.

[Rastan78]

https://youtu.be/0opA-E4Wqps

Some interesting comparisons in this vid from digital foundry.

You can't go wrong with picking up the PSP Parodius collection IMO. It's pretty solid. Has some good options, like you can even choose 1:1 pixel scaling which looks pretty sharp on the small screen. I wish a similar thing would get released today.

[SuperDeadite]

X68000 version with MT32 MIDI ftmfw!

[WelshMegalodon]

Incidentally, MAME's X68000 driver is reportedly quite solid these days and can pass MIDI output to MUNT, so OP wouldn't even have to venture outside MAME to play that particular port.