Salamander III announced for Gradius Origins for Switch [by M2] - Coming August 7, 2025

[Sweatlord_STG]

https://ibb.co/fzHJ1bBR

what does the green little T always mean?

god i cant believe this day has finally come. plus night strikers

[Steven]

WTF is up with the green ship? Its ripple laser is weird... definitely don't go into a boss fight with the green ship's ripple laser.

Also yes, there is a stage/loop select on Salamander III; it's shot+start on title screen after putting in a coin. Not sure if you have to unlock that by beating the game or not, and I kind of can't unbeat it to see if it changes anything lol

It looks like it only goes as far as you've been, though, so in my case I can only go up to 2-1.

https://ibb.co/fzHJ1bBR

what does the green little T always mean?

T = training mode

[BEAMLORD]

Also yes, there is a stage/loop select on Salamander III; it's shot+start on title screen after putting in a coin. Not sure if you have to unlock that by beating the game or not, and I kind of can't unbeat it to see if it changes anything lol

It looks like it only goes as far as you've been, though, so in my case I can only go up to 2-1.

Ah, that's handy, a very nice touch if it's as easy as early indications suggest.

[Sweatlord_STG]

WTF is up with the green ship? Its ripple laser is weird... definitely don't go into a boss fight with the green ship's ripple laser.

Also yes, there is a stage/loop select on Salamander III; it's shot+start on title screen after putting in a coin. Not sure if you have to unlock that by beating the game or not, and I kind of can't unbeat it to see if it changes anything lol

It looks like it only goes as far as you've been, though, so in my case I can only go up to 2-1.

https://ibb.co/fzHJ1bBR

what does the green little T always mean?

T = training mode

ah thx, i saw them explaining the training mode in a review, nice addition. any thoughts on the g3 am show ver yet?

[Steven]

Also yes, there is a stage/loop select on Salamander III; it's shot+start on title screen after putting in a coin. Not sure if you have to unlock that by beating the game or not, and I kind of can't unbeat it to see if it changes anything lol

It looks like it only goes as far as you've been, though, so in my case I can only go up to 2-1.

Ah, that's handy, a very nice touch if it's as easy as early indications suggest.

Yeah, it's REALLY easy. I went into the last stage with like a dozen lives, did a glorious chain death against the boss before the super easy final boss and lost like 10 lives right there, and then managed to pick up an extend or two and then chain death again during the escape sequence and still 1CC the game. Not sure how to feel about that...

This will probably be an awesome beginner game, aside from the chain deaths, so that's nice.

ah thx, i saw them explaining the training mode in a review, nice addition. any thoughts on the g3 am show ver yet?

Nope

[Sweatlord_STG]

im gonna save sala 3 for the end i only got the clear in gradius 1 and salamander 1 so far (((:

[Steven]

Is it me or are there no replays for Salamander III? That really sucks.

[Sweatlord_STG]

Is it me or are there no replays for Salamander III? That really sucks.

there should be i assume, like they get saved automatically if u dont rewind or quick save i think. i just almost got the clear in gradius 2 and the replay was saved, i can watch it, upload the score to the online leaderboard and turn visible hitboxes on n off while watching it. there is also a feature called "lock", i assume its purpose is to prevent you from deleting your best replay by accident.

however, no wait control on/off??? i liked how u can turn it off on the saturn. (no slowdown)

btw dot by dot means square pixels plus integer scale right?

damn i cant believe we finally got this <3

[harborline765]

WHAT IF...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevan ... re_ReBirth

I feel like an idiot now as I have played through this one back when it launched!

Will need to revisit it - I don't really remember it having that much similarity to the original Game Boy game, but it's a great title in its own right. It was more like a sequel to Adventure 2 (Belmont's Revenge) more than a revisit of the first The Adventure game.

i recently tried to emulate the rebirth games but it felt a bit laggy. any way this can be improved?

i guess best thing is just to play it on crt. i have several wiis and a gamecube to ps2 adapter to i can just play the games with my sls saturn style ps2 controller

Let me know how it is - Gradius Rebirth never looked quite right to me on an HDTV via component outputting 480p, like it was doing some sort of anamorphic widescreen. Would be great if it outputted 240p to a CRT or at least looked more authentic.

I never gave Gradius Rebirth the attention it deserved when it came out, might have to revisit it later this month. Manabu Namiki knocked it out the park with the music!

[Sweatlord_STG]

i wish there were some nice wallpapers included

[XoPachi]

I've nearly got the 2 loop clear for Salamander III. This game is so good.

[VanishingVision]

Does anyone know if the PS5 version supports PS4 joysticks? PS5 Dominus Collection did, so I would assume this noticeably more arcade-focused collection would too.

[XoPachi]

WTF is up with the green ship? Its ripple laser is weird... definitely don't go into a boss fight with the green ship's ripple laser.

Gray Layer is a Jade Knight stand in. Round Laser is nerfed from Gaiden a bit in that you no longer have an additional forward vulcan shot, but I kinda like that. It also goes very well with S-Option and really makes short work of the scarier terrain sequences if you can move properly. Especially stage 1 and 4. I wouldn't discount it against bosses. It really cleans up the Moai boss and can deal with the stage 5 boss better if it goes on long enough that he gets behind you. It's a tricky but powerful ship that rewards knowing what's up ahead.

[Sima Tuna]

I don't expect others to agree, but I'm just disappointed we are expected to shell out for another Gradius collection that's woefully incomplete.

No Gradius V. No Gradius Gaiden. No Gradius IV.

Imagine a Darius Collection that left out Darius Gaiden completely. Or G-Darius. You'd say, "yeah, but you are forgetting the best game in the series! Why are you doing this?"

And yet, no Gradius V and no Gradius Gaiden in yet another Konami official Gradius collection we're expected to pay a relatively premium price for. If you aren't going to offer me the cream of the crop then I'm not paying your creamium price.

Salamander 1 and 2 are great games but I think they are already available elsewhere. Gradius 1 and Gradius 2 are definitely available elsewhere. Gradius 3 isn't much of a big deal either way (not a fan of it,) but it's available for individual purchase from hamster and on other collections iirc. The SNES version of Gradius 3 is easier than the arcade version but it's also completely broken and unfun on a technical level thanks to the insane levels of slowdown.

To be fair, the R-Type collection didn't have R-Type Final, R-Type Delta or R-Type 3, but that collection is quite old by now and I give them some amount of slack for just how old the collection is + the seamless transition technology between old visuals and new. That collection wasn't JUST a pack of roms.

[Restart_Point]

Does anyone know if you can unlock the Salamander III OST in the sound gallery? It's not there by default.

[Sly Cherry Chunks]

Anyone know how to deal with the screen flicker in fullscreen mode? The game window flickers and I can see the wallpaper behind everything. Works okay in windowed mode.

[Klatrymadon]

I'm getting a lot of jerky scrolling which I think may be caused — like so much else — by the AMD hardware I'm on.

Keen to talk about Sala III another time but for now I just want to say that you should definitely check out the spread double shot in the Edit mode of the AM Show version of Gradius III, which can now be upgraded into a 4-way shot. It's a hell of a leg-up.

[MSZ]

GIII AM is nuts. Stage 2 is ridiculously long.

[Sweatlord_STG]

people are pissing me off. in the discussions section on steam there is nothing but naggers. "too expensive, nothing new"... really pisses me off. i really hope it sells well and that there will be another collection and just more m2 in general. same goes for operation night strikers of course.

[FunktionJCB]

people are pissing me off. in the discussions section on steam there is nothing but naggers. "too expensive, nothing new"... really pisses me off. i really hope it sells well and that there will be another collection and just more m2 in general. same goes for operation night strikers of course.

Sadly, that is relatively usual whenever there's a retro compilation released on Steam.
People are happy to pay $30 or $40 for a cosmetic skin for some game, or a small map pack for certain MP titles, but charge that for a retro compilation, and some people (who likely wouldn't buy it anyway) come out of the woodwork to complain about the price.
Block these users, and move on, for the sake of your sanity.

Side note: while Gradius Origins is awesome, and Salamander III is worth the price of the compilation alone, I'm a bit disappointed with Operation Night Strikers. Everything about it feels... "cheap", at least the PC version. It just appears to lack the usual polish and effort one would expect from M2. Even the game launching in a window (an early M2 "problem" with some of their earlier titles, that doesn't happen with Gradius Origins), the basic menus, the lack of features, or even the controls (for some reason this collection uses different buttons for insert credit and start, compared to their other compilations, and the start and menu button on my control both do the same, and access the same pause menu), make it somewhat clear this was a project that just wasn't given the same budget/time/effort as most of their other releases.

But, I'm on cloud 9: an awesome new Mega Drive shmup by Koshiro (Earthion), Salamander III, a 2D sequel to Ninja Gaiden, and a new Shinobi entry, in the space of less than a month. How unbelievably cool is that?

[bcass]

Having watched a few playthroughs on youtube, Salamander III seems more like a "remix" than a whole new game. Even down to the soundtrack, which although decent, seems to be remixes of prior themes.

[Sweatlord_STG]

people are pissing me off. in the discussions section on steam there is nothing but naggers. "too expensive, nothing new"... really pisses me off. i really hope it sells well and that there will be another collection and just more m2 in general. same goes for operation night strikers of course.

Sadly, that is relatively usual whenever there's a retro compilation released on Steam.
People are happy to pay $30 or $40 for a cosmetic skin for some game, or a small map pack for certain MP titles, but charge that for a retro compilation, and some people (who likely wouldn't buy it anyway) come out of the woodwork to complain about the price.
Block these users, and move on, for the sake of your sanity.

Side note: while Gradius Origins is awesome, and Salamander III is worth the price of the compilation alone, I'm a bit disappointed with Operation Night Strikers. Everything about it feels... "cheap", at least the PC version. It just appears to lack the usual polish and effort one would expect from M2. Even the game launching in a window (an early M2 "problem" with some of their earlier titles, that doesn't happen with Gradius Origins), the basic menus, the lack of features, or even the controls (for some reason this collection uses different buttons for insert credit and start, compared to their other compilations, and the start and menu button on my control both do the same, and access the same pause menu), make it somewhat clear this was a project that just wasn't given the same budget/time/effort as most of their other releases.

But, I'm on cloud 9: an awesome new Mega Drive shmup by Koshiro (Earthion), Salamander III, a 2D sequel to Ninja Gaiden, and a new Shinobi entry, in the space of less than a month. How unbelievably cool is that?

regarding Operation Night Strikers, it's only on steam and switch so chances are very high the steam version has less input lag and therefore plays better. also mouse vs switch motion controls? pretty sure mouse is better. i checked it out briefly and had lots of fun, i assume the most important features are all there, this plus good emulation is all i need.

the project was first announced literally years ago so they should have had enough time to ensure the emulation is fine. regarding missing features ive noticed that even m2 releases can be very bare bones if they were merely the contractor. for instance, there is that namcot collection of famicom games on the ps4 that i bought when it was cheap (although i have two famicom consoles and most of the games from this collection), and you cant even map the buttons on that one. i thought id freak out. the buttons you are supposed to use are circle and X. whether you like it or not. but when playing platformers for examples, i prefer using square and X, because square = attack, X = jump. but no, not here, not even with m2!!! it's unbelievable to me. id love to know what goes on behind the scenes and what leads to such decisions. maybe some clients (namco in this case) are just ridiculously stingy and cheap? idk. maybe it was a concious decision made by namco, but thats a bad one if u ask me.

the whole button mapping is a nightmare on both, gradius origins and night strikers. it seems like there are different presets on steam that your input device will be recognized as (regardless of what it actually is) and thats what you have to deal with. in my case, i wanted to play gradius with the sega saturn style controller by retrobit. it gets recognized as a switch pro controller. so when i change the buttons (on each of those ~ten games from these two releases!), there are these lines with "A", "B", "X", "Y" (because again, steam claims im using a switch pro controller) and I can assign "shot", "credit", "start" etc to each of these buttons but the problem is that i have no idea which button is which on my controller, because, as i said, it's a saturn style controller. so that was extremely stupid and annoying but i managed.
obviously, being a sweatlord, i have all kinds of controllers that would match one of steam's stupid presets perfectly (ps4 controller, xbox one controller for windows, etc), but i want to use the saturn controller because it is the best one so i had to deal with this bullshit. its just so fucking retarded that it doesnt just say "shot", you highlight it, and press the button u want to assign shot to. but it was doable -.-

[Steven]

There are definitely no replays for Salamander III. Disappointing, but it's not like it's hard to record externally on PC. I only ever record replays to post my scores, which I don't do very often, so if nobody keeps score for this game it doesn't really bother me that much that I can't do replays without external software, but if anyone wants to keep their replays or is playing on Switch, which can only record for 30 seconds, they have to do it externally and that's disappointing.

WTF is up with the green ship? Its ripple laser is weird... definitely don't go into a boss fight with the green ship's ripple laser.

Gray Layer is a Jade Knight stand in. Round Laser is nerfed from Gaiden a bit in that you no longer have an additional forward vulcan shot, but I kinda like that. It also goes very well with S-Option and really makes short work of the scarier terrain sequences if you can move properly. Especially stage 1 and 4. I wouldn't discount it against bosses. It really cleans up the Moai boss and can deal with the stage 5 boss better if it goes on long enough that he gets behind you. It's a tricky but powerful ship that rewards knowing what's up ahead.

I only played Gaiden for 20~30 seconds to see if it worked on the MiSTer (it does!), so... okay lol

My initial impression is that it does suck against bosses if you don't have Snake Option, though that's only really a problem if you haven't played the game before and I think you might need to beat the game to get the ship anyway.

Anyone know how to deal with the screen flicker in fullscreen mode? The game window flickers and I can see the wallpaper behind everything. Works okay in windowed mode.

It seems that this is yet another M2 game where fullscreen isn't actually fullscreen but is borderless fullscreen. I seriously wonder if these guys actually know what they are doing on PC or if they're doing this on purpose. It's like nobody at M2 has played a PC game that was released after like 1989 or something.

I'm getting a lot of jerky scrolling which I think may be caused — like so much else — by the AMD hardware I'm on.

Is it not because of the refresh rate mismatch? I thought I saw some screen tearing going on on my normal computer, but maybe it was me. It's fine on Steam Deck from what I have played and that's AMD, but yeah... there's a reason that I don't use AMD. Too many horror stories. Everything just works with Nvidia. Steam Deck doesn't have screen tearing because SteamOS has a bug that forces vsync to be on at a system level even if you turn it off, so there is also that.

[Sweatlord_STG]

but if anyone wants to keep their replays or is playing on Switch, which can only record for 30 seconds

well they could just break down their replay into "several" parts. just like when yt still had that 10min time limit. so if the game is 20min, thats only about 40 parts.

[Firehawke]

I'm playing with NV hardware on a G-Sync capable 144Hz monitor, and no issues whatsoever with jerky scrolling or the like. Definitely looks like an AMD-specific issue from what I've read so far.

All in all, the quality is pretty solid outside of a few issues with keyboard handling when playing P2, a complete lack of subtitles or gadgets in Salamander 3, and the volume being extremely low at least on PC. These are pretty fixable things, all things considered.

It looks like there's at least one more unlockable in there, somewhere, somehow. Someone I don't know put up a screenshot of

Spoiler

VS System Gradius on Steam and someone else that I actually know datamined the EXE and confirmed the presence of NES emulation.

[Sweatlord_STG]

I feel like an idiot now as I have played through this one back when it launched!

Will need to revisit it - I don't really remember it having that much similarity to the original Game Boy game, but it's a great title in its own right. It was more like a sequel to Adventure 2 (Belmont's Revenge) more than a revisit of the first The Adventure game.

i recently tried to emulate the rebirth games but it felt a bit laggy. any way this can be improved?

i guess best thing is just to play it on crt. i have several wiis and a gamecube to ps2 adapter to i can just play the games with my sls saturn style ps2 controller

Let me know how it is - Gradius Rebirth never looked quite right to me on an HDTV via component outputting 480p, like it was doing some sort of anamorphic widescreen. Would be great if it outputted 240p to a CRT or at least looked more authentic.

I never gave Gradius Rebirth the attention it deserved when it came out, might have to revisit it later this month. Manabu Namiki knocked it out the park with the music!

iirc it is made for 480p so ideally you would play it on a 4:3 31khz crt via component or via vga with a lagless component to vga adapter. If you only have a 15khz crt you can play it in 480i via rgb scart, but 240p is not possible iirc because the game's native res is 640x480 so even if you managed to get 240p then 50% (every other line) of the image would be missing.

BTW I remember hearing Salamander 3 was actually made with the same engine or something as the rebirth games but idk whether that's true.

[Steven]

I just now realized that one could run Salamander III as an arcade game because you have to put coins in it to play it. You'd have to disable the select button so nobody opens the menu, but you could definitely do it. That would be pretty cool to see. Not 100% sure about the game yet, as I went to sleep shortly after it released, but I'll play it some more once I go home later today. I just wish the first loop wasn't super easy, as it's kind of disappointing to insta-1CC a brand-new game within an hour of its release without even trying to do so, as the struggle is part of the fun. It should have difficulty settings, so I'll try some of those later too.

How many times does it loop? Is it infinite? That would be crazy.

[Sweatlord_STG]

I just now realized that one could run Salamander III as an arcade game because you have to put coins in it to play it. You'd have to disable the select button so nobody opens the menu, but you could definitely do it. That would be pretty cool to see. Not 100% sure about the game yet, as I went to sleep shortly after it released, but I'll play it some more once I go home later today. I just wish the first loop wasn't super easy, as it's kind of disappointing to insta-1CC a brand-new game within an hour of its release without even trying to do so, as the struggle is part of the fun. It should have difficulty settings, so I'll try some of those later too.

How many times does it loop? Is it infinite? That would be crazy.

Did u buy origins just because of s3? I already had a feeling it would be a nice bonus but nothing crazy, kind of like Gradius Rebirth.

[Steven]

I mostly bought it for Gradius 1 and 2 and especially Salamander 2, which I had never played until today and I see why people like it because it's great. Salamander III is just a bonus to me.

Speaking of Salamander 2, the unreleased Taiwanese version, Life Force 2, is also included. I wonder what differences there are aside from the title screen and the legal warning that says to only use it in Taiwan.

[Sweatlord_STG]

I mostly bought it for Gradius 1 and 2 and especially Salamander 2, which I had never played until today and I see why people like it because it's great. Salamander III is just a bonus to me.

Speaking of Salamander 2, the unreleased Taiwanese version, Life Force 2, is also included. I wonder what differences there are aside from the title screen and the legal warning that says to only use it in Taiwan.

What??? I didn't see that. It would have sparked my interest. I'll have to check next time I play.

What I had never played before is that NA prototype of Gradius 1, the one where the game says it's the hardest version of Gradius 1. I'm kinda familiar with g1 so fired up that version and ramped up the difficulty to hardest and had fun with that, but no chance so far.