(screenshots taken from GR3 Project site dump)
GR3 is a freeware Gradius fangame from the creators of La-Mulana, predating La-Mulana by several years. As you might expect, the game is a love letter to the MSX Gradius and Nemesis games, similar to how La-Mulana is a love letter to Maze of Galious. Also like La-Mulana, the game is challenging, borderline sadistic at times, and sometimes of questionable fairness, but is nevertheless a real treat to play thanks to the sheer quality of it all and the love put into it.
I'm surprised there's so little mention of the game on this forum (I can only find two passing mentions of it that aren't my own), given that the creators are fairly well-known (albeit not for shmups) and how well-made the game is. This should be a must-play for anyone who likes Gradius and enjoys a good challenge. If you like the MSX Nemesis series in particular, I don't know what you're waiting for, a download link?
I haven't cleared the game but I would rate the difficulty above Gradius 1 and 2, but still below Gradius 3. It's very heavy on memorization (there's a lot of stuff that will surely kill you if you don't know what to expect), but it's the sort of memorization that comes naturally with play due to all the challenges being very distinct and memorable, rather than the sort of memorization that has you reciting arbitrary motions that you only remember because they work. Checkpoint recoveries are tough but still doable from what I've seen, since the game gives a ton of powerup capsules everywhere. Note that the checkpoints are very far apart - I think there's only two per stage, one at the beginning and one in the middle.
As you can see in one of the screenshots above, there's a shop at the end of each stage where you can spend special E-capsules (different from powerup capsules, and hidden in various locations) on additional weapons, most of which hail from the MSX games GR3 is so strongly influenced by. There's also secret bonus stages inspired by the MSX games. In short, there's a lot to play around with here.
There are several versions of GR3, including "GR3 Re-Death" which remakes all the stages to make the game even harder. The game's written in Java and distributed as an executable JAR file, so it'll theoretically run on any system with Java installed. I say "theoretically" because some versions of the game are so ancient they only run on obsolete versions of the Java Runtime Environment - for more details on that, see the Strategy thread I put together. Also, even if the game itself works, the soundtrack sounds different in recent (after 2011) versions of Java because it's written in MIDI and the default MIDI synthesizer changed in Java 7, which is a real shame because the soundtrack is quite good, especially for MIDI (this shouldn't be a surprise if you've ever played La-Mulana). If you can, I recommend setting up an old Java Runtime Environment just for the game.
Links:
Strategy thread
Hi Scores thread
Download here (this is a site dump of the old GR3 Project homepage, which includes all versions of the game and more)
