You Might Have Missed...
Gyruss, (c) 1983 Konami

When I was a very small child, after my family would attend church in a little southern California suburb, we would dine at a Round Table Pizza in the nearby area. The year was 1985, and yours truly was all of four years old. What I am about to explain is one of my first memories as a human being, as a gamer.
I can never truly remember a time when there was no Gyruss. This game came out two years after my birth, but most know that you never quite remember things that happened VERY early. But, one day, whilst my brother was off playing the new Gun.Smoke or Rush 'N' Attack, I sat down to a game of Gyruss. And, oh, what a wonderful game it was. A cocktail model, I can remember... I could put my pizza to the side of the game screen and continue my toddler fury. As one might imagine, being a toddler means loving repetition, and this game had patterns in spades.
This little review of Gyruss is a love letter to my first love for a video game. I had played a few before on my Atari 800 (Learning with Leaper, Frogger, Star Raiders, even some crummy motorcycle maze game), but I found no better at the time. To this day, I can play this game indefinitely, until my arms cramp up and I fall asleep, I can still hang on, die occasionally and earn the lives back.
As I grew older, my family bought the home version for me, for the Atari, and I was thrilled. I can remember wearing out the reset button on the console, because I could never get the patterns right. A BOSS controller with a button on the top and the illusion of an arcade stick was not quite the adequate means for getting things exactly to my liking, but oh, did I still play. The game was the same, although a bit cruder, I'll admit.

When the old Atari kicked the bucket, my family invested in an NES, which is still one of my favorite consoles ever... heck, I got it so far back, I had SMB in single-gamepak format, and I had a R.O.B. (although, much like every other R.O.B., he worked like a piece of trash). In the early nineties, Ultra Games (which, most of you know was just another name for Konami) decided to throw out a revamped arcade title onto the home console market; it was Gyruss, but I'll tell you... this was not the same Gyruss. The original creator went on to do great things for Capcom, but Konami did nothing to keep his work sacred. I'll go into the differences in a moment.

Gyruss was a compilation of two schools of shooter: Galaga, which was a wave-moving Space Invaders spinoff, and Tempest, which was a circular wireframe shooter. In this game, you controlled a ship that stayed on the outside of the screen, shooting in at patterns of ships that came out at different portions of the playing field, whilst rotating in a 360-degree fashion. You started with a single-shot, but earned the ability to use a double-shot to maximize your firepower, and widen your aim. The point of the game, however odd it was, was to get from "2 warps to Neptune", all the way to Earth, then back to a magical THREE warps to Neptune, where ships were faster and moved twice as fast, and whenever you reached a planet, you were treated to a "Chance Stage" which was a bonus level of four waves of fighters that didn't touch you, and if you shot all of them, you were awarded 10,000 points (see why I hit reset a lot? I kept missing the patterns as a child). Was there plot? Probably in the manual that came with the machine, but nothing that anyone would find to be a good read... I think it had something to do with some guy who was lost in space and had to find his way home... does it matter? Of course not! If you had a plot for Galaga, what would it say? Shooting bugs in space? Whaaaat?
This version can be found on most classic console systems, like the ColecoVision, I believe the Commodore64 had it, and Atari 5200 and 7800 I think had a port of it, although my facts might not be quite straight, and I apologize for that. I'm not a whiz when it comes to multi-console porting. However, the version on Nintendo was strikingly different.
First off, the arcade version had really nice, attractive music. It was a rock version of Bach's Tocotta and Fugue in D Minor, and it pumps life into you when you hear it. When the nintendo version came out, they had a revamped version of it (watered down, no doubt), and sadly... they put in some really awful replacement music for some of the other waves. Quite sad. While the wave and chance stage format was kept, the actual levels had been DRAMATICALLY changed. In short, the levels were dummied down so that I could beat it in 10 minutes without breaking a sweat. They added mid-level bosses and ending bosses, which were just an excuse to exercise a Gradius influence to a game that didn't need it. The Nintendo game is NOT the game you missed... it was the arcade game that you should all check out.

If you have the opportunity, please find a way to try this old game out. You will be delighted to find that this is a shooter that withstood the test of time. Heck, even Konami woke up and decided to put out a Konami Classics game for the Game Boy Advance... and what's on it? Why, Gyruss, of course.

Revision One:
Yours truly, Debeautar, actually dug up the old Atari 800 version of Gyruss, for perusal (still have the cartridge, as shoddy as it might work). I have some startling news: I'm getting WORKED by this ancient game. Because of this and other reasons, I must amend my earlier comments.
This game was NOT the same as the arcade. The Colecovision version (as well as other versions) MIGHT be somewhat faithful to the old construction of Gyruss (ships in patterns, objects in waves, that sort of thing). The Colecovision version which I have tested has very few differences from the arcade version (some of the chance stages are different, as well as the color scheme was compromised)... but the Atari 800 animal, is a completely different story.

From the beginning, it would seem as though the patterns in the Atari 800 version were identical to the arcade... except, the patterns changed EVERY WARP. Also, if you lost, and had to start over again, the starting pattern would NOT be the same. This makes for a even larger challenge, and a even deeper understanding as to why, at 4 years old, I became so frustrated with the patterns of the game that I reset it after losing one life. A challenge to the very end.
Still, it incorporated everything that made the arcade game a solid title, and actually gave the home player a deeper challenge. How about that? Innovation in 1984. I'm shocked.