Darius Gaiden

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The Silver Hawk faces the first boss.
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The Silver Hawk faces the first boss.

Darius Gaiden is a horizontally-scrolling shoot 'em up arcade game, released by Taito in 1994.

[edit] Description

The gameplay is basically the same as the preceding games in the Darius series. It uses a single screen, rather than the three screens of its predecessors.

A minor change is in the power-up system; the 'missile' weapon (the forward gun) no longer has its own power up bar. It can still be powered up in the normal way, but losing a life results in the weapon reverting to a previous level of power. The bomb and arm capabilities do have power-up bars, and retain any new power levels they have gained.

The Silver Hawk has a new special weapon; a black hole bomb which creates a vortex in the middle of the screen, sucking enemies and projectiles in.

The mid-level minibosses in the game provide an opportunity for the player to add to their firepower. Every miniboss has a globe on their head; if the player blasts it off and catches it, the miniboss is captured, and fires its weapon to aid the player. This is probably a precursor of the Capture ball in G-Darius.

[edit] Ports

Darius Gaiden was ported to the Sega Saturn in 1996, and to Microsoft Windows and PlayStation in 1999. The Saturn and PC versions were released in North America by Acclaim and Interplay respectively.

The PC version does not work correctly in Windows NT-based kernels, but it works with Windows XP with a little tweaking.

Darius Gaiden is included on the Taito Legends 2 compilation.

[edit] Trivia

  • As in all Darius games before, Taito's in-house band Zuntata composed the soundtrack.


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Darius video games
Darius • Darius II • Darius Twin • Darius Gaiden • G-Darius
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