Any fan of old-school (previous to Touhou) shoot-em-up’s must know Gradius, that Konami side-scroll shooting game by excellence, which power-ups and insane difficulty gave us nights of frustration and record beating. Some time later, another very similar game came out, it featured the Gradius ship and other characters from other games like Goemon and Twinbee. Parodius is the name and, like the name implies, takes the Gradius game engine and tries to make fun of the game in every way possible. This game had many versions, even one called Sexy Parodius!, where after defeating a boss you would get a “risque” image of a woman in the background.

This video is from the last level of the game Gokujou Parodius for the Sega Saturn, where you could use a flying pig among the wide gamma of characters.

As an interesting fact, if 2 players played at the same time, the 2P will have a sprite variation of 1P. Some of these are: Vic Viper/Lord British, the Spaceships; Pentaro/Hanako, the penguins; Twinbee/Winbee, the bees. Most of the time, the 2P clone would be red and be a female clone of 1P.