
Graphics: The backgrounds are quite nice in a lot of areas. This makes Vile feel more sluggish than X and adds a new angle of difficulty to the game. Therefore, you really have to be careful about when you shoot because you don’t want Vile’s feet to be nailed to the ground at just the wrong moment. While he’s using one of these types of weapons, you can’t dodge attacks. The biggest challenge with Vile is that he has extremely slow recovery times on most of his weapons. If the meter runs out, you merely have to wait a couple of seconds for it to refill enough for you to shoot again. However, the meter refills quickly over time, so it really just limits how rapidly you can fire off weapons. Vile has a single weapon energy meter which all of his armaments share. Most notably, Vile’s leg weapons use the same button as X’s dash, which means I tend to forget that I can’t dash and get clobbered by what I was trying to avoid because Vile kneels down to use his leg weapon instead. You can equip different weapons to these three slots, and you use three different buttons to fire the three weapons. Vile doesn’t use special weapons like X does instead, he has three weapons installed in three places of his body: his arms, his shoulder cannon, and his legs. You have to remember to do it yourself on the stage select screen (press Select). The game doesn’t offer for you to save after stages.(Sometimes they use these on normal mode as well.) I detail these where applicable. Hard mode is a lot like normal mode except bosses have new attacks that they will pull out. There are new plot sequences, and of course all of the character dialogue has changed.You can revisit the intro stage and even the fortress stages (even without a clear-game save).In Vile Mode, the stages are more or less the same, but the enemy and object layouts are different.Some of Sigma’s fortress stages were revamped entirely.(Or back to the title screen, if you lose all your lives in the intro stage.) This really isn’t a big loss, however, since “Continue” in the classic games puts you at the beginning of the stage anyway, so all you really lose is a bit of time. When you lose all your lives, you are booted back to the stage select screen.You can still fire your buster with even when you have a Master Weapon equipped. Dash-jumping off walls doesn’t seem to work well in this game.Your shots don’t go through walls here.Your weapons are refilled every time you die.You can now exit a stage at any time, even if you haven’t completed it.For the most part this game (at least the X side) plays like the original however, here are a few differences.
