(SAT) Darius Gaiden

Originally developed in 1994 to show the F3 System, Taito’s new arcade board, it was ported to Saturn (and PS1) in 1995.
The story takes place between the first two episodes and for the first time in the main series the multi-monitor system was abandoned in favour of a classic single monitor.
The gameplay didn’t change too much, the classic path system for stages was kept, there are 20 in totals but only 7 can be played in a single session. The ship called Silver Hawk can shoot laser and missiles and by grabbing pods released by defeated enemies weapons can be upgraded, including a force shield; the new feature is the smart bomb which creates a black hole that can grab all enemies in the area and even the mid boss level can be captured.
Gradius Gaiden was highly praised not only for the arcade release but also for Saturn port.