I've seen some people mention that the Gradius series has slowdown built into the engine to help facilitate in getting out of those crazy situations. This was specifically mentioned in passing for the SNES (Gradius III). I kinda dismissingly laughed it off. Just some excuses of rabid fanboys insecure about their beloved console's processor speed. Then, recently, I saw this mentioned again on a dev forum. I questioned what kind of research was done to prove this. I wasn't given any links, but was told that a certain reputable member of the dev community actually looked through the code and found evidence that appeared to point to the fact.

I didn't think too much of it, until more recently. Watching Spida1a's review of Salamander for PC-Engine hucard. It jokingly mentioned of the slow down in the game. That reminded me that the Gradius hucard port also had slow down. And so did Gradius 2 on PCE CD. I'm thinking at this point, Konami are some pretty incompetent programmers.

So I did some research about the arcade hardware. For Gradius and Salamander, the main processor is a 10mhz 68k. For Gradius 2 and 3, it's a dual 68k (10mhz IIRC). Plenty of processor resource. And all the games have slowdown.

So either Konami is great at game design but shit at actual code implementation, or this fact that the slow down is built into the engine/game as part of the design to help it out. I'm suspecting it's the latter.