The Japanese and European versions are nearly identical, but the American version changes the game's plot by adding an opening text that establishes the game to be set inside a giant alien life-form which is infected by a strain of bacteria. The arcade version of the game was released under its original title, Salamander, in Japan (version J) and Europe (version D), and as Life Force in North America. The player gains power-ups by picking up weapon-shaped capsules left behind by certain enemies, as opposed to the selection bar used in other Gradius titles. The buy-in feature is available in single-player mode, and the continuation feature is only available in dual-player mode but they will both cease to be available once the final stage is reached. Players can immediately restart back into the action instead of being pushed back to a predefined checkpoint per Gradius tradition. The game features six stages which alter between horizontal and vertical scrolling. The first player controls Vic Viper and the second player takes the reins of debuting spacecraft Lord British. Super Space-Time Fighter Vic Viper, launch!! Extending their support, they fly to the Salamander Army's mother star. The Gradius Army receives British's distress call. The prince of Latis threw himself at battle with the Space-Time Fighter Lord British, named after himself, and requested help from the planet Gradius, which was said to have faced and defeated the cluster's forces before. The Latis Army, however, didn't have any way of fighting against Salamander. Here in planet Latis, the Bacterion cluster continues to spread, beginning its invasion with the Salamander Army. There, a prophecy of fire has been passed down since a long time ago: Thousands of light years away, when a giant dragon born and living in a sea of flames wakes up, a crazy force will approach, swallowing heaven and earth in the darkness and eventually breaking the light. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.Latis was a planet covered by water with a beautiful sparkle. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior. Overusing our search engine with a very large number of searches in a very short amount of time.Using a badly configured (or badly written) browser add-on for blocking content.Running a "scraper" or "downloader" program that either does not identify itself or uses fake headers to elude detection.Using a script or add-on that scans GameFAQs for box and screen images (such as an emulator front-end), while overloading our search engine.There is no official GameFAQs app, and we do not support nor have any contact with the makers of these unofficial apps. Continued use of these apps may cause your IP to be blocked indefinitely. This triggers our anti-spambot measures, which are designed to stop automated systems from flooding the site with traffic. Some unofficial phone apps appear to be using GameFAQs as a back-end, but they do not behave like a real web browser does.Using GameFAQs regularly with these browsers can cause temporary and even permanent IP blocks due to these additional requests. If you are using Maxthon or Brave as a browser, or have installed the Ghostery add-on, you should know that these programs send extra traffic to our servers for every page on the site that you browse.The most common causes of this issue are: Your IP address has been temporarily blocked due to a large number of HTTP requests.