Jaimers posted:

I've only played the Arcade Salamander game but that game really wasn't designed very well. The amount of dead air in that game is ridiculous and most of the time there is barely anything happening or you are just standing still.
The fire walls stage in particular was just terrible because you can stand still for like 80% of the stage.

At least the stage design in Gradius 1 was designed in a more engaging manner. There is a much bigger focus on using your options in clever ways to deal with enemies and bullets coming from all directions which force you to keep moving and be alert. Besides that there is also the weapon and powerup management where you strategically want to have the cursor on a certain section of the powerup meter to time weapons and shields.
Salamander 1 really has none of that and is just incredibly empty and boring as a result. You can fast-forward through almost the entirety of stage 1 and 3 and you can use it a lot in the other stages as well. That is not to say that Gradius 1 doesn't have dead air as well but it's not nearly as bad.

Life Force Arcade looks pretty silly. I guess the aesthetic of stage 1 was popular so they just remade the entire game to look like stage 1.