Duration: 0:00

52 views

0

More TG16 stuff, Irem's R-Type. This port has a few issues here and there, mainly flickering and the charge beam sound playing out of nowhere, put those aside you have an excellent conversion of the arcade game. The music as well sounds a lot nicer for me.

Taking inspiration from Konami's gradius and the visuals from Alien and H.R. Giger, R-Type has you pilot the R-9A Arrowhead and save humanity from the evil Bydo empire.

Simple but dark plot, the visuals are fantastic for something in 1987, H.R. giger and Alien aside a lot of the bosses have unique designs, you fight a xenomorph and the 2nd one called the Gomander/Cyst...or as I like to call it, the clit monster. Once you take em out you're then faced with a huge ship and other mechanical menaces until you finally reach Bydo Core.

On to the game, it does have it's own form of option like in gradius except it's they're called Force Units. You start the game off with just the ship but once you get the first power up, your force module eventually flies in. It has 3 levels, one is that it just acts as a shield, level 2 is when it can finally shoot out the weapon you picked up, 3rd is at it's max.

Another neat thing about this module besides being a shield is that you can launch it at enemies and have it shoot at distances. You can retract it by either going near it or pressing a button. You can even put the force in your back and it'll give you defense from behind (though it's mostly situational.)

This also another one of those games where you have to stay powered up because recovery in later stages after one miss makes recovery very cumbersome. Friend said it best, recovery in horizontal shmups can be tough. The game isn't too too harsh, once you get the blue laser crystal you're very much set really, save for the 5th boss.

Interwebs say that the weapon pick ups are laser cystals, Blue fires in 3 directions, Red shoots them in a wave like pattern and Yellow is air and ground. My advice, switch to red when you fight against the 5th boss and as soon as it pops up, start spamming fire so you don't have to deal with going around it. Yellow for stage 6 then back to blue from 7 to 8.

Last thing I have to say is that this port also features an extra boss in stage 6, fairly easy to beat so long as you got the yellow laser crystal power up. Everything else though is the same, it's a great port save for the flickering and audio bugs. I recommend this one though as the original PC engine release had to be sold in two sets because they couldn't fit the game into the HuCard.

If you want something extra fancy with funky arrangements then R-Type Complete CD is there, it even adds animated custcenes, sweet stuff!

Irem really is an underrated company, a lot of their games have some exquisite detail, In the Hunt being the best example for this along with Undercover Cops. What also surprised me is Akio was one of the artists for this, one of the metal slug team members.

Overall it's definitely one of Irem's classics. The music along with the gritty and graphic visuals really helped it stand out. It's still a tough game nonetheless, yes you're very much OP but one single means trouble, I do like this kind of design just a bit as it urges players to get better.

If you like my runs be sure to check out the group I'm in if you want to see us play more good ol fashion retro games!
PRG official page
https://www.facebook.com/pinoyretrogamingofficial