Rendering Ranger R² (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
267A playthrough of Virgin's 1995 space-shooter game for the Super NES, Rendering Ranger R².
Played through on the default difficulty level.
Rendering Ranger R². Wow. Just wow.
If you aren't familiar with it, I'd be surprised if that wasn't the first thing that came to mind. Wow. And the game totally deserves it.
Rendering Ranger R² was developed by Rainbow Arts, known best for some absolute classics of 80s PC gaming. The game is largely the production of übergenius Manfred Trenz, who has some insanely impressive work under his belt, not least of which is the Turrican series.
Though it looks like a mix of Contra and Gradius, it plays far closer to Turrican in its platformer stages (sans giant maze-like level layouts) and Jim Power in its shoot 'em up stages (with far smaller sprites... thank god).
The controls feel very similar to both of those games, meaning they're sharp and responsive. You can use the shoulder buttons to aim diagonally without moving, and you get four upgradable weapons - each with their own unique super attack - that you can swap out on-the-fly. It's a good way to accommodate different playing styles and to avoid handicapping the player after dying too badly. When you go down, only the weapon that was active when you got killed gets reduced to level one.
While the difficulty may seem too forgiving at first, don't worry: Rendering Ranger's difficulty level steadily ramps up until about stage seven, wherein it spikes massively and will test even the best gamers on their first several tries through. It's damned hard to finish (that seemingly endless boss rush in stage eight, anybody?), but everything can be fairly overcome with the right strategies and character placements, and it never feels particularly frustrating.
And finally, those graphics. Holy hell. Such is the magic of Manfred Trenz. The graphics are prerendered CG, like we saw in Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct, but they are so clean you could eat off of them. The game appears to break the SNES's standard onscreen color "limit" regularly, and there's an amazing amount of detail in the backgrounds. You might strain to see them at times, though. They move so fast you'll feel like you're suffering from vertigo at times (the nighttime cityscape especially!) - and they're often made up of several layers of parallax (many using transparencies) flying about in various directions as they're being scaled into or out of the screen. It's beautiful, but it's impossibly disorienting. Just go ahead and try to focus on the action in the more chaotic spots - you'll go cross-eyed, I swear, and the further into the game you get, the more it amps up the spectacle. Screenshots don't do it justice.
The sprites are just as impressive. I have no idea what sort of black magic is at work here, but there appear to be hundreds of sprites flying around in several scenes, all while the backgrounds are running full-speed, with no sign of slowdown whatsoever. The sheer size of some of the sprites it tosses around also deserve a mention - there are some massive ships that fly around filling most of the screen with little pixelization, and even an AT-AT that fills the height of the screen walking around completely fluidly. There are just too many jaw-dropping moments to count after awhile. It's surprising how rare it is that the visual effects actually get in the way - *most* of the time it doesn't hinder the gameplay.
And all of this was done on the humble stock SNES hardware - no enhancement chips involved, and it shipped on a cramped 16meg cart - half the size of Donkey Kong Country's. This is one of those rare cases where, without hyperbole, you can say that this looks like a 32-bit game. If I wasnt familiar with it and someone showed it to me, I seriously would believe it was an early PS1 or Saturn game.
It's a crying shame that this is one of the rarest SNES games ever officially released. Even though it's 100% in English, it was only released in Japan, and only a few thousand were ever produced.
I recommend everyone play it, no doubt. It's amazing - not quite as good as Contra III, but what is? It certainly has its flaws, but ultimately the good outweighs the bad by a huge margin. Just be warned - buy a repro cart if you aren't into emulators. An original cart goes for stupid amounts of money.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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