R-Type

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The story takes place somewhere in the 22nd century! You fly a futuristic fighter craft called the R-9a "Arrowhead". The craft's name is based on its shape and because it is the ninth model in the 'R' series of fighter aircrafts. The main mission is to blast and destroy the evil Bydo Empire (and its fleets). Basically, you have to shoot everything that moves -with most aliens shooting back at you while others just get on your way to instantly kill you upon contact. The backgrounds look like tunnels (or caverns) that have a "ceiling" and a "floor" outcropping in places! These can also be dangerous since you can easily crash your R-9a. Some of the sprites are pretty large, like the giant spinning wheel monster that awaits near the end of the first level where you actually have to get your ship inside it and shoot it in the eye to close its account. And be sure that there are a lot of even bigger (and far more difficult) alien monsters to confront! The rapid presses on the fire button produce standard laser bursts, but should you require a bit more firepower you must hold the button for 3 seconds to charge and blast a bigger shot which will pierce and kill everything into its range. It is absolutely necessary to also collect an extra bonus shield (a sort of a second aircraft) that shoots and can be unleashed to kill everything on sight. Overall, R-Type is extremely difficult (frustratingly difficult actually) since you can easily lose lives and -the worst of all- if you are shot down, you re-spawn at the beginning of the level (very unfair in my opinion)! Actually the whole game is unfairly tough!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Although the developers tried to have a pretty faithful conversion of the original, the CPC again suffers from a poor port of the ZX Spectrum's hardware. It’s a pity as the CPC series could handle more here! And that is, the game looks almost colorless (!) and the sound is very poor! The sprites move fine though, but the background scrolling is incredibly choppy, which makes it hard to weigh the speed of the enemy projectiles. It makes the game harder than it really is, and can potentially be quite frustrating! The sprites themselves move beautifully and some of them are really big! Graphically the best conversion is the Commodore 64 and MSX systems! Especially the C64 version looks and sounds almost perfect! As I said, the sound is poor on the CPC series, featuring a few spot sound FX and no music at all during gameplay. Note that the Commodore's port is superior due to its SID sound chip, while the MSX version is better even without using any FM sound pack. I really encourage you to find and play the CPC 128k remake of the R-Type though, made by using the pure CPC hardware but this time with better programming and enthusiasm!