Welcome to World Zero - Reviews for the hardcore gamer

Placing an arcade game as old as yourself in proper historical context is a relatively difficult, if not impossible task. Forgive me for not trying. Historical significance aside, R-Type still knocks the hell out of nearly every scrolling shooter you can get your hands on.

R-Type opens in a quiet manner, understated in a way that is uncommon in the genre even now. There aren’t any bright flashes, explosions or rocking guitar synth greeting you as you insert your first credit. The game starts not by blasting you off into the great unknown, but rather by having you crawl into it. Your small R-9 fighter lurches forward, creeping into enemy territory. The action quickens as you penetrate the enemies stronghold, if only a little. And then suddenly the music drops out and the screen begins to fade to black. Immediately a screen filling H. R. Giger inspired behemoth seeps into view. If this was 1987 I’m sure the silence would only be broken by the sound of your jaw (and possibly your stomach) hitting the floor. The silence lasts for only a second or two, but the tension created in that small frame of time makes all the difference when the boss track kicks in and once again you’re off, dodging and returning fire for all you’re worth, slamming the force attached to the front end of your ship (quite literally) into the belly of the beast. This is what gaming should be about. This is R-Type.

Though the atmospheric tension never quite again reaches the heights it did in the games opening segments, R-Type substitutes its reliance on gripping aesthetics for one that instead hinges on its very design. As far as I’m concerned, nowadays there are two schools of scrolling shooters. Though classifications have been created by gamers for nearly every discrepancy found in the genre, what I’m talking about doesn’t refer to whether or not you have to flip your TV on its side to get the full experience or to how cute or funny your graphical design is. Which ever way your screen scrolls, every shooter is descendent from one of two schools of design--one of which originated with R-Type. And if there was some game preceding it, then Irem’s seminal shooter is certainly the most prolific, influential, and fully realized iteration of the concept and therefore the one to which it should be accredited to anyway. What I’m referring to is the practice of designing a shooter based around its level design.

Take for example Galaga, a quintessential shooter of the early days of gaming. Galaga placed the player on the backdrop of an ever repeating star field. Capable of only moving left or right, the player could interact with the environment in only the most minimal of ways. The draw was solely on the destruction and avoidance of enemy bugs, aliens, and ships. Xevious, years later, would feature land mounted obstacles and fortifications for which to destroy. Gradius, later still, would hint at the idea I’m talking about with its carefully construed placement of Maoi heads and enemy turrets. But in R-Type, the levels take on a life of their own. It’s impossible to play through the third level, where the entire stage is devoted to taking out a gigantic enemy battle ship one segment at a time and not see it as innovative in terms of standard shooter design. I challenge you to play through the game’s factory stage with its legion of manufactured bots moving about in assembly line-like succession and not see shades of what would evolve into the likes of Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. Each stage in R-Type is so different from the last in contrast to the “more bombs, more bullets” approach taken by those early titles.

That’s not to say that the focus is merely on stage design. The enemies in R-Type aren’t cannon fodder. My point is, however, on the ingenious way in which the enemies and surroundings mesh to form one coherent whole. Irem used the memorization-heavy approach to place you in the most mentally taxing and difficult situations imaginable and forced you to think your way out. This means that enemies always appear in the same places and fly in the same patterns. In plainer language, this boils down to R-Type being an entirely scripted affair; if you don’t like R-Type, then this is probably why. Surviving R-Type depends just as much on your prior experience learning the game’s levels as it does with your reflexes.

While the ingenious design and enemy attack patterns insure R-Type a top spot on the list of the most frustrating games ever made, the game’s reliable scripted nature acts like the proverbial carrot on a stick, always urging you to go forward, dangling the possibility of success right in front of your nose. When you die in R-Type (and you will die many horrible, horrible deaths) you can usually see why, even if you can’t correct it just yet. The game is always fair. If you die, it was probably your fault. The other thing that makes the heavily scripted nature of gameplay all the more bearable is the completely contrasting free form power-up system that R-Type sports.

R-Type lives and dies by its power-up system. Though featuring the standard speedups and missile expansions that you would come to expect, R-Type’s most innovative feature outside of its ingenious design is its force power-up. The force is your all-purpose offensive/defensive weapon of choice, and intelligent use of the force is required to get you through the game’s stickier situations. Essentially a large orb that you can attach to either the front or back of your ship, the force acts as a shield which also provides you with enhanced firepower when attached to your hull. However, the force can also be thrown in front of or behind your craft to destroy hard to reach enemies, provide cover fire, penetrate an enemy’s defense, or a handful of other practical purposes that you can only really find by experimentation. R-Type offers the player a great deal of creativity inside of a highly restrictive frame work and this is one of the thing that keeps the game remaining so addictive, even when it’s beating you up and taking your lunch money. In fact, the flexibility of the force power-up and the possibilities that it opens up even makes the typically infuriating old shooter ‘restart at a checkpoint when you die’ standby almost tolerable. That’s a feat in and of itself.

I can’t name many games from 1987 that, if played for the first time today in 2006, would have had me as glued in front of my television set as R-Type has done for the past few weeks. R-Type is timeless, and should not only be played for its great innovations, but also for the fact that it is as difficult, gripping, and addicting a game as I imagine it was eighteen years ago. Though old as dirt by industry standards, R-Type is anything but dated. And with ports on major consoles ranging from the TurboGraphx-16 all the way to the Sony Playstation, there is no excuse to miss out on this shooter classic.

Rating	The rating scale in detail
9.5	++ Incredible design and artistry throughout. ++ Screen filling (or in the case of the now famous battleship in level 3, multiple screen filling) boss encounters that put near everything the genre had seen at this point to shame. + Subtle touches in animation bring the game world to life. - The masses of alien spores in the later levels aren’t much to look at.
8.4	+ R-Type's score is mostly atmospheric, though a few tunes manage to stand out on their own. The best part about the soundtrack is its use of dramatic pause.
9.5	++ R-Type hasn’t changed much in the 18 years or so since this original release because Irem got the gameplay right the first time. The versatility of the force pod is the game’s biggest innovation, but the balance between rapid fire and charged shots as well as Irem’s high emphasis on creative and engaging stage design helps put it above and beyond the competition.
9.5	+ Obviously inspired by H.R. Giger’s work in Alien, R-Type is alive with all the hideously deformed and pulsing extraterrestrial life that you’d come to expect.
9.5	++ R-Type is still kicking ass and taking names nearly twenty years after its original release.
9.5	++ The epitome of a classic.