R-Type
Developer/Publisher: Hudson
R-Type I 25 March 1988 | R-Type II 3 June 1988 (JP) | R-Type November 1989 (NA)
Foreknowledge
We’re eight games in and we’ve finally arrived. Here it is, the first shooter released on the PC Engine. R-Type would define the fate of the platform in a way that Hudson likely did not foresee. In some sense this is the canonical game for the system, though for my money the title most deserving of that position is a little down the line yet.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What the hell is an R-Type anyway? This is a conversion of an Irem arcade shooter from 1987. It was rapturously well received in Japan, being the highest grossing arcade game of its release year and remaining in the top 10 highest grossing games for all of the following year. The game itself utilized a new arcade board designed by Irem and featured Giger-inspired visuals, an innovative “Force Bit” option mechanic, and a high level of difficulty even for a genre defined by its willingness to kick in your teeth.
Fun fact: Nintendo is the publisher and distributor of record for R-Type in North American arcades. It was the last arcade game they released for a good long while.
R-Type was ported to a few systems. The ZX Spectrum version of the game is warmly regarded by devotees of that platform, with the game winding up at or near the top of a lot of Best Speccy Game round-up type lists. The Master System port is also pretty good, with a nifty FM Synth soundtrack on cart. But the PC Engine conversion towers over the lot of them, by virtue of being the most technically impressive. What cuts are made here, specifically the loss of some vertical resolution and a few bouts of flickering sprites, are more than acceptable for how damn close they got here.
There is one particular fly in the ointment, however. You’ll note that the release dates above indicate that this game did not come into the world in the usual way. R-Type has a veritable feast of sprite work, compared to anything prior to it on the PC Engine. These sprites take up memory, and due to either technological or fiscal limitations Hudson was not able to fit this onto a single HuCard in early 1988. The result? R-Type released on two cards, R-Type I and R-Type II, each with four of the eight levels that comprise the arcade game. By the time of the North American release of the game, my guess is NEC and/or Hudson were able to foot the bill for larger ROM sizes necessary to make this game whole.
I’m not all that skilled at shooters, but this game is a real treat for the senses. In the past I've made it up to the gates of the fourth level before tapping out. Let’s have another round.
Hindsight
Holy shit this game is good. By no earthly measure am I good at this game, in fact I struggled to grind my way through level three again just as I always have. But with a little more experience in the genre I can appreciate what this game is doing better at this point, and it’s rad as hell.
The thing about R-Type is that the difficulty is less about throwing a gazillion space ships with a bazillion bullets on screen for you to endure. Its challenge, instead, stems from solving how to navigate safely through each of the eight levels. This in turn, comes to include when and how best to utilize your Force Bit for both its offensive fire and invincible hit/hurt box. The first two levels are straightforward horizontal shooters, with space to experiment with your bit and lots of wild looking enemy sprites. The first boss is basically on a timer, and adept use of your Bit can have it shredded in very short order. The second end boss is more of a solved puzzle type, where the solution is to place your ship in one precise spot and fire away until the weird yonic worm tunnel monster is killed.
Then you get to the third level, that classic arcade game trope. If you’ve ever fiddled around with any shooter made after 1987 with a level built around fighting one massive alien mothership, this is the archetype. The level itself is only two or three minutes long but its impact reverberates through shooter design to this day. You’ve got to carefully maneuver your ship through tight spaces, emphasizing smart use of the Force Bit to clear out enemies in tough to reach spots before slipping into a narrow spot on the back of the ship to take it out.
And that’s as far as I’ve made it in R-Type! I’ve poked the fourth level a few times but no farther. A clean run of R-Type I on Popular Video Sites Online reveals that the HuCard can be devoured in well under twenty minutes with practice. However, you will be putting in a great deal of time before you roll the first four levels unless you're quite adept at this sort of thing. And that’s before you get to the second set of stages, originally released on the separate R-Type II HuCART. These are bastards, every one of them, and I’ve yet to finish the first of these. Nor am I particularly interested in doing so, to be honest. This is a survey, not a ThaBeast721 style quest to beat every PC Engine Game.
The impact and legacy of this one is fairly hard to overstate. I’ve looked at the Famitsu scores for about half of the PC Engine’s library at this point, and can say conclusively that it was one of that publication’s few PCE games to score in the gold score territory. Its 34 puts it just shy of the 35s scored by Ys Book I & II and, uhh, Pro Yakyuu World Stadium. It is tied with Devil’s Crush and, furthermore, a point higher than the PCE conversion of Snatcher. And these were some of the slobberiest Famicom devotees in the world, writing in what was more or less a video game monoculture. Even those review staff folk couldn’t deny what they were looking at. Needless to say a cursory stroll through Shmup YouTube will have you sooner or later coming across PC Engine R-Type (or more likely its North American release which compiled both halves into a single card), with genre deviants still enamored with its accuracy and performance.
Now, would I recommend this is a game to introduce people to shooters on the PC Engine? Hell no. Its high skill floor and brutal late game are anything but new user friendly. I have a very specific recommendation for this general subject; as to horizontal shooters specifically I’d point to the PCE port of Gradius as a jumping off point. But as a thing that has to be seen, a necessary waypoint on the journey through this library? With apologies to Victory Run, it’s the first truly essential game in the system’s library. You owe it to yourself to have a look at this thing if you are interested in the platform. Just don’t expect to feel great about your video game acumen if you aren’t immersed in this genre.
Times Crushed Under The Stage 3 Mothership: 2. Turns out part of my problem is tracking my ship and my Force Bit independently, and mistaking the invincible one for the non-invincible one.
Number of Types of R-Type: 3. There is the split Japanese release (with no interoperability between the carts, in case there was any doubt), the “complete” North American release, and the CD-ROM2 release which allowed Japanese players to experience the entire eight level game on a single piece of media for the first time, with added redbook audio. Maybe I’ll make it that far.
Turbo Ratio: 1:1, incredibly. A complete North American copy of TG16 R-Type is sitting at $80ish on Price Charting at time of writing, which is about the cost of complete PCE copies of R-Type I and R-Type II combined. You can save about $20 importing R-Type Complete on CD-ROM2, but at that point you’re also in CD-ROM2 drive territory so money is not a thing you care about at all. You sicko.
****
Author's Note: Originally failed to link Chris Bucci's video review of this title. Here it is.
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