R-Type

About This Game

Gameplay

The game has a generally slower pace than similar shooting games of the time, and emphasizes enemy pattern memorization as much as player speed. It is composed of eight levels, with a boss enemy at the end of each. The player controls a small spacecraft and must navigate terrain and fight enemies using the various ship weapons. The player's spacecraft has, by default, a weak but rapid-firing main gun; and a more powerful gun called the Wave Cannon, which requires the player to hold their fire to build up power for the cannon. During the game, the player can obtain an auxiliary device called a Force. This resembles a glowing orange ball. The Force can be attached to the front or back of the player's spacecraft, or detached to fly freely. When attached, the Force provides one of three different powerful weapons, in addition to the main gun and the Wave Cannon. When detached, these weapons cannot be used, but the Force will instead resort to a secondary set of guns, which can be fired by the player even if the Force is at a distance from the spacecraft.

History

Development on the Commodore 64 version began when Activision's Electric Dreams Software subsidiary obtained the rights. David Jolliff was planning on to program the game with James Smart assisting in program help. The original version was shelved, and as a result of the settlement between the creators of Katakis and Activision, Manfred Trenz of Rainbow Arts had the right to do a port, which was made in six weeks. Hudson Soft developed a fairly accurate port of R-Type for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 console, although it suffered from a slightly lower resolution, reduced color palette, sprite flickering and slowdown.