1001 Games To Play Before You Die: #0145 R-Type

Monday, August 7, 2017

#0145 R-Type

Alright! We got four arcade games in a row! ya know what that means? That means I can plow through all of them in a single evening. let's rip into these bad boys:

So today I played R-Type, a 1987 SHMUP from Irem.

This game... Is amazing. Like seriously, this was everything Gradius was and more. Like, honestly, this is probably the most polished SHMUP I've seen so far. It has the amazing visuals and sounds of Darius, it has the powerup system of Gradius, it's like the perfect SHMUP game!

Well, ALMOST perfect. I have to say that the powerups, while amazing, take a while to accumulate in power. And the amazing art and smooth animations of every sprite make the game distracting, and hard to concentrate on what's going on around you. I found the difficulty curve EXTREMELY high. At least it has a very robust and forgiving checkpoint system so you never go back too far so long as you have enough quarters. And MAN does this thing eat quarters. I gladly fed the thing like $5 easily. Amazing game, if you like SHMUPs at all, you NEED to give this game a try.

Next up: Gemini Wing

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Why I'm taking this challenge

So! I’ve spent nearly my entire life as a Nintendo Fanboy. A rabid fanboy to the point where when my family got a brand new Playstation 2 back in ‘02 (One of the best consoles ever). I refused to play it. I refused to have anything to do with the company that stole my beloved Nintendo’s thunder! This fanboyism ran rampant in my gaming life through high school and even when I moved out to live with the woman who would one day become my wife. I still didn’t play anything but Nintendo consoles. In fact, it wasn’t until we were gifted an Xbox 360 did I FINALLY play a game on a different console. That was Bioshock, it was also the first shooter I had ever played.It became one of my favorite games of all time. The rest is history, I’ve been playing games on any console I want now.

That’s all well and good, but this means that there is an entire other gaming WORLD that I’ve never played. Never experienced in my life. I love shooters, but with the exception of the half-life series, and System shock 2, every shooter from Doom all the way up until Bioshock, I’ve never played. Not Quake, not CoD, not battlefield.

So, since I’ve missed out on nearly 30 years of gaming, I decided to take a challenge. My lovely wife got me a book called 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die I am going to play through every game in this book. Starting with Oregon Trail (1971) and finish with Bioshock Infinite (2013) I plan to do at least one generation per year. At least. And to help me keep track of what I've done, I started doing small reviews of every game.

At first I wrote these in the starment.net forums, but eventually they became too lengthy to only be posted there, so I created this blog to not only help keep me organized, but so others can follow along as well. It won't be easy, but I think it's worth it to play games that I may otherwise never have played.