WHAT IS IT?

A beautiful HD remaster of 1993’s R-Type III: The Third Lightning for the SNES.

IS IT GOOD?

It’s a great shmup from a bygone era.

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

Shmuppers.

FLY RIGHT

My favourite shmups – Ikaruga, Einhänder, the little-known Sine Mora – work best when they make you feel like a gaming genius. Combining blistering difficulty (Dark Souls ain’t got nothing on Ikaruga) with repeatable, learnable attack patterns, these are games that are meant to be honed over countless hours of practice, only to finally reach the point where the whole adventure can be finished in less than sixty minutes, its toughest sections no longer a match for your lightning fast reflexes.

R-Type is one of the progenitor shmup series, and it’s easily one of the best. R-Type Final was one of my favourite games on the PS2 (it narrowly missed the cut on my rundown last year), but the series, with its attachable “Force” powerups, has always been good. While R-Type Delta (1998, PlayStation) is generally considered the best of the bunch, that’s no knock against the SNES-era R-Type III: The Third Lightning, or as it’s now been confusingly rebranded, Dimensions III.

FLY RIGHT

It’s been seventeen long years since R-Type Dimensions, an Xbox Live Arcade title (remember those?) which brought together and remastered the original R-Type and R-Type II for widescreen, HD gaming. There’s been nary an R-Type since then (saving the release, earlier this year, of an HD compilation of the offshoot turn-based Tactics games), and that’s a shame for what was once a widely-heralded series.

Dimensions III – even more confusingly, there is no Dimensions 2 – comes at a great moment for fans of retro-shmups. There’s Saros, busy applying the shmup ethos to third-person roguelike shooters, while the ever-expanding Switch/Switch 2 retro console library features a plethora of classic shmups, ranging from the aforementioned Ikaruga to the similarly-celebrated Radiant Silvergun and a large swath of the R-Type games.

FIRE

What Dimensions III brings to the table is the ideal version of a game widely considered among the best 16-bit shmups. Optional HD graphics – you can swap between the classic and modern with the tap of a button – alongside local shared screen co-op make for a fun afternoon, if you happen to know any other shmup nerds. (I know, we’re a dying breed.)

As for the game itself, it’s got the same solid core of spacefaring combat, albeit with the same extreme difficulty the series is known for. Difficulty modifiers help ease the pain, but players should bear in mind that this isn’t so much a game to be sit down and played through, as it is one to be mastered, over countless hours of improvement. It’s still far less daunting than Elden Ring, at any rate.

That said, we did notice some occasional slowdown, both in 16-bit and HD mode, and we actually found the original graphics to be preferable in certain areas. (Less visual clutter.) The lack of online multiplayer is also disappointing, if forgivable. Mostly, our main criticism has to do with difficulty: it is very hard, so unless you have the stamina to keep pushing through the same levels over and over, this one may not be for you. (Again, Elden Ring sickos, you’ll understand.)

***
Final score: 7/10 Vic Vipers.

Visit the official website for R-Type Dimensions III here.

The post R-Type Dimensions III Review: Pew Pew Pew appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

WHAT IS IT?

A loving – and very specific – remake of an obscure underwater shmup from the late ’80s.

IS IT GOOD?

It’s fun enough for what it is, though it can be unexpectedly tough.

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

Harcore shmuppers. Jaws fans.

WE ALL LIVE

Was a time, shmups – that’s shoot ‘em ups – were a dime a dozen. You couldn’t turn a corner at the arcade, or rummage through your dad’s stack of Amiga floppy disks, without encountering an R-Type or a Gradius or a Xevious or a Darius or any one of a thousand other titles. Some of these – the ones I just mentioned – were great. Others were merely good, or bad, or very, very terrible.

Shmups may have largely fallen out of fashion – though their influence is still seen in games like Returnal – but there’s a very specific subset of us gaming dorks who keep the shmup flame alive. We’re out here with our G-Darius reboots and curated Steam wishlists, whiling away the hours taking down thousands of flying little robots and aliens and various other monstrosities.

The Amiga/Commodore release X-Out is a hell of a deep cut for even the most hardcore of us shmuppers. Released in 1989 for the Commodore 64 (1990 for the Amiga port), it’s little remembered today, and honestly would have gone unnoticed by your resident Guardian shmupper if not for its salient feature: underwater combat.

That’s right: standing out amongst a sea of retro re-releases, X-Out: Resurfaced is a shmup set entirely underwater, pitting you against a veritable menagerie of aquatic foes.

IN A YELLOW SUBMARINE

X-Out: Resurfaced is a lightly retouched retro remake, in that it still looks like a heavily-pixelated 80s game, but remastered to widescreen with smoother graphics and movement. It looks, in other words, like the way you remember your Amiga 500 looking, but which in actual fact was never as crisp as this.

As mentioned, X-Out’s main selling point is its aquatic theme. Unlike so many other shmups, which are usually set in outer-space (or, in the case of Contra/Metal Slug, in the guerrilla-populated jungles of an unspecified dictatorship), this one puts players in control of a cute little submarine, pew-pewing its way through eight levels of underwater challenge.

In a nice touch, you get to build your sub yourself, customizing its loadout right down to where you place your various weapons/equipment. X-Out represents a very early example of ship customization in the genre, and it’s fun to experiment with different weapons/setups even today.

The level design is, unsurprisingly, excellent, rendering moody underwater settings, like a sunken city, in fine pixelated detail. The enemy design is pretty good, though I was disappointed to discover it still favours the mechanical/spaceship-style foes common to other shmups, rather than outwardly biological designs. While there are far fewer robot alien space sharks than I would have liked, I still found myself enjoying my time in X-Out’s brilliantly imagined settings.

A YELLOW SUBMARINE

New features, like a two-player co-op mode and a new “mirror mode” challenge, sweeten the deal for returning(?) players, though even without those additions I’d recommend X-Out for anyone interested in the genre. It’s especially good on Steam Deck (or Switch, for that matter), whose portability aligns nicely with the short and sweet levels available here.

The sight of a rocket-launching octopus is worth the price of admission alone.

***
Final score: 8/10 robo-cephalopods.

Visit the official website for X-Out: Remastered here.

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