Playing with your balls.
In the great pantheon of shoot-’em-up games, R-Type is both one of the greatest and one of the most excruciatingly difficult. Released in arcades in 1987 and drawing visual inspiration from the works of H.R. Giger, you pilot an R-9 fighter craft through spectacular alien worlds in a bid to destroy the Bydo Empire.
Although shoot ’em ups later evolved to favour more twitch-reflex gameplay, R-Type’s staple is its strict memorisation, requiring you to learn it by rote. As with Gradius, not dying is an unspoken challenge: losing your power-ups makes recovery brutally tough, and the game’s infamously aggressive checkpoints send you back a considerable distance each time you bite a bullet.
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