In the market for a new horizontally scrolling shooter? Assuming you already own Lords of Thunder, R-Type III is the game you're looking for. If you already own R-Type III, you might want to give the TurboGrafx port of the original R-Type a try, despite the stupid $2 surcharge.
If you enjoyed both R-Type and R-Type III, you may be tempted to give Super R-Type a shot. It's basically an enhanced SNES remake of the arcade R-Type II with several console-exclusive additions and changes, so what could possibly go wrong?
There's nothing technically wrong with Super R-Type's core gameplay. It's got the same weird and vaguely nauseating biomechanical aesthetic you'd find in other games in the series, and the charge meter mechanic provides an unexpected amount of depth.
Super R-Type also borrows R-Type II's second meter of weapons charging for an added layer of strategy. Do you try and take out all the enemies on-screen by using weak rapid-fire shots, or do you risk leaving yourself vulnerable for several seconds while your meter charges? After that, is it worth the extra wait time for an even more powerful shot? R-Type's gameplay is based upon making these kinds of decisions, and your survival depends on proper balancing of risk and reward.
You're going to die, though. A lot. R-Type is infamous for being a game of level memorization and pattern recognition, and your own skill is only going to take you so far before an unexpected wave of enemies or a sudden boss attack blows you up real good.
This isn't so much an issue in the R-Type games previously released on the Virtual Console. You die. You get sent back to the last checkpoint. You learn, and you conquer. Super R-Type, though, has no checkpoints. No matter how far you get, any of the game's one-hit deaths will send you all the way back to the beginning of the current level.
The amount of frustration this causes is easy to imagine. The stages themselves may be easy enough to get through after some practice, but the bosses are another matter. Until you spend a few lives getting their pattern down, they'll destroy you in a matter of seconds with unpredictable attacks. And each time you die, you're sent back to the beginning of the level, forced to sit through several dull minutes of gameplay that you've seen many times before, just for the privilege of getting to spend a few more seconds with the level's boss before it kills you again.
This kind of gameplay is tolerable in other R-Types, but Super R-Type can eat itself, as far as I'm concerned. It's otherwise a solid, if slowdown-plagued, horizontal shooter, but without checkpoints, Super R-Type quickly becomes tortuous and boring.
Don't do this to yourself, man. You deserve better.
