Good conversion. I didn't like it (or the original arcade) much though. Nor did I like Salamander or Denaris either. I can't put my finger on why though. I mean, I liked Menace on the Amiga which is fairly similar (though that was probably to with "Gunth" and "Lathers!")
..I couldn't agree more with Velesoft, R-Type is almost a different game when played with a mouse... Don't get me wrong, the game is still a swine, but somehow it lends itself very satisfyingly to the use of a mouse...
Yes. Playability is absolutly different and speed of movement is faster:
Zynaps is a horrible game as well, any shoot em' up that starts you off with 1 bullet per shot that either has to hit something or leave the screen before you fire another is total F*cking B*llocks if you ask me.
....and that applies to anything that came before or after it as well.
but it would've been nice to have AY effects and menu music.
Activision were only ever going to release a standard 48K version of the game - which is why it's a multi-load and has BEEPy music. A 128K version was never considered.
I don't mind the character movement, but it would've been nice to have AY effects and menu music.
This topic reminded me of ST Dragon. It uses pixel-movement and I was very impressed when I saw it for the first time.
I played ST dragon for a while.
It was not bad - but I hated the fact the play area was really small, and there was no frame around it to warn you of this! It made dodging bullets needlessly difficult.
For me R-type was the ultimate show off game. Late on in the speccy's life it was handy to have a few such games to show 16-bit and console owning friends who were paying ?30-?60 per game!
I used to show my friends R-type but I never seriously played it and I've no idea whether any of the later levels even load from my copy of the tape or not. I'm unlikely to ever play them!
Forgive my necroposting but had to defend this one.
I thought R-Type on the speccy was the effing boll*cks. The speccy just didn't have the power to provide smooth sprites and keep that playability compared to the arcade parent. Bob Pape got his priorities right IMO and should be praised.
And just for the info about R-Type being too hard...it's a game of memorisation, all the enemies have certain patterns which can be exploited.
I managed to consistently beat the speccy version WITHOUT even losing a life, all eight levels, back in the day of course.
I bought this on cassette recently and fired it up on my rubber keys. I've only managed to reach level 2 (probably about as far as I ever got but that could apply to any game). On this and emulator I find it astounding the way the screen comes to life with colour and action, I really don't mind the character based movement at all. In fact if I didn't know to look for it I would probably just think it fast.
The programmers took some bold decisions which paid off in my opinion, and if they didn't it's likely R-Type would be just another uninspired shootemup like X-Out or Xenon.
So on balance, Good! The best SEU of its time, even gives Slubberdegullion a run for its money. (Shame about the multiloader tho)
Now my thumbs are sore I've moved to emulator, and I will complete it!
Well like I said in the first post, the game's technically amazing. But see how you feel during the second half of the game. Again, it's just the levels that I hate.
Well like I said in the first post, the game's technically amazing. But see how you feel during the second half of the game. Again, it's just the levels that I hate.
Yep, what I love about R-Type is at the start, middle and end of each level there's a real feeling of 'how the hell do I get past THAT?'. And it keeps that up right through the first four levels. And then it starts to repeat itself and get tedious, and rely on bad design to make it hard for the rest of the game.
Yep, what I love about R-Type is at the start, middle and end of each level there's a real feeling of 'how the hell do I get past THAT?'. And it keeps that up right through the first four levels. And then it starts to repeat itself and get tedious, and rely on bad design to make it hard for the rest of the game.
That's typical of all shooters that came from the arcades though, because they rely on getting obscenely difficult to ensure that punters end up spending a lot of cash in them.
For fear of being shot down with ****e, I've gotta say that I really don't like the Spectrum version.
Like Uridium, whilst it is a technically brilliant achievement, I don't think it seems right on the Speccy. Maybe it's because I played Manfred Trenz's superb C64 version first, I don't know. I'm not being traitorous, honestly. It just needs silky smooth scrolling and smooth sprites.
Maybe it's because I played Manfred Trenz's superb C64 version first, I don't know.
Do you reckon if the Spectrum version had chucked out half the game sprites, changed the sprites to make them smaller, letterboxed the screen to shrink the display area, simplified the alien sprite movement patterns, changed the player weapons system, failed to implement some major enemies properly, dropped\changed the end of level baddies and ignored a lot of the gameplay then all that extra space could have been used to make things better? Like the Manfred Trenz version does?
I think Turkwel has a point there... When you consider the other shootemups available at the time for the Speccy, and even compared to a few on other systems, you can't help but admire the technical brilliance of this one... I also suspect that whether you think R-Type on the ZX is any good or not really also depends upon whether you like horizontal shootemups in the first place... A few posters here give the impression that they would have rated R-Type poorly even if it had been a perfect arcade conversion with smooth graphics, music and sound, but that may be more to do with their personal taste for this genre rather than the conversion itself...
Personally, I think the conversion was fantastic, and the biggest flaw, as far as I can see (level design), says more about the original arcade than it does about the ZX conversion...
I didn't say that the Speccy version wasn't a brilliant achievement, I just think that fluidity of gameplay has been sacrificed a bit for the sake of impressive graphics.
I personally love horizontal shooters, and LUNAR JETMAN is an example of one that really works well on the Speccy, even though it's blimmin 'ard.
If the Speccy version had been super-smooth but mostly monochrome, would people bum to death as much as the version we got? Impossible to know, but worth thinking about.
Imagine you were the programmer of R-Type. If you believe the "fluidity of gameplay" was replaced with the graphics then what would you do to redress this imbalance? What would you change or drop in order to make room for the new code\graphics that would put the gameplay back into the game?
Visited the film museum in Bradford and it has a videogame section with some stand up arcade machines and various other examples (manic miner, golden eye). But one stand up machine had r type on it. Oh boy. All the old skills came flooding back! The controls on the machine were in appropriate though. Four large flat buttons instead of joystick and only 1 fire button so couldn't control the orb thing properly. Still got to the end of the level though! Order r-types for ps2 from ebay. Looking forward to getting re-acquanted with it on a big screen!
The speccy version is a classic and I can't understand why people don't like it ot Zynaps. If the Zynaps programmer had done the speccy version it may have been a touch better but overall I don't see what else they could have done to make it a faithful version as possible (missing level excluded). Sure it relies on you learning the positions and patterns of the baddies but most of the computer game of the time had that.
Thinking about when I played it originally back in the late 80s in the video shop across the road from my school I got pretty good at it then and could get to the very difficult level with the machinery flying around on just a few credits. Other classics they had were Bubble Bobble, Double Dragon and Golden Axe. I could complete Golden Axe on one credit. Nothing like as hard as r-type.
Mikal, as I said in the first post, I'm very impressed by the conversion (it's a technical marvel!). The topic is more about whether or not it's a good game and, two levels aside, I'm not sure it actually is.
Zynaps is playable enough, looks great and is pretty smooth but the lack of proper levels makes it pretty dull.
Yes. Playability is absolutly different and speed of movement is faster:
and example of Zynaps for mouse:
How did you get your GIF's to run so smoothly? I've been trying to make a GIF of Zynaps recently and everytime it comes out looking framerate-y, choppy, and slightly slower than its supposed to be.
Any help would be appreciated as I've just been settling with choppy GIF's and repeatedly having to explain to people that the real thing is smoother (and anything which isn't Spectrum comes out much worse too)
Mikal, as I said in the first post, I'm very impressed by the conversion (it's a technical marvel!). The topic is more about whether or not it's a good game and, two levels aside, I'm not sure it actually is.
Zynaps is playable enough, looks great and is pretty smooth but the lack of proper levels makes it pretty dull.
I'm afraid you are quite wrong. Both are marvellous. Now let that be an end to it.
How did you get your GIF's to run so smoothly? I've been trying to make a GIF of Zynaps recently and everytime it comes out looking framerate-y, choppy, and slightly slower than its supposed to be.
Any help would be appreciated as I've just been settling with choppy GIF's and repeatedly having to explain to people that the real thing is smoother (and anything which isn't Spectrum comes out much worse too)
What are you using to capture the video?
Dunno about anyone else, but personally, I've never had much success with emulator video-recorders (e.g. Spin). Instead, I tend to use a "desktop" recorder (e.g. Camstudio) with the lagarith video codec - it's lossless and can significantly reduce file-sizes for this sort of video.
Then, once I've captured the AVI, I stick it into VirtualDub, so I can trim the resolution (most games are trimmed down to 256*192, games with border effects are trimmed to 320*256) and chop out the clips I want to stick onto the website - depending on the game and the amount of on-screen change, these tend to be around 5-15 seconds in length.
Finally, the trimmed clips are dumped into Paint Shop Pro's Animation Studio and converted into gif. The built-in wizard generally does a good job of optimisation, though you sometimes need to force it to use 16 colours instead of 8, as otherwise it'll dither everything and hugely increase the filesize.
The results hopefully speak for themselves :)
(one final note: I tend to use Paint Shop Pro version 5 - it's essentially the last "pixel-pushing" version of PSP, before they started to move more towards Photoshop's photo-airbrushing focus. The version I use was given away free on a coverdisk about a decade ago; the shareware version is still easily found online. There's also a patch for the program which improves stability; this is somewhat harder to find but I've got a copy sitting on the hard drive...
How did you get your GIF's to run so smoothly? I've been trying to make a GIF of Zynaps recently and everytime it comes out looking framerate-y, choppy, and slightly slower than its supposed to be.
Any help would be appreciated as I've just been settling with choppy GIF's and repeatedly having to explain to people that the real thing is smoother (and anything which isn't Spectrum comes out much worse too)
I use ZX SPIN emulator. Record to animated GIF format (10 fps without border area and select size optimalisation).
Just got R-Types delivered today. A PS1 emulation of rtypes 1 & 2 but I'm playing it on my ps2.
So sat down with my 9 year old son and started it up in 2 player mode and after a trial run explaining the controls etc I got to level 4 on 1 life. I'm king of the worrrrllllldddd!!!!!! Admittedly it is easier than the arcade as one button is rapid fire which cuts down on the furious stabbing of the fire button. But still. I ROCK!!!!
Comments
Just cant see past it.
Did you complete it?
Yes. Playability is absolutly different and speed of movement is faster:
and example of Zynaps for mouse:
....and that applies to anything that came before or after it as well.
This topic reminded me of ST Dragon. It uses pixel-movement and I was very impressed when I saw it for the first time.
I played ST dragon for a while.
It was not bad - but I hated the fact the play area was really small, and there was no frame around it to warn you of this! It made dodging bullets needlessly difficult.
For me R-type was the ultimate show off game. Late on in the speccy's life it was handy to have a few such games to show 16-bit and console owning friends who were paying ?30-?60 per game!
I used to show my friends R-type but I never seriously played it and I've no idea whether any of the later levels even load from my copy of the tape or not. I'm unlikely to ever play them!
I thought R-Type on the speccy was the effing boll*cks. The speccy just didn't have the power to provide smooth sprites and keep that playability compared to the arcade parent. Bob Pape got his priorities right IMO and should be praised.
And just for the info about R-Type being too hard...it's a game of memorisation, all the enemies have certain patterns which can be exploited.
I managed to consistently beat the speccy version WITHOUT even losing a life, all eight levels, back in the day of course.
Tony.
The programmers took some bold decisions which paid off in my opinion, and if they didn't it's likely R-Type would be just another uninspired shootemup like X-Out or Xenon.
So on balance, Good! The best SEU of its time, even gives Slubberdegullion a run for its money. (Shame about the multiloader tho)
Now my thumbs are sore I've moved to emulator, and I will complete it!
Well like I said in the first post, the game's technically amazing. But see how you feel during the second half of the game. Again, it's just the levels that I hate.
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
That's typical of all shooters that came from the arcades though, because they rely on getting obscenely difficult to ensure that punters end up spending a lot of cash in them.
Like Uridium, whilst it is a technically brilliant achievement, I don't think it seems right on the Speccy. Maybe it's because I played Manfred Trenz's superb C64 version first, I don't know. I'm not being traitorous, honestly. It just needs silky smooth scrolling and smooth sprites.
Don't get me started on Salamander either... :)
Do you reckon if the Spectrum version had chucked out half the game sprites, changed the sprites to make them smaller, letterboxed the screen to shrink the display area, simplified the alien sprite movement patterns, changed the player weapons system, failed to implement some major enemies properly, dropped\changed the end of level baddies and ignored a lot of the gameplay then all that extra space could have been used to make things better? Like the Manfred Trenz version does?
Personally, I think the conversion was fantastic, and the biggest flaw, as far as I can see (level design), says more about the original arcade than it does about the ZX conversion...
I personally love horizontal shooters, and LUNAR JETMAN is an example of one that really works well on the Speccy, even though it's blimmin 'ard.
If the Speccy version had been super-smooth but mostly monochrome, would people bum to death as much as the version we got? Impossible to know, but worth thinking about.
The speccy version is a classic and I can't understand why people don't like it ot Zynaps. If the Zynaps programmer had done the speccy version it may have been a touch better but overall I don't see what else they could have done to make it a faithful version as possible (missing level excluded). Sure it relies on you learning the positions and patterns of the baddies but most of the computer game of the time had that.
Thinking about when I played it originally back in the late 80s in the video shop across the road from my school I got pretty good at it then and could get to the very difficult level with the machinery flying around on just a few credits. Other classics they had were Bubble Bobble, Double Dragon and Golden Axe. I could complete Golden Axe on one credit. Nothing like as hard as r-type.
Zynaps is playable enough, looks great and is pretty smooth but the lack of proper levels makes it pretty dull.
Any help would be appreciated as I've just been settling with choppy GIF's and repeatedly having to explain to people that the real thing is smoother (and anything which isn't Spectrum comes out much worse too)
No need. You can get a cream for that!
I'm afraid you are quite wrong. Both are marvellous. Now let that be an end to it.
What are you using to capture the video?
Dunno about anyone else, but personally, I've never had much success with emulator video-recorders (e.g. Spin). Instead, I tend to use a "desktop" recorder (e.g. Camstudio) with the lagarith video codec - it's lossless and can significantly reduce file-sizes for this sort of video.
Then, once I've captured the AVI, I stick it into VirtualDub, so I can trim the resolution (most games are trimmed down to 256*192, games with border effects are trimmed to 320*256) and chop out the clips I want to stick onto the website - depending on the game and the amount of on-screen change, these tend to be around 5-15 seconds in length.
Finally, the trimmed clips are dumped into Paint Shop Pro's Animation Studio and converted into gif. The built-in wizard generally does a good job of optimisation, though you sometimes need to force it to use 16 colours instead of 8, as otherwise it'll dither everything and hugely increase the filesize.
The results hopefully speak for themselves :)
(one final note: I tend to use Paint Shop Pro version 5 - it's essentially the last "pixel-pushing" version of PSP, before they started to move more towards Photoshop's photo-airbrushing focus. The version I use was given away free on a coverdisk about a decade ago; the shareware version is still easily found online. There's also a patch for the program which improves stability; this is somewhat harder to find but I've got a copy sitting on the hard drive...
:lol:
Brilliant line. I'm going to be looking for an opportunity to use this one in regular conversation.
I use ZX SPIN emulator. Record to animated GIF format (10 fps without border area and select size optimalisation).
So sat down with my 9 year old son and started it up in 2 player mode and after a trial run explaining the controls etc I got to level 4 on 1 life. I'm king of the worrrrllllldddd!!!!!! Admittedly it is easier than the arcade as one button is rapid fire which cuts down on the furious stabbing of the fire button. But still. I ROCK!!!!