Xevious, R-Type III, Moto Roader

Xevious – 500 Points
Well, Nintendo certainly seems to have an obsession with shooters on the Virtual Console as of late. Here’s the granddaddy of them all. Xevious is the first real horizontal shooter released in arcades in 1982 by Namco on the eve of the video game crash. In North America the title went largely unnoticed, but in Japan, the game was a cult-sensation featuring promotion from some of the nation’s leading musicians of the era, and even inspiring the first ever commercial release of video game music. Drawing on elements from Galaga, the game basically laid the fundamental basics for future shooters in the vein of Raiden and Radiant Silvergun. While certainly a classic, Xevious is an arcade classic, and not an NES classic. The original game made use of a vertical monitor running on the Galaga hardware. Rather than stretch the game to fit the screen, the NES version of Galaga compensated with a black bar on the right side of the screen holding the score information to somewhat retain the game’s correct aspect ratio. The NES port of Xevious didn’t fare so well. The game is stretched out to fill the entire screen which takes away some of the sharpness and visual punch. The sound also takes a hit coming off sounding weak and tinny. The core gameplay is pretty much intact, but the game hasn’t aged all that well in comparison to other shooters already available on the Virtual Console, especially since there are so many floating around right now to choose from, including another killer hit in this week’s batch. Seeing as this is a inferior NES conversion of a somewhat dated game to begin with, you’re probably better off holding out for something else if you’re in the market for a good shooter.

R-Type III – 800 Points
Ah, a Super NES title. It has been a couple of weeks now since we saw one and a shooter no less. This is R-Type III, a title that was released exclusively for the Super Nintendo in 1993. There was never an arcade version, so what you have here is a tough as nails shooter designed to take full advantage of the SNES hardware, and boy did it ever. You might have seen this title when it was released on the Game Boy Advance a few years ago. That port was produced using literally none of the original source code by a studio with no experience in the genre. Don’t be fooled by that horrible conversion. This is the original version that suffers from none of those ailments such as bad collision detection and wonky visuals. In fact, R-Type III visually wrings out of the machine almost every possible graphical trick the Super NES is capable of which means the game still looks quite good today. R-Type III has a great soundtrack and spot-on controls, but the difficulty level is very high. There are some sections where you will almost always die unless you’ve been there before and know what cheap shot is coming next, or when the game is going to rotate the whole screen Mode 7 style and try to throw you into a wall. The difficulty is somewhat unbalanced since it’s not like they were trying to get us to pump quarters in the machine, because this game didn’t originate from arcades. Nonetheless, it is still a high grade production and terrific fun unless you’re the sort of person who’s controllers wind up in the neighbors yard because you hurled it through the window in frustration, because R-Type III will frustrate you. If you’ve got a good memory, balanced temper, and fast fingers, R-Type III will provide you with a lot of fast action and unrelenting gameplay.

Moto Roader – 600 Points
Most of the TurboGrafx games released so far have been pretty obscure, though when you think about it, the whole library is pretty much obscure from 92% of gamers. Nonetheless, there is a large mass of classics hidden in there just waiting to be discovered by unknowing gamers…this isn’t one of them. Moto Roader is a top-down perspective racing game, a breed that went extinct some time ago. There are some undeniable classics in this genre such as Rock n’ Roll Racing, Galaxy 5000, or R.C. Pro-Aim but this one comes off as too simplistic and dated to qualify. The visuals are overly simplistic, a trait that many early TurboGrafx titles share, but many others make up for it in the gameplay department, unlike this one. The backgrounds are simplistic and bland, and the only difference between the cars is their color. Your car is stuck with its grayish/white color and there is no way to change it. The alternate car bodies are somewhat nice, but they are overpriced and take to long to be affordable for a game so repetitive. Moto Roader borrows a little from Super Off-Road by awarding winnings for placing high in races, and you can use those winnings to upgrade attributes such as your engine, acceleration, turbo boosts, body durability, brakes, and maximum speed. You can also purchase special items such as bombs to use offensively which adds a little bit of tactical positioning to the game. While these adds a tiny amount of strategy to the game, it isn’t enough to make much of a difference. To completely finish off the gameplay, if you fall behind a significant amount the game will automatically warp you ahead to keep you in the race, which completely kills any need for skill. Top-down racing games sometimes suffer from awkward control, but Moto Roader takes it to a new level of confusion, and the music is just plain annoying. There are much better racers out there for the TurboGrafx and a lot for even the NES. Pass.