Irem Week #1
Gaming has been good to me this weekend, it's May bank holiday so I don't have to work today. For a lack of anything better to do, I decided to check out Pokemon XD: Gale Of Darkness while I had some time to myself. Getting started proved troublesome as Gamecube memory cards have an inability to hold more than one game file each (!) and I didn't want to erase any of my Mum's games. Why is this? I was tempted to post a longwinded hate-rant about how crappy the file-sizes are over at the Nintendo fanboy infested P.U.F.F. forum. It just seems like we are forced to buy multiple cards if we want to share our games within a household - you'd think for a machine aimed at families you'd be able to fit a game on for Mum, son and little sister instead of just one game per card. This really is A Complete Load Of Fucking Bollocks and Animal Crossing in particular is a real bastard for this reason. One town per card?
Because of this, I would like to think that Nintendo won't get another penny from me as long as I live but of course, this is doubtful. I'm sure I'll cave in whenever Wii is revealed.
Anyway, my mum has already beaten the pokemon game so she let me overwrite her save. I can't say it was worth the hassle though. Apart from the cuddly little pokemon themselves, who are drawn and animated beautifully - this game looks absolutely ghastly (neh-heh). Its sad because I spent ages and ages with the old Digimon game on PSX - a game which was quite punishing and that I never beat - and that was ten times better than this poorly knocked-together pile of crap.
Like I said though, gaming has been good to me. Today my mum has been struggling with Shadow Of The Colossus which looks excellent. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on it when she's done.
In the meantime, I managed to google up an FAQ on how to write ISOs properly. I'd had trouble backing up my old PSX games onto my harddrive in the past - I couldn't get them to run in my emulator. I can play games from the CD just fine but my CD drive heats up really bad and the CDs come out boiling hot. This has always worried me but fortunately the FAQ told me how to do it all properly and get the ISOs running.
So this is what I've been doing all afternoon. Backing up all my best games and then giving them a whirl in the emu. Apart from the occasional sound or graphics glitch, this is a great new way to play these old games. You can set the screen resolution higher so that the 3D graphics look a lot better than they do on your normal TV and with the savestates and stuff, you can continue from wherever you last left off without having to wait for the game to load. Theres the added bonus of not having to sit next to a CD drive that sounds like a jet engine (and pumps out the same amount of heat) and also, up until now I've been sharing a scart lead with my mum. Now I can play Gradius Gaiden whenever I want.
You're probably wondering about the title to this entry. Well, I have officially declared this week "Irem week" and have prepared a bunch of screenshot galleries accordingly. I enjoy making these little galleries, even though you dont enjoy looking at them - and as it is Irem week the obvious choice of game to begin with would be:
What can be said about this game that hasn't already been said a thousand times before. I have to say that back in 1989 when I first encountered this in the arcades in Torquay, I was much more into Salamander. The bizarre, organic visuals of that game capture your imagination from the second you insert the coin and the sea of flames level we all saw in the attract mode was just as amazing.
With R-Type, I sorta walked past the machine, saw it had spaceships in it, had a go and lasted about 30 seconds. I had little skill in those days - and even less confidence. My strategy was this: shoot the small enemies, run away from the big ones - and that first mech you reach had me panicking every time. I remember my bro was the first person to grab the force pod, neither of us knew how to work it and I dont think he got much further, those cancers that lurk just inside the entrance to the enemy fortress hover just out the way of your shots.
So anyway, a few weeks later me and my bro were in Software Superstore in Sheffield, browsing the C64 section, when I happened to notice the amazing R-Type box artwork up on the shelves. Me and me bro only had enough cash with us for a £2.99 budget game each, I think I bought Ghosts and Goblins and my bro picked up the legendary Draconus. I'm not sure in what order the next bunch of stuff happened in (it was 1989 goddammitt) but I eventually grabbed the game.
As a kid, a Thursday during the summer holidays would traditionally involve a trip up to the swimming baths, followed by a walk around Dronfield Market (which was only there on Thursdays) and then a trip up to my grans house. I distinctly remember buying the game from the computer stall for £9.99 and drooling over the instruction manual while we sat at my gran's house, eager to get home and play the damn thing. We were in luck, because the C64 version was worthy of the coin-op - in fact, the music was even better. Unfortunately, while the game played pretty well, the game was prone to crashing at the level two boss, or sometimes just failing to load at all. It would be many long painful months until I got my hands on the Amiga version, (and don't those months just drag when you're a kid) thanks to my good friend Alex who was one of the first guys among us to get one of these new systems which were just becoming popular at the time. In fact, on the morning of the first day back at school after the holidays had ended, my friends were all looking through a copy of CU Amiga that had features on X-Out, X-Multiply and R-Type II as well as a little thing called Venom Wing that I recently rediscovered. For me, this was a truly exiting time. It wouldn't be until the summer after (1990) that I would get home versions of Nemesis and Salamander - of course, that summer was all about Turrican. For the time being, all my attention was devoted to R-Type.
STAGE 1
Sorry about the big pics! Thery're almost too big to display side by side on my layout. There's a whole load of memorable moments to be found on the first stage, most notably the rotating gun wall that you have to maneuver through. These big pincers look like they should crush you or something. They don't. (But they did in Pulstar, which was sort of an R-Type tribute) At the end of the stage, you're faced with R-Type's most iconic villain, Dobkeratops (official spelling). He's a pushover if you know what you're doing but he sure looks fearsome. He would reappear throughout the series in a variety of forms, in the final game, Eart scientists have captured one and are keeping it in a giant jar on Mars.
STAGE 2
An incredible visual departure from the previous stage, I managed to have a quick blast at this level in the arcades by continuing somebody else's game after they'd gone. I didn't know what was going on, just a whole load of meat and gristle with my ship being constantly bombarded by scorpions and sperm. Practicing at home, I eventually made it to the hideous penis/vagina/haemorrhoid amalgamation that was Gommander, another mainstay of the series. Here you can see me in the safe spot, the snake will miss me as it circles around, leaving me to blast the creature's clitoris/weakspot when it is revealed.
STAGE 3
Stage 3 as everyone already knows, is an encounter with one big battleship. The thing is covered with weaponry, the player is required to deal with the big ship's defenses and avoid its attacks. Eventually attacking the ship's main engine, that purple machinery in the second picture. The 'big spaceship level' was to be another recurring theme, sorely missing from R-Type III.
STAGE 4
On the C64, this is where everything fell apart for me. You can make it this far just by memorizing when to move up and down but now you will actually be required to, you know, dodge bullets and stuff. Enemies also attack from behind here.
This stage appears to be a city that has been overun with weeds and plants. Enemies whizz around leaving trails of green spores for you to blast through. Eventually, you reach a massive wall of spores and behind it lurks the boss, this red spaceship thingy. It can divide into three sections, each with a green orb for a weak point.
STAGE 5
Another visual departure, It loks like we're underwater here. This stage is great fun as it is just a straight-forward blast. The large snakes can cause problems but a well placed shot to the head will send their body segments flying all over the place. The boss is a big green blob (yellow here because I'm playing the japanese prototype). The segments of its body launch at you and as you destroy more and more it is revealed that there is a metallic thingy underneath all that goo. This is your target.
STAGE 6
Level 6 tests your dodging and memorisation skills. There are a few turrets to take out, but the moving containers can only be destroyed by shooting the red orbs, which all face the wrong way. At the end of the stage your trapped in a room with a whole load of moving containers. You can either dodge them or if you're equipped to shoot backwards then you can blow a bunch of them up.
STAGE 7
This stage appears to be some sort of mechanical fortress, not unlike the last stage or the first, except all is decayed and rusting here. Parts of the scenery explode so be careful. This stage is also home to the dreaded "wall of death" sequence where you have to make it through a narrow gap while a snake-like formation of yellow enemies circles around, eventually attacking from behind. With the force pod on the back, this part is fairly straight forward, but I cannot do it without weapons. This is something you'll have to learn though, if you trying to maximise your score, as you will be required to kill yourself and repeat this section over and over again to get the most points, before going on to beat the game with no lives left.
The boss is a big trash machine. The chutes at the top of the screen open up and drop trash down but there's just enough space for your ship in between where they fall. A machine keeps appearing at the right of the screen, attack the blue globe to destroy him and beat the stage. I going for score, you will be required to keep on destroying as much trash as you can until the boss times-out. Then you purposely kill yourself and repeat the process - that's if you can get past the "wall of death" without weapons.
FINAL STAGE
Yay, it's the last level. I'm not sure what this is, the heart of the Bydo Empire? It looks like strawberry fields to me. (only not here because of the odd pallet used on the japanese prototype.) There are no traps on this stage, just a constant stream of babies flying at your ship. An indestructible spinning whirlwind appears and must be avoided. After many babies are destroyed you eventually make it to the boss who sits protected inside this big membrane thingy. I always wondered what he was supposed to be. If you look closely he kind of resembles a little old man with bushy eyebrows and a moustache. The only effective method to beat him is to wait until the membrane opens up, just before he fires. Then fire the force pod inside with him.
With two bits, there is a safespot at the left hand side of the screen. The whirlwinds he fires will swerve and miss your ship and the babies will mash harmlessly into your bits, so its a simple matter of waiting for him to die. If you get here without two bits, then you will just have to survive, dodging the babies and the whirlwinds. I've never done this without the bits. After a while, he dies.
YAHOO WE HAVE WON
Because of this, I would like to think that Nintendo won't get another penny from me as long as I live but of course, this is doubtful. I'm sure I'll cave in whenever Wii is revealed.
Anyway, my mum has already beaten the pokemon game so she let me overwrite her save. I can't say it was worth the hassle though. Apart from the cuddly little pokemon themselves, who are drawn and animated beautifully - this game looks absolutely ghastly (neh-heh). Its sad because I spent ages and ages with the old Digimon game on PSX - a game which was quite punishing and that I never beat - and that was ten times better than this poorly knocked-together pile of crap.
Like I said though, gaming has been good to me. Today my mum has been struggling with Shadow Of The Colossus which looks excellent. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on it when she's done.
In the meantime, I managed to google up an FAQ on how to write ISOs properly. I'd had trouble backing up my old PSX games onto my harddrive in the past - I couldn't get them to run in my emulator. I can play games from the CD just fine but my CD drive heats up really bad and the CDs come out boiling hot. This has always worried me but fortunately the FAQ told me how to do it all properly and get the ISOs running.
So this is what I've been doing all afternoon. Backing up all my best games and then giving them a whirl in the emu. Apart from the occasional sound or graphics glitch, this is a great new way to play these old games. You can set the screen resolution higher so that the 3D graphics look a lot better than they do on your normal TV and with the savestates and stuff, you can continue from wherever you last left off without having to wait for the game to load. Theres the added bonus of not having to sit next to a CD drive that sounds like a jet engine (and pumps out the same amount of heat) and also, up until now I've been sharing a scart lead with my mum. Now I can play Gradius Gaiden whenever I want.
You're probably wondering about the title to this entry. Well, I have officially declared this week "Irem week" and have prepared a bunch of screenshot galleries accordingly. I enjoy making these little galleries, even though you dont enjoy looking at them - and as it is Irem week the obvious choice of game to begin with would be:
What can be said about this game that hasn't already been said a thousand times before. I have to say that back in 1989 when I first encountered this in the arcades in Torquay, I was much more into Salamander. The bizarre, organic visuals of that game capture your imagination from the second you insert the coin and the sea of flames level we all saw in the attract mode was just as amazing.
With R-Type, I sorta walked past the machine, saw it had spaceships in it, had a go and lasted about 30 seconds. I had little skill in those days - and even less confidence. My strategy was this: shoot the small enemies, run away from the big ones - and that first mech you reach had me panicking every time. I remember my bro was the first person to grab the force pod, neither of us knew how to work it and I dont think he got much further, those cancers that lurk just inside the entrance to the enemy fortress hover just out the way of your shots.
So anyway, a few weeks later me and my bro were in Software Superstore in Sheffield, browsing the C64 section, when I happened to notice the amazing R-Type box artwork up on the shelves. Me and me bro only had enough cash with us for a £2.99 budget game each, I think I bought Ghosts and Goblins and my bro picked up the legendary Draconus. I'm not sure in what order the next bunch of stuff happened in (it was 1989 goddammitt) but I eventually grabbed the game.
As a kid, a Thursday during the summer holidays would traditionally involve a trip up to the swimming baths, followed by a walk around Dronfield Market (which was only there on Thursdays) and then a trip up to my grans house. I distinctly remember buying the game from the computer stall for £9.99 and drooling over the instruction manual while we sat at my gran's house, eager to get home and play the damn thing. We were in luck, because the C64 version was worthy of the coin-op - in fact, the music was even better. Unfortunately, while the game played pretty well, the game was prone to crashing at the level two boss, or sometimes just failing to load at all. It would be many long painful months until I got my hands on the Amiga version, (and don't those months just drag when you're a kid) thanks to my good friend Alex who was one of the first guys among us to get one of these new systems which were just becoming popular at the time. In fact, on the morning of the first day back at school after the holidays had ended, my friends were all looking through a copy of CU Amiga that had features on X-Out, X-Multiply and R-Type II as well as a little thing called Venom Wing that I recently rediscovered. For me, this was a truly exiting time. It wouldn't be until the summer after (1990) that I would get home versions of Nemesis and Salamander - of course, that summer was all about Turrican. For the time being, all my attention was devoted to R-Type.
STAGE 1
Sorry about the big pics! Thery're almost too big to display side by side on my layout. There's a whole load of memorable moments to be found on the first stage, most notably the rotating gun wall that you have to maneuver through. These big pincers look like they should crush you or something. They don't. (But they did in Pulstar, which was sort of an R-Type tribute) At the end of the stage, you're faced with R-Type's most iconic villain, Dobkeratops (official spelling). He's a pushover if you know what you're doing but he sure looks fearsome. He would reappear throughout the series in a variety of forms, in the final game, Eart scientists have captured one and are keeping it in a giant jar on Mars.
STAGE 2
An incredible visual departure from the previous stage, I managed to have a quick blast at this level in the arcades by continuing somebody else's game after they'd gone. I didn't know what was going on, just a whole load of meat and gristle with my ship being constantly bombarded by scorpions and sperm. Practicing at home, I eventually made it to the hideous penis/vagina/haemorrhoid amalgamation that was Gommander, another mainstay of the series. Here you can see me in the safe spot, the snake will miss me as it circles around, leaving me to blast the creature's clitoris/weakspot when it is revealed.
STAGE 3
Stage 3 as everyone already knows, is an encounter with one big battleship. The thing is covered with weaponry, the player is required to deal with the big ship's defenses and avoid its attacks. Eventually attacking the ship's main engine, that purple machinery in the second picture. The 'big spaceship level' was to be another recurring theme, sorely missing from R-Type III.
STAGE 4
On the C64, this is where everything fell apart for me. You can make it this far just by memorizing when to move up and down but now you will actually be required to, you know, dodge bullets and stuff. Enemies also attack from behind here.
This stage appears to be a city that has been overun with weeds and plants. Enemies whizz around leaving trails of green spores for you to blast through. Eventually, you reach a massive wall of spores and behind it lurks the boss, this red spaceship thingy. It can divide into three sections, each with a green orb for a weak point.
STAGE 5
Another visual departure, It loks like we're underwater here. This stage is great fun as it is just a straight-forward blast. The large snakes can cause problems but a well placed shot to the head will send their body segments flying all over the place. The boss is a big green blob (yellow here because I'm playing the japanese prototype). The segments of its body launch at you and as you destroy more and more it is revealed that there is a metallic thingy underneath all that goo. This is your target.
STAGE 6
Level 6 tests your dodging and memorisation skills. There are a few turrets to take out, but the moving containers can only be destroyed by shooting the red orbs, which all face the wrong way. At the end of the stage your trapped in a room with a whole load of moving containers. You can either dodge them or if you're equipped to shoot backwards then you can blow a bunch of them up.
STAGE 7
This stage appears to be some sort of mechanical fortress, not unlike the last stage or the first, except all is decayed and rusting here. Parts of the scenery explode so be careful. This stage is also home to the dreaded "wall of death" sequence where you have to make it through a narrow gap while a snake-like formation of yellow enemies circles around, eventually attacking from behind. With the force pod on the back, this part is fairly straight forward, but I cannot do it without weapons. This is something you'll have to learn though, if you trying to maximise your score, as you will be required to kill yourself and repeat this section over and over again to get the most points, before going on to beat the game with no lives left.
The boss is a big trash machine. The chutes at the top of the screen open up and drop trash down but there's just enough space for your ship in between where they fall. A machine keeps appearing at the right of the screen, attack the blue globe to destroy him and beat the stage. I going for score, you will be required to keep on destroying as much trash as you can until the boss times-out. Then you purposely kill yourself and repeat the process - that's if you can get past the "wall of death" without weapons.
FINAL STAGE
Yay, it's the last level. I'm not sure what this is, the heart of the Bydo Empire? It looks like strawberry fields to me. (only not here because of the odd pallet used on the japanese prototype.) There are no traps on this stage, just a constant stream of babies flying at your ship. An indestructible spinning whirlwind appears and must be avoided. After many babies are destroyed you eventually make it to the boss who sits protected inside this big membrane thingy. I always wondered what he was supposed to be. If you look closely he kind of resembles a little old man with bushy eyebrows and a moustache. The only effective method to beat him is to wait until the membrane opens up, just before he fires. Then fire the force pod inside with him.
With two bits, there is a safespot at the left hand side of the screen. The whirlwinds he fires will swerve and miss your ship and the babies will mash harmlessly into your bits, so its a simple matter of waiting for him to die. If you get here without two bits, then you will just have to survive, dodging the babies and the whirlwinds. I've never done this without the bits. After a while, he dies.
YAHOO WE HAVE WON