Saturday 12 December 2009
Disaster Year 2003: R-Type Final
Video games very rarely ever deal with the idea of consequences. Enemies are slaughtered, landscapes altered, all the player can do is zip off to blitz somewhere else. Not so R-Type Final; it plots a course through the ruin. Mechanically Final is a sidescroll shooter, a primitive, almost inception video game form in which a lone player battles a vast armada of foes. Final dials down the sense of invasive scale, instead positing limping dregs as challenge, and tight-fit geography as peril. Whilst players rarely ever have to dodge screen swamp bullet deluges, they do have to methodically pick their way through destitute battleships and hammered outposts. You're not resisting an onslaught, you're chasing the survivors, annihilating what's left of the fleeing invasion force. The rout takes you through a wheezing field hospital into space, where a final encounter with an amorphous techno-biology can mutate you into something horrific: a being that cannot stop fighting and doesn't distinguish between friend or foe.
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