Hands on with classic shooter R-Type on iPhone

If you haven’t heard of R-Type, you’re either new to shooters or new to gaming.

The grandfather of shooters is heading to iPhone and iPod touch, and it's looking to be true to the original. Under the direction of publisher EA Mobile, this well-regarded series is gunning for a whole new generation.

Rather than trying to show-off with glitzy graphics or cutting-edge features, this is a game that tries to remain as true and authentic to the original as possible.

This means not just pixel-perfect visuals, but also frequency-perfect replications of the original music and almost frame-by-frame recreations of the enemy layout.

Yet, none of these rank as the most important feature that developer DotEmu has had to nail when it comes to this particular version of the classic shooter. That honour doesn’t even belong to the very welcome addition of online and local leaderboards, with both daily and all-time scores for the three new difficulty levels.

These difficulty levels range from infinite continues for the beginner to the frightening Insane mode for the experienced R-Type masochist. Purists may balk, but the inclusion of a level select option to skip the stages you’ve already survived is a welcome one for those of us who don’t have the inclination to learn the waves of enemies.

There are three control methods. Two are rubbish. Let’s talk about them first.

First up is the virtual D-Pad option that attempts to recreate the feel of an arcade cabinet. This distorts the perspective backwards like a TFT monitor: the two 'fire' buttons resemble those chunky, round plastic ones from 80s cabs (the awesome kind), and the joyst- oh. It’s a Mega Drive D-pad.

The D-pad is slippery, moving diagonally when you want to move straight. It’s not terrible - after a few minutes I was weaving fairly safely - but it’s not accurate.

Next up is one that sounds just as bad as it is: tilt and touch. Upon selection, you calibrate the accelerometer then you take enough diazepam to stop even the slightest twitch escaping from your finger muscles or else your ship has a fit in front of your eyes.

Finally, there’s the touch control scheme - it’s the default for a reason. It works magnificently. There, that’s what you wanted to know.

Why? For one thing, it doesn’t rely on you sticking to one portion of the screen, so obscuring the ship or the action barely factors into proceedings.

There’s an invisible right-hand strip of about 20 per cent of the display that denotes the firing area (although this can also be relegated to auto-fire with a touch-hold to charge up the beam weapon) and the rest is all movement.

Still, that doesn’t get around the fact that your thumb is going to cover something at some point in the game. To get around this, DotEmu has also included a windowed option that adds borders.

These borders shift the playing area up and slightly to the left, making the graphics smaller, but still easily visible, and creating a dead zone for your sweaty thumbs to rest, secure in the knowledge they’re not obscuring anything.

It’s obvious that DotEmu is aiming to create the definitive iPhone shooter and not a lazy port.

Whether it’s in the dogmatic approach to retaining the original graphics, modern additions like the leaderboards, level selects, and difficulty levels, or the thoughtful approach to the hardware’s limitations, R-Type is looking like it could be a big hit.