As far as remasters go, R-Type Delta HD Boosted adds very little in terms of new content. There’s the new soundtrack (which is fantastic), the supposed graphical boost, along with the Practice Mode, and…that’s it. It’s a smaller offering than what some of the other remasters of this year have brought to the table, but it successfully manages to preserve the refreshing yet frustrating experience of its source material.
The 80s, 90s, and early aughts’ vision of the far future was, for lack of better words, crunchy. While Star Wars had us looking up to the stars in hopes of seeing light sabers and Jedi heroes, other media portrayed space travel as an isolating and dangerous jaunt. The R-Type series contained one of these portrayals: Imagine a future Earth that has been invaded by grotesque biomechanical aliens. Think of twisted combinations of flesh, machine, and bone, merging ideas of unrefined industry and organic horror into something to make you squirm.
R-Type was more than a vision of the future, though. It was a critically acclaimed shoot-em-up (shmup) series on arcade cabinets, old-school consoles, and some handhelds. Its general premise is simple while its difficulty immensely complex: Pilot a little ship and navigate through waves and waves and waves of enemies shooting colored bullets. Oh, and if you take a single (yes, one) hit, you die and are taken back to the beginning of the level/nearest checkpoint.
R-Type Delta HD Boosted is a remaster (not remake) of R-Type’s fourth title, R-Type Delta, which was originally released in 1998. Delta was R-Type’s first instance into the three-dimensional space. While enemies still emerge from every inch of the screen, entire levels rotate and hint at future threats in the background, constantly reminding the player to remain alert and alive. At its original release, the 3D models and environments were praised for pushing R-Type’s fantasy into new directions all the while its difficulty remained high.
Now that I have this remaster in-hand and have played it for several hours over the past week, I have many thoughts. I’m thrilled to replay a classic R-Type game, but I’m unsure if enough love was given to it to truly celebrate the game as a piece of gaming history. HD Boosted contains basically the same game as Delta barring a new Practice Mode, a new soundtrack (along with the original), and supposedly upscaled graphics.
On the graphical front, it looks as though the textures have been overly smoothed to showcase models’ sharp edges. This makes objects, enemies, and parts of the background look more like a relic of the PlayStation 1 era. This becomes even more evident on the second level which took me into an aquatic warehouse. Water textures look more like grainy ice than smooth water. The machines and monsters look more blocky than I recall, too.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with classic graphics. I’ve spent far too much time replaying games than new ones in my spare time. But, to claim that Delta HD Boosted contains a graphical update is a serious stretch. It would have felt better to simply preserve the game in its original graphical state, CRT filters and all, alongside an HD counterpart that sands the edges down to really showcase the disparity between the classic and remaster.
If you’ve played Delta before today, or any R-Type, you’ll remember that the gameplay is insanely difficult. This remains true in HD Boosted, as my little ships were just as fragile as I remember. Grazing an object (regardless of it being an enemy’s bullet, an enemy itself, or even part of a level’s architecture) blows me up into smithereens and takes me back to the nearest checkpoint. Some levels have hazards that rise up out of the ground or fall from the sky, almost always without any form of warning. This makes playing HD Boosted another instance of memorization rather than timing or dexterity.
Would it have made HD Boosted a subpar product for adding small UI elements like warnings or brighter hazard outlines? Possibly. Nostalgic superfans (myself included) grew up with these difficult games, but today’s standards of difficulty are more player-friendly. Players of today are accustomed to wind-up animations and clearly communicated windows, so HD Boosted comes across as player-hostile at first glance. The sharp difficulty curve in the form of memorization ends up being refreshing after the first few attempts of trial, error, and eventual success.
HD Boosted contains a Practice mode, though! Practice modes aren’t groundbreaking, sure, but doing so with a difficult game like HD Boosted gives players the right space to try out difficult segments to train muscle memory and the like. I loved how many levers were available in this practice mode, spanning power ups to speed to chosen level. It’s a smart implementation of a tool that can and should be used. That said, HD Boosted has the same cheat codes from the original, so feel free to do some Google-fu if you just want to get to the end credits and/or unlock a new ship.
As far as remasters go, R-Type Delta HD Boosted adds very little in terms of new content. There’s the new soundtrack (which is fantastic), the supposed graphical boost, along with the Practice Mode, and…that’s it. It’s a smaller offering than what some of the other remasters of this year have brought to the table, but it successfully manages to preserve the refreshing yet frustrating experience of its source material.
