R-Type: Unfeasibly hard, especially after a tipple...

Following an unusually harrowing day at the office, I sat down last night with a glass of vino for an impromptu session on the classic R-Type (the almost arcade-perfect version for the PS1).

'Right,' I said to myself as the familiar R9A Arrowhead craft flew onto the screen, 'I'm not going to move until I've completed it.'

Terrible, terrible idea. After sailing through the first two levels (let's face it, as terrifying as Dopkeratops - the first boss - appears, he's dead easy to beat, and the heart thing on level two is even easier if you position your ship correctly), and only losing a life or two on the 'giant ship' third stage, I hit a complete and utter brick wall on level four. In case you don't remember, it's the one with the hundreds of little green spores everywhere. Through sheer determination, and after a lot of swearing, I finally managed to battle my way to the end of level guardian, a sort of mechanical, modular affair that splits into blocky sections.

By this time, it was pushing midnight and fatigue - and inebriation - were really beginning to set in, and I was forced to abandon the war effort. Somewhere in here, there's a moral message - something about drinking and playing retro shooters obviously - but the more important one is that R-Type is still an unbelievably addictive game, even after all these years. It's fiercely difficult, and even made number seven in a top ten listing of all-time hard games, but this is really part of the appeal.

Gamers of a certain age will possibly remember the once mind-boggling sight of R-Type playing on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This was the late eighties equivalent of seeing an almost perfect replica of Crysis running on a Nintendo DS, it was that close to the arcade version. Everything was there - all the sprites, all the gameplay - with only a hint of the colour clash that plagued any Speccy game that dared to be anything other than monochrome.

Well, just to remind you how great that conversion was, here's a video of someone playing Speccy R-Type from beginning to end. I bet he can't do that after a bottle of red wine...