pegboy wrote:Have you tried playing loop 2 on hard (aka pro difficulty)? That is pure hell. If you die on stage 2-6 or 2-7 you might as well reset and laugh off the 45 minutes you just wasted. A Super R-Type 2-ALL starting on hard is the hardest SNES clear I've done. The second hardest was Strike Gunner STG on level 4 difficulty.
Thunderspirits is fun and very easy, although you should just play Thunder Force AC instead

Nope. Never finished standard Hard, and given how lackluster the game tends to be, I'm just not that enamored to care.
What the game does well is what Irem are known for: really detailed sprite-work, which does shine here... although, this game could have easily been done on the MD (minus some colour). The only SFC/SNES special mode usage is the still-screen pixel scale-outs during transitions from the stages to the boss rooms (which were clearly used to cover up their unfamiliarity with how to allocate large "sprites" actively into memory during play on the SFC). The whole game never uses more than a single layer of parallax and there's no alpha channel.. nor is there any rotation or scaling. Clearly, Irem sought to fix all of these
omissions by jamming copious amounts of graphical special effects into R-Type III, thus making it boring for a completely different set of reasons (but how bout dat awesome take-off sequence though).
Thunder Spirits shouldn't take me very long... and yeah, I already spent time with TF AC in TF GP2 on Saturn. This is mainly about giving my SFC some attention.