NOTE: This is Virtual Console review. As such, there's none of the usual scoring at the end.Just text and a quick verdict.

Our third game this week is what is considered by many to be one of the greatest side scrolling space shooters. R-Type III: The Third Lightening, released back in 1993 and as to be expected, this game is incredibly difficult! But that is no way a bad thing, if you're a fan of Ikaruga, Radiligy or Radiant Silvergun you are sure going to like this. Using both an incredible amount of enemies and physical obstacles, this game will take you a long time to complete.

R-Type III also boasts a quite fantastic weapon system, which has three specific areas of excellence. Firstly, you have two fire buttons. Now this may not seem major but up until this point games either had a charge fire button, which meant you had to button mash to do a single fire attack or other games just had a rapid fire button. R-Type III boasted both, which are controlled with X and Y on the classic controller or GameCube controller. The game also has what's called 'Shadow Force Weaponry'. Which are essentially different styles of laser which come in red (reverse lasers), blue (all-range lasers) and yellow (guide lasers). These however were nothing new for the R-Type franchise and neither were the 'Cyclone Force Weaponry' which is essentially just a smaller ship that either locks onto the front or the back of your spaceship.Graphically and audibly R-Type III is still fantastic. With its high tempo midi beats suiting the levels to a tee and even the scrolling sprites used in this game still hold up fairly well. As for the emulation, I used to own this game back on the SNES and it is exactly the same, a very good job by Nintendo.

As I previously said, if you're a fan of the genre if you've played this game or not it's a definite pick up, but don't if you're not in for a significant challenge or you hate dying a lot.

7/10