Thanks to discoveries made during co-op I’ve also made progress in single player. Made it to stage 7 on a credit, though I still died on stage 6 few times. As suspected, stage 5 is ridiculously easy if one can get there fully powered up. It’s enough to park yourself to the upper left or lower left corner and only occasionally move out to take care of the few popcorn enemies now and then. With the Red weapon held all the way from stage 4′s start the boss falls quickly.

Stage 4 itself is still annoying. There’s so many small, yet fatal things that can go wrong there. Getting better at the boss, though. Rather silly that stages (and bosses) 5 and 6 feel easier than stage 4…or at least they have far less things to remember to watch out for. Though in stage 6′s boss room, where you want to (or I want to, anyway) put the Force to my back I gotta be real careful not to run into a wall doing that. I think Dimension’s 3D graphics are playing tricks on me there, it looks like there’s more space there when there actually isn’t. Lost two lives just to that. Didn’t get too far into stage 7, a large “thing” came out from the left and I took a laser blast at close range after a while. Rather reminiscent of Delta’s stage 6, actually.

Speaking of Delta, I just realized the other day that I never changed away from Red weapon while I was playing it. Not sure why, just didn’t seem necessary to. In R-Type I change weapons at almost every opportunity and there’s a good reason every time. ‘Course in Delta RX’s Force has homing capabilities which more or less does the same job as having a more spread-out weapons fire output like those of the Blue or Yellow weapons. Makes me wonder if Delta’s and the original’s level design have that different philosophies behind them, or if RX was just that good. I guess if/when I go back to Delta to the other ships I’ll really find out. Could certainly make that one bit in stage 6 a whole lotta easier.