R-Type Game: The side-scrolling space shooter certainly seems to be the genre du jour for the Wii Virtual Console service right now. It's great to see a long-abandoned genre get another day in the sun, but if you didn't play these old console games back when they came on carts, it can be tough to discern any real differences between them at first blush. This is doubly troublesome with the release of both R-Type and R-Type III: The Third Lightning, a pair of space shooters that rely on roughly the same core gameplay gimmicks to differentiate themselves from still other space shooters. They both remain solid shooters, but R-Type III is slightly easier to recommend, as it improves on some of the concepts introduced in R-Type and also features flashier presentation and a less punishing level of difficulty..