Reviews | Arcade

X Multiply

By Alex Kierkegaard / May 03, 2006

Following the stunning success of R-Type (1987), Irem set to work not only on the sequel, but also on two variations to the original's theme. R-Type's enduring popularity clearly showed that players craved more, and Irem was about to give them what they wanted. In 1989, within the space of a few months, the company released three new shooters. They were X Multiply, Dragon Breed and R-Type II. It was a hell of a year for fans of the genre.

All three games borrowed heavily from the original R-Type of course, but each one served up a unique experience. The general set up, the pacing, and some of the challenges were similar, but the underlying game mechanics were radically different, giving each game its own feel. So while R-Type II was more of the same (not a bad thing, since that was exactly what many players were asking for), the other two greatly diverged. X Multiply, released first, featured a ship with two attached mechanical arms, which could be used to guard against bullets or to destroy enemies by smashing into them. Dragon Breed, on the other hand, cast the player as a tiny hero riding a giant fire-breathing dragon.

It was a great show of creativity from Irem, which had changed the meaning of their acronym just a few years before (from International Rental Electronics Machines to Innovations in Recreational Electronic Media) to reflect a growing ambition. Although the company would focus less on innovation and more on R-Type sequels in later years, in 1989 they were still trying out new ideas and concepts; in fact, for a while there they occupied the vanguard of the genre's development.

And they were certainly in an inventive mood when they came up with the setting for X Multiply. While most shooters start out somewhere in space and end up inside a slimy alien-infested base, X Multiply starts in that base, and stays there. This is justified by the plot, which involves a miniaturized fighter plane inserted into a human body to fight micro-alien parasites. Unfortunately, you don't get to blast bacteria, viruses, or other biology-class inspired organisms. These are alien parasites, after all. But you do go up against a surprisingly large variety of twisted abominations: from scores of tiny spider-like creatures to an H.R. Giger-inspired mothership that fills several screens. And all these epic battles unfold against some of the most beautifully grotesque backdrops I've ever seen. Overtones of horror were present throughout all of R-Type, but X Multiply is the real "horror shooting game," as Irem describes it in the promotional flyer.

The mechanical arms I mentioned are the game's central aspect. You acquire them in the same way you get the orb in R-Type: by destroying the appropriate enemy ship and collecting the power-up left behind. The arms extend from the top and bottom of your ship and swing gracefully around you in more or less the opposite direction of movement. To an observer not familiar with the game they might seem to have a life of their own, but you quickly learn to position them exactly where you want them; sometimes as shields that absorb incoming bullets and other times as battering rams, destroying enemy ships and ground units. You also pick up additional power-ups that give you bombs, lasers, homing missiles and more, as well as speed-up and speed-down items (for maneuvering around tight spots).

When you die you lose the attached arms, as well as all power-ups, and get sent back to the last checkpoint (usually, the beginning of the stage). Thankfully, since the stages are full of power-up carrying ships, you are never without the arms for too long. And that's a good thing, because without them the going can get pretty tough. The enemies here attack quite aggressively, and some of them track you down and follow you around the screen, instead of simply wandering away after they've had a pass at you. The defensive and offensive qualities of the arms have the effect of balancing this out, keeping the difficulty down to a reasonable level. Mastering the use of the arms then is half the challenge in this game (the other half, of course, is memorizing the enemy attack patterns and the layout of the different stages).

In fact the arms are such flexible and powerful weapons that I think a skilled player could conceivably go through the stages just using them to smash enemies, without firing a single shot (this wouldn't work on most of the bosses, however). It was bizarre how quickly I got used to depending on them. After a few hours of playing this I went back to a couple of other horis and felt naked without them.

X Multiply really is a fantastic trip, resounding proof that R-Type was not a one-off. Irem had somehow stumbled on a formula for making great horizontal shooters, and they became perfectly capable of applying it again and again, with great skill and precision. What's more, they kept improving and refining their technique with every game: It's telling that the opening stage of X Multiply is even more dramatic and fast-paced than that of R-Type. Similarities between the two games abound, since much of this is a re-imagining of R-Type (the huge mothership of the second stage, the moving platform challenges of the fourth stage). But there are also many new set pieces and boss battles which are as effective in surprising and delighting the player as anything else seen before.

The fifth stage is particularly memorable. In the first part you have to squeeze past various narrow openings that are clogged with purple blobs of some alien substance. You shoot the blobs and they retreat, but the openings become ever more narrow, and you need to move fast or crash and burn. It's just a lot of fun and a nice change from all the usual shooting. When you finally manage to get past the last opening you find yourself in a cave, where large drops fall from the ceiling into a pool underneath you and splash toxic liquid all over the screen. After a while the boss bursts out from the bottom of the pool and attacks you with all the ferocity you would expect of a fifth stage boss. And the game just keeps getting more surprising and frantic from there.

Irem crafted an immensely enjoyable shooter -- a tour-de-force of an inventive imagination. Its success is based on the cool idea of the arms, a textbook execution of the R-Type formula, and very high production values. The unique, imaginative art direction, and the matching, gloomy soundtrack take a balanced game and elevate it to one of the finest horizontal shooters of its time. And that's some praise for a game in a genre so crowded with sequels, spin-offs, rip-offs and side stories. And, I believe, it deserved at least a couple of R-Type's sequels.