Boss Fight - Gigantic Warship (R-Type, 1987)

Last month's boss was an antagonist who turns up time and time again, at the end of every level (albeit in different guises). This month's boss is an entire level! It can only be R-Type's level 3 boss, the Gigantic Warship.

Usually bosses have a couple of weak stops that you have to exploit in order to destroy them, but this monstrosity needs to be taken apart piece by piece -- not just to defeat it, but in order to survive. You approach the warship from the back, which means your first challenge is to avoid the main thruster engine, which blasts out hot death every few seconds, but that's not its only rear armament, there are also twin cannons and multiple turrets. The game then forces you underneath the warship, where there's more turrets and a bank of four lower thrusters, each of which have to be destroy individually and a few trash enemies to boot. Once you're past this you come up and around the front of the ship, only you cannot turn around, so you have to make careful use of your Force (R-Type's detachable weaponised pod) for both your protection and the turrets' destruction. This means you have to make sure you either have to start the level with a Force and not die or make sure you collect the yellow and/or red power-ups that appear while you're facing the warship, otherwise you have almost no chance of getting past this section. Once you've come around the front you've got to get past more turrets to blast the distinctly phallic purple engine unit on top. As a kid I never realised just how much this thing looks like a penis, but look at it! It's a long shaft, with pulsating pipes running up its length and a bulbous purple end, which has a sheath that exposes its most vulnerable area. It also moves in and out, spits out gobs of stuff. A pixel cock if ever I saw one and also the key destroying the whole ship. The best tactic is to get your Force wedged next to the engine and let it do the work, otherwise you have to have nerves or steel and surgeon-like control in order to sneak in and blast it with the R-9's wave cannon. Good luck with that.

To end, here's YouTube user Matrixandraia taking the Gigantic Warship apart on the sublime R-Type remake, R-Type Dimensions. I must admit, this guy makes short work of it, but that's down to practice:

MTW