So, it's pretty well known to those that know enough about late 80s/early 90s shmups that some of IREM's designers/staff went to SNK. NEO-GEO's Pulsar by AiCOM was the successor to R-TYPE, done by former IREM people. Also, Metal Slug by Nazca Corporation was done by former IREM employees hired by SNK. While Pulstar is one of the best examples, Last Resort on the Neo Geo in 1992 was officially made by SNK, but it too was heavily influenced by R-Type II from 1989, and thus, IREM designers. While there are clear differences between R-Type II and Last Resort (R-Type II has more dull colors, lots of browns, Last Resort is much more colorful) there are also clear graphical similarities in the enemies' sprite designs. I took some magazine previews from different magazines, of R-Type II & Last Resort, and layered them over each other for comparison.



Do you guys see the similarities?

I'm also posting part of Hardcoregaming101's look of Last Resort.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/las...lastresort.htm
Not content to just rip off Akira's skyline, however, Last Resort also offers us a pixelated take on the cratered ruins featured early in the manga (and as the title card of its animated adaptation) duplicated in extreme detail. While Last Resort's story is different, it impressively uses just these two shots from Akira as a jumping off point to keep a continual visual progression through the game's world. The game's first boss (a wannabe giant sized Terminator) emerges from the the demolished city at the end of the first level. Upon defeating him, players fly their ships into the background's ruins, which make up the game's second level. Levels three and four have them passing from the watery ruins to a mine under the city, surfacing to enter a massive factory. The final level takes place entirely in space, where a huge battleship (similar to the ones encountered in the R-Type series) must be confronted before the game's malevolent AI can finally be sought out and destroyed. It's a brutal conclusion, with a near constant onslaught of enemies. Players must also navigate a very crowded asteroid field in between that battleship and the game's final boss. There's an impressively large number of rocks hurtling towards the player here, and as an unexpected extra way of making it even more difficult, items that increase the player's ship's speed appear here constantly.

That battleship isn't the only homage to R-Type in the game, however, as Last Resort's art is reminiscent of the detailed graphics and mechanical foes found in R-Type II. The players' ships, the TZ-024 and the YS-024 are also clearly influenced by Irem's sprite artists. The former looks a bit like the ship in Irem's Armored Police Unite Gallop while the latter looks like the ship from R-Type itself. Both are mercifully much smaller targets than the ships in either of those games. While the TZ-024 has made a few cameo appearances in other SNK games and is remembered by shooter and Irem fans, the latter is completely forgotten, and isn't even featured in the game's introduction or ending. It was a nice touch in 1992 to have the two ships be completely different sprites instead of just different colors. Unfortunately it's a detail that was forgotten by SNK itself while making the game, even Last Resort's official packaging features two ships drawn identically to each other! Borrowing so precisely the aesthetics of Akira and R-Type might seem brazen, but the most obvious influence of Irem's series on Last Resort is the large drone players can acquire to hover around and protect their ship while it also provides additional firepower.

So much of Last Resort's atmosphere and graphics are derivative of its contemporary pop culture, that it can be easy to dismiss the game completely. Players that do so will be missing out, however, as SNK has also packed in just enough intense action, new ideas, and intense music to make it stand out. The biggest change to the combat of the genre is how the that pod-like drone functions. Instead of being stuck in front of or behind the ship, it follows the player's movements and makes a great makeshift shield against enemy fire. By pressing the B button, it will be locked in place and can be used more offensively to direct its fire or even as a makeshift battering ram against weaker foes.

This extra versatility makes Last Resort's drone unique compared to the device that influenced it from R-Type. Its last trick is that it can be launched across the screen at and through most enemies, dealing massive damage to them. This is accomplished by just holding down the A button for a moment, which will charge up a gauge at the bottom of the screen that will increase the drone's damage as it shoots out through anything in its way and then damages enemies even more as it returns. Depending on how it's positioned around the ship, players can also control whether it will travel along any walls it hits or rebound off of them. The entire game is built around making good use of this (the game actually cannot be completed without precise use of the drone unless one has a very large amount of quarters), giving it a strategic feel compared to most other shoot-em-ups, and making it as interesting to play as the R-Type games. Irem itself even unambitiously experimented a bit with Last Resort's drone abilities in the much less interesting and poorly received R-Type Leo.
The music becomes a bit more hopeful in the third and fourth levels, as players enter deeper within parts of the planet now completely controlled by machines. There's an implied extra level of cruelty present throughout. The game's manual is specific about how the enemies are purely robotic. A computer intelligence that has systematically mobilized massive amounts of military hardware against humanity, yet many of the craft the players destroy actually still have human pilots trapped in them. Each time one is defeated a human is seen helplessly tumbling away from it. In a game where all of the enemies are strictly mechanical and metallic in nature, these brief glimpses of human beings stuck in a front row seat to humanity's destruction are a nice touch. After leaving the opening of the first level's urban sprawl, the only signs of biological life in the entire game besides these hapless victims and the robots themselves is a large worm encountered in the beginning of stage two (an homage to a similar one found in R-Type II.

Last Resort does have one major flaw. It allows for two players to play simultaneously, which is a great. The downside is that when one player loses a ship, a new one appears immediately (if a single person is playing, they are sent back to one of several checkpoints throughout each level). Sounds fine, except that several of the game's later bosses are simply impossible to defeat without making extensive use of the game's drone. If one player loses a ship while facing some of the bosses in levels four and five, they can actually become impossible to damage without also colliding with them and losing yet another ship. So it ends up costing less lives (and quarters) for both players to ram into something simultaneously so that both get sent back to an earlier part of the level to pick up some extra weaponry. This is a huge oversight in a game that's already very challenging. SNK was "thoughtful" enough to have extra enemies fly into the boss fights at regular intervals to keep players moving, but none of them will drop extra weapons to make the fights any easier. They were designed assuming players would already have picked up the drone earlier in the level. This and the total lack of acknowledgement of the second player's ship being a different design makes it clear that the simultaneously two player mode is a last minute addition to an otherwise polished shooter.