R3 (video game)

R3: The Art of Rocketry is a computer game for the Amiga series of computers in 1995. It was released as a playable demo on the coverdisks of Amiga Power (issue 54) in October 1995 and on Amiga Format (issue 89) in September 1996. The game was an independent release and orderable directly from the author, Bruce Webster and several other agents scattered worldwide.

Genre

R3 is a Thrust clone where the player navigates his craft by rotating it in the direction he wishes to travel and applying power, against gravity. These games are quite diverse but all eventually trace back to the classic Asteroids.

R3 featured many innovations to the genre, such as the ability to purchase new and better craft, which were organised into five classes and each craft in the same class would generally have similar characteristics, such as class 3 being large on the cargo space and shields, but low on missiles and low on thrust power. Each class had three craft within it, the weakest having lower everything (engine power, gun range, gun speed, cargo space, shields) but being much cheaper.

The registered version of this shareware game also featured Tritus from Davin Pearson, which was a three player competitive Tetris-inspired game, much in the same manner of the game Super Foul Egg.

Availability

The full version of the game can be downloaded with the authors permission from Aminet ().

R3 and Tritus were both featured on the Amiga Classix 3 PC/Mac/Amiga CDROM with the appropriate emulators (e.g. WinUAE) although the legality of such compilations tends to be dubious.

External links

• Amiga Report review of R3
• R4 (Rocketman) is the sequel to R3