Raiden Fighters Aces
Xbox 360 disc. $20. Three games: Raiden Fighters 1, Raiden Fighters 2, Raiden Fighters Jet. 5-8 Stages each. Two-Player dualplay (co-op), local only. Everything comes unlocked. 8-16+ Selectable ships. Detailed video settings (Scanline config, Tate, etc.). Caravan Mode/Score Attack, Boss Rush Mode, and Leaderboards with two difficulties per mode for all games.
Replays recordable, viewable from leaderboards, and savable to hard drives. Replays include fast-forward feature, but not rewindable.
Worth the price?: One of the best gaming deals, period!
Very Much Recommended: Literally everybody. Yes, even a host from Gamers With Jobs. Shocking!
Not Recommended: Anybody who absolutely cannot stand the Shooting Game genre for significant reasons. If you’re on the fence about the genre, that doesn’t count; buy this game. It’s the perfect place to begin or re-experience the genre.
Armed Police Batrider fans, get the hell over here, send Valcon some thank you letters for flying this west, and celebrate with case of (ugh!) Busch. This here is a party in a box for some frugal-ass gamers.
Raiden is a shoot-em-up series known for its slow pace, those bastard sniper helicopters, and the crazy fun purple laser. It’s usually enjoyed by gentleman with or without top hats and extremely dedicated “retro” gamers alike. But this is the Raiden Fighters series we’re talking about. Imagine the original Raiden series being a wine and cheese party somewhere in The Hamptons with detailed, frilly decorations hosted by Hugh Laurie and populated entirely by (the better) B-list celebrities but without Bruce Campbell. Now envision the Raiden Fighters series being Lil’ Jon crashing that party with the entire East Side Boyz crew, T.I., Akon, Michael Vick, a just-escaped O.J. Simpson, 17 Strippers, a bigass strobe light, Rasheed Wallace, Chuck Norris, Norm MacDonald, somebody in a big-ass Tinkerbell costume, Soulja Boy, and Vanilla Ice holding turntables and a pound of pure mixed with speed and adderall.
Raiden Fighters maintains the vertical (up-down) orientation of zero stage obstacle play, but triples the speed and pace of the original series, introduces a working but totally fucked up scoring system based on medaling, brings in massive bosses as large as 10 screens of area, and gives you a metric buttload of selectable ships with many of them sporting special charge attack weapons, all equaling mad content replay value. However this all comes at the expense of the environmental visual detail old Raidens are completely unique and known for, so basically you can’t blow up a plane and it lands on a house and tree and you see the house completely destroyed only in the section the plane landed. Not a big deal. The powerup system is also relatively simplified for better or worse. Either way, a good shooting game is typically worth $10. You get 3 good STGs for $20. Buy two get one free. A steal indeed.
Like a good reviewer should, let me tell you about the scoring system. It’s as clusterfucked as John trying to acquire the equipment in Chrono Trigger to beat the Son ofthe Sun: “Take the cat, shave it, plant the hair, open the box but don’t take the item, go back in time, reshave the cat, take the item from the box, now attack the one piece of fire but not the boss itself, but you have 1/5 rate of success, punt the football over some mountains…” Yeah that shit. So for Raiden Fighters 1 & 2, you have to collect medals up to a value of 90 without a Slave powerup (option/multiple), a value of 900 holding 1 Slave, and a value of 9,000 with 2 Slaves. Medals don’t increase value until every on-screen medal is collected without missing. When this is complete, all medals turn gold and worth 10,000 points. Now you have to find a Miclus which is a blue baby fucking dragon fucker located in hidden spots in the game you’ll have to memorize because you gotta hover your ship over specific spots on the stage background to uncover them. So you shoot this Miclus which shoots out medals but don’t collect the medals; you gotta let nine medals crowd the screen at once then they all explode. After all that shit, now magically you can balls-out-resume collecting gold medals up to values of 100,000 but will reset to 10,000 whenever you miss one.
This is Twiddle. He’s #1 in US RFJ boards right now. This is what it takes…
Raiden Fighters Jet, it’s almost worse. The video you see above, that’s a day in the life of an expert player because Stage 1 requires following a ridiculous exact path, any deviation fucks up the total score of your run by millions. Even I blew 20 minutes on a false start reel just like this. This scoring system requires you to carry at least 1 Slave powerup so floating metals start following you around. But you don’t collect this medal. You gotta keep it around the whole stage as you steer the medal into other medals to absorb and grow bigger. After absorbing a shitload of medals, the medal will become this giant blue eagle medal worth over 2,000,000 points. Only after you pull that off, you then gotta track down a Miclus [Hint: hover over any stage 2 giant ball turret without killing it] and make it spit medals but don’t collect them. If enough medals are onscreen they explode. Finally, all medals after that become gold-..er…bigger shiny gold that will default to 10,000 but climb up to 100,000 if you don’t miss any. BUT there’s another separate scoring system involving message combos. You have to quick-shot kill enemies, uncover fairies, discover Miclui, and destroy two large enemies at a time all back to back of each other which triggers top-screen message multipliers you gotta exploit for huge points. You have to rote memorize where these situations can be done, what order to kill things, what enemies to leave alive long enough so they explode by themselves, where specifically to use your bombs, Jesus Christ it’s just a fucking mess dude. The other bummer is the viable ships for the highest scores are Judge Spear, Ixion, and a fast Slave…probably. However leaderboards can be filtered by all the other ships, so there’s still room to compete in anything you want.
Praise the fucking lord online replays are available! Leave it to shmups.com users who swarm the boards already to leave their vids with all the secret locations intact. That’s the good news at least. The other great feature is the instant restart function, perfect for Raiden Fighters Jet. Only high level players are going to know why. Rest assured leaderboard scores force players to a 1 credit attempt, so credit feeders have to use their own offline mode.
But don’t let all that shit you just read scare you off. The other 96% of you who don’t play for score won’t ever have to deal with all that. Instead, you get a large variety of ships to toy with across 3 different full courses of stages to grant you hours of variety. RF1&2 let you play with the stage order, while RFJ has branching paths with all kinds of “you won’t play the same game twice” change-ups. Players can also elect to play the super-long Full Run mode with every RFJ stage thrown into the same playthrough. Also, hold up or down and hit bomb and fire buttons together when selecting a ship to play as one of those option Slave thingers.
Ah yes, presentation qualities. The sound effects are what you’d wanna hear. The music, not so much. The soundtrack is garbage, actually. All of them. Custom soundtracks are your friend though. The graphics are the usual arcade port slickness. The faults in the presentation are all with Seibu Kaihatsu’s back in the day and not with Valcon or Success who helped get this collection over here. What I mean is there are lots of great display options that deal with scanlines, blurring, overscans, display types, tate, all that great shit that’s almost unprecedented for a console release, but the initial game design choices like using yellow bullets over white, orange, and yellow backgrounds is almost pants-on-head-retarded. Unless you got a large or tate’d screen to work with, you might be squinting to see what’s about to kill you.
Another interesting tidbit is that with all three of these games accessible right next to each other, you’ll be able to see just how much stage and graphic recycling took place. It’s not a big deal or anything as I like remixing as much as the next guy. However, when you’re hunting for the secret Miclus things, you’ll see the same patch of background in a few games, but one version has a secret, another doesn’t, and the third has the secret but moved the bonus to a slightly different place. There isn’t usually some glaring hint on where exactly you need to stand, so you’re tapping in spots hoping you triggered the bonus but missing it sometimes because you weren’t in the exact invisible spot, or other times because you’re a dumbass playing the wrong game with the same stage in it. It’s kinda a pain, so it’s probably better to work on one game at a time when playing for the score.
One more thing; the blatant lie on the back of the box about challenging players around the world on the leaderboards. The leaderboards are region locked, so you don’t get to see how much Japan and Korea laugh at us westerners as we roll our arrogance into happy bubbles thinking, “holy crap I’m #4 in the world right now” when the reality is us weak-sauce Americans are all like, rank #7389 and under. What is up with this trend anyway? It’s widespread on the Wii, but it’s showing up on other consoles. Make a filter, but don’t lock us out. I thought the internet was-…-you know-…-global.
At the end of it all, Raiden Fighters Aces is a thorough playground of content for an outstanding price with radical elements that reward the shit out of players who try to learn the game and flexible extravaganzas for people who just wanna murder a whole mess of planes and tanks.
May 12th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Okay, love this game. Played RFJ for 4 hours last night. Totally grabbed me.
Question: Getting the big Eagle Medal thing is cool. I got that. But I was able to get the big X-Medals without all the bullshit “find the Miclui” stuff. Am I getting a different gold shiny medal? Or is it I’m simply finding the Miclui without knowing it. I’m still getting a bunch of medals to explode after I get the big Eagle. And the scores on the X-Medals multiply, so I’m assuming I’m getting the score shit I need.
Just curious if I should be doing something else.
May 12th, 2009 at 9:16 am
My GameStops didn’t have any copies, but I got it off of GameStop.com. Should be here in two days. Glad this is finally seeing a release.
May 12th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Okay, shit. I got it. You have to leave 9 or more medals lying on the ground after absorbing the Big Eagle. I’ve been doing that, only without the Miclui. You know…by sucking and not picking them up because I’m trying not to die.
yeah.
May 12th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Man I hope this version is region free.
May 12th, 2009 at 10:00 am
@RPT
It’s region locked. Sorry mang
@Hilden
Yeah you’re right. However, the higher-end scoring runs get the full eagle medal complete just as the boss appears. Then there is a Miclus on the right if you sit your ship on the bright white rod in the center of the background angled stationary jet on the right side of the screen. It’s toward the end of that video in the false start reel when he finally gets stage 1 right.
Anyway, that stage 1 miclus is what’s used to trigger the 9 medal thing at the quickest pace possible. Then at the beginning of stage 2, blow up a train car one piece at a time and pick up the medal before shooting the next train piece. This is because the gold (x) medals don’t increase untill all medals are collected from the screen. If you do this right, your medals should be at 100,000 by 10 seconds into stage 2. Then you begin your official run.
May 12th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Awesome review Ian. Excited to get my copy on Friday when Amazon finally delivers it.
May 12th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
I picked it up on thursday, and I love it. I love Raiden’s excellent pacing and well executed design through and through. When I had posted my score for the first game after playing it at home I was in 36th place, which will be the highest ranking I will probably ever achieve in any shmup ever.
May 13th, 2009 at 9:08 am
The snowy background in the train level on RFJ is totally fucking me up. My eyes refuse to separate the background from the foreground I’m only not running into bullets by pure luck.
And don’t bother looking for a score on the boards if your not playing in XBOX live mode. Other play modes are local only, and don’t seem to transfer over.
May 13th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
My sass alert went off and sure enough, found me some sass.
“Very Much Recommended: Literally everybody. Yes, even a host from Gamers With Jobs. Shocking!”
I might take that challenge, but that would actually mean having to put down Shiren The Wanderer long enough to play this. The price is right, I’ll give it that!
May 13th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Finest sass radar in the land.
May 14th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Why, sir, I do declare there is certainly no sass here at RobotPanic.com! Only the finest of gentlemen inhabit these lands. And Hilden. And sass.
May 14th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Ian, what control input method do you use for shmups on 360?
May 15th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Obviously he uses his penis. And that’s why he’s banned.
May 15th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Now I get what he was referring to when he was talking about his “pro joystick” at the meet-up.
May 15th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Yeah. A wifi signal totally resonates from my wang. Tap dodging is very hard. I bullet hoard with my balls.
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a’ight. I use the pad that came with a Elite. It’s the only working 360 dpad I know about. It works well. I got a stick, but keep it around for fighters.
May 15th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
I have got to do something about that dpad. I’m going to try and sand the housing down again, because this is just killing me.
What’s everyone’s favorite ship? I like the Eraser’s awesome solid laser charge up.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
I was feeling the Aegis, with those homing lasers… then I just about doubled my score my first play with the Slave.
May 16th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Yes! 1CC Raiden Fighters 2 by the skin of my teeth!
May 16th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Congrats!
May 20th, 2009 at 10:31 am
Btw, the scoring system in RFJ is completely ridiculous and stupid glue a mustache on a cat and go back in time type shit.
May 20th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Ars Technica compares Raiden Fighters Aces to high school sex. Lazy and poorly written review: starts sentences with phrases like “Sure” and “Still”, ends with “Good stuff.”
Some press is better than no press. Maybe more than 300 people will take this game to the online leaderboards in the US now. Probably not.
September 8th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Raiden Fighters Jet is this week’s Shooting Game Tournament game: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=27936
For some reason they didn’t count my score last week, but we still would have been in last place overall either way.
Only John, deadward, and I submitted scores…where you at Nate and Boric? Redeem yourselves this week by kicking ass on a game you’ve most certainly played before!