One Bang-Up Shmup: Raiden Fighters Jets Reviewed

I have an extended history with the Raiden series of games. I still recall walking into an arcade and becoming transfixed by Raiden 2’s serpentine plasma beam. I marveled as the purple coil ensnarled its foes and sucked their life away like some kind of cybernetic python. The beam was alive, fluid, and felt amazingly lethal to the arcade patrons of 1993.  Two years later, I purchased The Raiden Project, a Playstation One title that masterfully recreated the first two Raiden games for the home setting. The game became my disc of choice when I felt RPG fatigue, or just wanted to unwind by destroying a couple hundred planes, tanks and turrets. Raiden Project offered remedy and relaxation after an exhausting day. Sadly, I let an acquaintance borrow the disk, and never saw it again. By the time I got around to replacing the title, it had become a collector’s item and was selling for a small fortune.

Unlike most shoot ‘em ups (known affectionately as ‘shmups’), which require the player to bend to the game’s level of difficulty, the majority of the Raiden series has had a wide range of difficulty levels. When I wanted a bit of relaxation, I’d set the Raiden Project’s difficulty to the ‘kids’ setting. If I required a more active challenge, I’d crank the setting up to ‘hard’. When recent shmups frustrated me with a constant barrage of enemy bullets, I often longed for a greater range in difficulty settings. I’m sure there is a correlation between the ever-increasing difficulty of shmups and their popularity with gamers.

Luckily, recent Xbox 360 release- Raiden Fighters Aces retains the open-ended difficulty popularized by the series. The disc is a masterful compilation of Raiden Fighters 1 and 2, along with Raiden Fighters Jet, which were released in arcades from 1996-1998. Shmup fans are a notoriously fastidious bunch, demanding perfect emulation of the beloved diversions. Fortunately, Raiden Fighters Aces presents a perfect recreation of the shooter series.

While many arcade compilations suffer from quickly produced front-ends and offer a minimal amount of amenities, Raiden Fighters is a stunning exemplar of how collections should be presented. The amount of display options alone is substantial- players can choose from the default letterboxed format, or turn their monitor sideway to truly recreate the arcade experience. Additionally, gamers can switch between a 54 and 60 fps output, add optional scanlines, and choose one of five available visual filters. Few collections offer as much customization as Raiden Fighters Jets.

Most gamers will play the titles in their native 240×320 display, sandwiched between two borders, on their widescreen displays. Although the games are over a decade old, their presentation is flawless, with a framerate that never falters. Although novice players can enjoy the title by lowering the difficulty level, the higher skill setting will offer plenty of challenges for the expert player. One incidental I appreciated was the ability to save and share game footage; seeing experts techniques via Xbox Live is a useful and clever addition.

The compilation isn’t without fault as suffers from two minor weakness. First, although each title offers a slight variation on the familiar Raiden formula, there are a number of redundancies. Expect game has similar bosses; for example, the airwing is common to all three titles. Although each title contains a nice selection of ships with a unique loadout, are three games are remarkably similar. Second, where the music of the Raiden games used to have memorable melodies, now the soundtrack is a lackluster industrial/metal fusion.