You know what I like doing? I like telling you to buy videogames. Buy Raiden Fighters Aces! Do it now! Twenty bucks! Do it! Do it!
Well then. You might not know that in Japan, the Xbox 360 has become an unlikely haven for traditional, arcade-style 2D shooting games. Of course, this isn't to say that there aren't a ton of shooting games available on Live Arcade, because there are, and many are quite good. (Strangely, nearly all of them are listed under "action/adventure" rather than "shooter": why are XBLA's games so genre-mislabeled? Pop'n Music is under "action/adventure" too, for chrissake!) But a lot of the top-shelf ports of recent Japanese arcade shooters-- most notably the only existing home ports of Cave's recent work-- are stuck in Japan.
And when I say "stuck in Japan," I really, really mean it. Unlike the Wii, for which importing is a matter of installing some software, or the PS3, which is region-free, Microsoft chose to give developers the option to lock or not to lock. While many Western and Asian 360 releases are region-free, there is not a single region-free Japanese 360 game. Of course, there's very little Japanese-exclusive content on the 360: mostly just visual novels, some RPGs, Idolm@ster and a pile of arcade shooter ports. But still, you're missing them. I'm missing a Super Robot Wars game, and that always pisses me off. The only recourse for many hardcore shooter fans and people who really, really want to play Idolm@ster has been to actually buy Japanese 360 units, for which they must put up with a tremendous amount of bullshit just to play their legitimately purchased videogames. As usual, pirates have to do less. So let's all blame Japan and their irrational fear of importers for this situation!
Thankfully, small publisher Valcon has seen fit to get one of these arcade shooter ports out in the West, and it's Raiden Fighters Aces. The Raiden Fighters series has existed for years without ever having been released for a home console, even in Japan, and last year's release for the Japanese 360 was expected to stay there. I'd heard a rumor a while back that a lot of these arcade shooter ports had originally been made for Xbox Live Arcade, and that MS had turned the companies down, saying that Xbox Live Arcade didn't need all these ports of... arcade games. I know, I know.
Raiden Fighters is perhaps the best of these arcade games to release to the larger gamer market: it's simple to pick up, it's not choked with bullets or built for experts only, the way Cave's games are, and yet getting a high score is still a very difficult and complex business. And it's not moe, thank god. You get to fly airplanes, and the enemies actually shoot at where you are. You can change every detail of the game, so if it's too hard, just put it on Easy and give yourself infinite continues, if that's what you want to do. By contrast, score attackers will want to go for the online mode, where the game will test how far you can get on three lives. The leaderboards (there seem to be separate leaderboards for the US and JP versions, oddly) are already pretty damn serious, and everybody uploads their replay videos so you can see exactly how these people are getting their insane scores. RF is a really enjoyable game on all levels, from beginner to expert, so I highly recommend it for anybody with a 360 and $20. Even if you don't take to the game, watching these superplays is in and of itself a performance worth paying to see.
Also, there are some serious bells and whistles here. The ports of Raiden Fighters 1, 2, and Jet are loving, pixel-perfect translations, and this is nowhere more evident than the sheer amount of options you have for playing these games. Take a look at the graphics settings, if you will: you can smooth out the picture for your fancy HD screen, or, more likely, you can make it look progressively older. This doesn't just stop at displaying the pixels in all their blocky glory, or running the game in the original 54 frames per second. You can also slap scanlines up on the screen to simulate an old CRT monitor or, better yet, try the eye-piercing filter that makes the game look as though it's being displayed on an ancient, color-bleeding projector! Seriously old-school, here.
Hopefully, if this goes well, Valcon will get their hands on some other Japan-only 360 shooters, like Raiden IV, or those Cave games or even Konami's Otomedius (yes, moe Gradius) but I'm not exactly holding my breath. It's enough of a surprise that we have this one.
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