Raiden Fighters Aces

The shoot em' up, herein referred to as schmup genre was a staple of arcades throughout the 80s and 90s but died a fairly quick death in North America along with arcades in general.  While still fairly popular in Japan (albeit still niche), we see only a fraction of those titles localized and most of the time, they are quick and dirty port jobs put out by low-end value publishers in very limited quantities.  While the latter two traits certainly fit Raiden Fighters Aces, a poor quality port this is not.

Raiden Fighters was a spin-off of the classic Seibu Kaihatsu arcade series that was originally supposed to be called Gun Dogs but was retitled due to the popularity of the Raiden name.  There have been three titles in the series:  Raiden Fighters, Raiden Fighters 2:  Operation Hell Drive and Raiden Fighters Jet and they are all included in this package.  They follow the classic arcade schmup model in that they are difficult, short, score driven and reward practice, study and patience.  A typical mission in the first two games involves a short level of various types of air and ground enemies, each having their own specific attacks with multiple minibosses interspersed and a climatic, long and diverse final boss fight at the end.  Raiden Fighters Jet mixes this up by putting you through a series of short levels of increasing difficulty and grading your performance at the end of each one.  Depending on how well you perform, the game may choose to jump you ahead several levels to keep things challenging.  You have a number of options to customize your experience including multiple difficulty levels, setting the number of credits available to you (from 1 to 9 or unlimited free play), a boss rush mode and whether or not you want to post your scores to Xbox Live, though this mode restricts you to a single credit.  All three games have local simultaneous two player co-op but unfortunately, no online play is available.

Make no mistake, if you don't like hard games or are not a fan of this type of fast paced game play, this may not be for you.  These are all direct conversions of arcade games that were primarily designed to suck quarters from your pocket and they make no apologies for that.  All three are very short and on free play, you can see them all to completion in less than an hour.  Like most schmups, the enemy patterns don't change and the key to success and high scores is memorizing the level progression and the ideal ways to move through it.  There are a number of ships to choose from with different traits and weapon types and they all play very different from one another which does add a fair bit of replay value.  It will take dozens, if not hundreds of plays to master the levels and truly become an elite pilot.  However, if you are an old school arcade player, you will fine a lot to like here.  The added bonus of competing with the world for score on Xbox Live often turned was I had planned to be a half hour session into four hours of "just one more play."

This release is the first conversion of these games to a home console and it is clear that developer Gulti cared about the project and doing it right.  The menus are clean and simple and you have a dizzying number of ways to alter the screen configuration to your liking.  Everything from the screen position style, frame rate, aspect ratio, over scan, smooting styles and scanline bias can be tweaked in minute detail.  You can even play with reverse and sepiatone color pallets and a mode called "Old Projector" that makes everything blurry.  While these options will only ever be altered by a select few, they show just how much effort and attention to detail was given.  The Xbox Live integration is seamless, allowing you to breakdown leaderboards by game mode, difficulty and ship type.  Every score posted also has a replay or "GameClip" that you can quickly download, view and even save to look over again later.  You can also save your own replays after each game.  All of the music is hyper fast techno which while complimenting the tense and frantic play style, may start to wear after a while.  The production values here are very rarely found in console schmup conversions and it is fantastic to see so much TLC went into this one.

At $20USD, this is simply an unbeatable value for schmup fans, considering that most other conversions to be found on Xbox Live Arcade are only a single game, not done as well and cost half as much as this three game collection.  It likely won't convert anyone who doesn't have fond memories of Saturdays at the arcade but for the price, there isn't much to lose anyway.  Online play would have been nice but the lack of it is a minor knock at worst.  If you like this genre, you simply have to purchase Raiden Fighters Aces, not just because it is a great package but because if it sells well (and it probably doesn't need to move many copies to do so), we may see more publishers like Valcon Games and some of their larger counterparts undertaking projects like these.  There are a wealth of schmups in Japan just waiting for willing North American consumers to show they want them.