Radiant Silvergun Vs Ikaruga
45These split screen comparisons were just made for a bit of fun, for geeky people like me that like to see games running in parallel for comparison purposes. I'm well aware that I die a lot and they're not intended as any sort of demonstration of 'serious' gameplay or an attempt to smash any high score records.
Two of the absolute very finest vertically scrolling shoot-em-ups go head to head, Radiant Silvergun and it's pseudo-sequel Ikaruga. Both games were made by Treasure, who were absolute masters of their trade and made some of the best games know to man (like Astro Boy: Omega Factor, Guardian Heroes and Gunstar Heroes to name but a few).
Radiant Silvergun is by far the most expensive game I've ever bought, £90 on eBay (but I've seen it going for almost double that). This was before the remake for the Xbox 360 (Edit: which I've since bought, along with a 360 to play it on, which combined still cost less than the Saturn game on it's own cost me). Now, I'm not normally a collector of super expensive or rare gaming stuff, but at the time I'd recently bought an Action Replay cartridge that let me play Japanese (and American) Saturn games on my Euro Saturn, specifically so I could play what I thought would be an arcade perfect version of Chase HQ at home (it wasn't arcade perfect but that's another story*). Subsequently, I felt kind of compelled to get myself a few more Japanese exclusive games to justify the Action replay's purchase and as, at the time, I was feeling a bit flush after payday (something that doesn't happen often anymore) a copy of this game was at the top of my 'to buy' list as I'd heard so much about it and what a super rare treasure (pardon the pun) it was.
For the purposes of easier video capture I'm using SSF, Sega Saturn emulator, as using my real Saturn for this requires a lot faffing around on my hands and kness, trying to unplug SCART cables from hard to reach places, then having to record gameplay to my DVR, then transferring that video to my PC. I can't see or hear any difference between this and running it on the real hardware and in fact doing it this way gives me much better quality video capture than if I were to record from my actual Saturn. And, as an interesting little side note (or not), the emulator is reading my actual Radiant Silvergun CD ROM disc from my PC's DVD drive, this isn't a downloaded ISO.
I own the Gamecube version of Ikaruga, but I'm using Demul 0.582 to record this on an emulated Dreamcast, again, because it makes life easier to video capture it this way.
*Find out more about Chase HQ for the Saturn and what I think of it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTkD2J02xic
and some bonus Chase HQ stuff by me here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLQl3hyh2T0