Game:

The Raiden Project (1995)

Duration: 17:04

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This video was captured using the actual game on an actual Sony Playstation. Most of the loading times have been removed for your consideration and enjoyment.

I was lucky enough to recently find this game complete for only 20 bucks at a game store during my travels out of town for work. While not the most rare title on the Playstation, it does have significant value since it really wasn't that popular back in the day. It was a launch title for the Playstation, and next to all the other launch titles like Ridge Racer, Tekken, Battle Arena Toshinden, and ESPN Extreme Games that all had slick 3D graphics, The Raiden Project looked outdated right out of the gate. Sprite based graphics were on their way out to make room for polygon graphics so this game may have seen like a step back. After all the first Raiden was released in the arcades in 1990 and Raiden II in 1993. This was also before the time where retro was considered to be cool. Back then everyone was ready to move up to better graphics and sound and leave the old games in the dust. So in an attempt to kind of modernize this collection they offered modern remixes of the original chip tunes of the arcade which thank God were strictly optional. Because they suck.

So what makes this collection so special? The first Raiden had already been ported to all the last generation consoles at that time which were the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Turbo Grafix 16. The Super Nintendo version was kinda slow and dull with the worst music out of the 3 ports surprisingly. The Turbo version was pretty nice with the exception of the sound effects. The Genesis was IMO the best port overall having a good balance of everything. The Playstation version is arcade perfect. Not only that but you also got Raiden II with it which had not been ported to any other console. Raiden II was a great leap in everything from graphics to sound to music. It's also much faster paced and gets out of control much faster than the first installment. I must note that the death animations are just stellar. Not only do the bigger ships blow up while in the sky, they then fall to the ground and blow up again which looks and sound great. Raiden II is my favorite of the series.

What I like about the Raiden series is that it gives you a reasonable amount of time to get eased in. In fact most of the deaths especially in the first three stages are caused by your own distractions. The biggest distraction is watching the power ups that certain enemies drop to change to the color you want. While you're looking at that power up you don't see the tank that just appeared on the screen that just shot you down. Then when you feel you have enough time to jet to whatever corner of the screen the power up is you don't know if that corner will be clear by the time you get there. In Raiden II you are able to retrieve your lost power ups after you get killed. This makes things easier and harder all at the same time. Trying to quickly collect the color you want while getting fired at from all directions can get you killed again very quickly. The Raiden series is the master of sleight of hand. After a while you should learn to expect little insignificant ships and tanks to appear from the outside edges of the screen while fighting bosses to throw off your studies of the bosses bullet patterns. It's what makes the Raiden series great. It's easy to pick up and play, and does not require heavy memorization which IMO makes it fair. It really only requires you to do one thing. WATCH YOUR SHIP!!!! That is of course easier said than done.

This is as usual not anything close to a perfect run of either game. As a matter of fact I do worse in these games than in most of the videos I put up. For some reason I just couldn't get into the zone so I just decided that I would use all 3 of my credits on Raiden II since it is significantly harder than the first game.

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