Raiden Legacy

Raiden games are the best among SHMUPS, at least the first ones. I was expecting to get a good version of the first two games, like in the PSX disc with its awesome sound and music, but I just got a dated version of the first game and some new ones that are not as cool (just a screen filled with bullets all the time). This is clearly an arcade emulation but you can't easily extract the roms to play it on MAME for yourself (which would play SO much better). There is no option to adjust the number of lives and continues, and the default selection is really short. I can barely get past a few levels! There are a lot of other problems not really worth mentioning, but I'd suggest you to stay away from this version and download Raiden 1 and 2 for Windows, that are free on MyAbandonware...

Do NOT BUY. this is made by dotemu, they are known for doing the outrageously lazy and bad work. Raiden Legacy is a scam. This can not be called a port or emulation. Real emulated games appearing on japanese playstation 2 and x360 took years of hard work and are extremely difficult to pull off. This game does not resemble or play like the games it is trying to emulate. Once again : we are not talking here small meticulous detail. This release has already been in a broken status on ios and is universaly bashed. Even if you never ever plaid Raiden games , you will be immediately noticing glitch after glitch. Right now the only way of playing these games is buying japanese x360 or an original PCB. Or just play in MAME. There are not perfectly emulated there , as there are sound issues but at least the gameplay itself is faightful. And the best part is... the audio from dotemu is also glitched as in mame, which makes me think ...

The four games are: one major classic (Raiden 1) and three minor but fun spin-offs (Raiden Fighters 1, 2, Jet), nice additions to a celebrated vertical shmup saga. That said, DotEmu emulation packages tend to be a mixed bag and this one is no exception: menus are mouse-only (c'mon!) and on my system (Core i7 3.4 GHz, nVidia GTX 1060, Win7) there are problems with sprite shadows and flickering transparency effects - to the point that when you're hit and lose a life, for a few crucial seconds you're not able to see your aircraft, after you respawn. And you seriously risk losing another life. This is particularly noticeable in Raiden Fighters 2, train chase level, that has scrolling issues too (framerate seems 30 or less, not 60 fps). But wait! (1) - if you search the forum messages, you'll see there could be one easy fix: by right-clicking-->properties and setting "raidenlegacy.exe" compatibility to "Windows 95" or "Windows 98", if you start the game directly from .exe (not from GOG Galaxy), the glitches are solved, transparencies seem to work as expected, framerate is ok. But wait! (2) - unluckily, this way the game will crash often and you'll enjoy it only in short bursts... I'll leave the fix nonetheless: maybe on your system it will work better than with mine.

This version of the game doesn't run very well and it's a bummer. You can pick between the games in a top "Raiden Legacy" layer and that part is particularly smooth. It hangs on every menu for me from picking which game to play then loading the options. Literally every button press has a few seconds of loading or something. Even once you get into the game, the game doesn't even play smoothly. I only tried Raiden Fighters but couldn't even bother trying the rest because the load times killed me. I really like these games and it's such a bummer to have this be the only real release for them. I'd say you should wait for a patch of some kind before really picking this up.

Raiden was, is, my favourite arcade. If only I had read the comments... but I didin't and I purchase this... this... *************.