Raiden Legacy

Let me get this out of the way first. It's four Raiden games for under 6 bucks. If it's ever on sale, it's an absolute no-brainer. The only problems I have is with the presentation. The game itself works just fine and is a ton of fun but the menus just scream "MOBILE PORT! MOBILE PORT!" (Hello to you too autofire on and off!) My biggest complaint is actually quite nit-picky. You can save the top score for each game but you can't enter initials except in Raiden only. Even then, don't bother as the game doesn't remember it from game to game much less session to session. When you are greeted with the high score table at the end of Raiden, you'll even see your level as being 1-1 no matter what lever you actually got to. I like seeing that even if I didn't get the high score, I got 2nd or 3rd but nope. Also, there is no online capability so you can't see how others played the stages like you can in the 360 version. Still, it's four Raiden games, and for the price, I can definitely say that I don't regret my purchase.

I have this game installed on a Samsung 860 EVO SSD, but you'd never be able to tell when trying to play it. After clicking "Play" from the GOG launcher, you're greeted, very quickly I might add, with the "who made this game" screens, but that's where the quickness ends. Just trying to navigate the menus and settings screens takes absolutely forever! It's almost like the game is reloading the entire game into RAM every time you want to navigate to another screen. It's kind of hard to explain, but imagine playing a game on a PC with barely enough RAM to meet the system requirements, and Windows has to make a page file to make up for the low amount of RAM, and imagine said page file is on a 5400 RPM HD with the slowest seek times in the world! That's what kind of performance this game has on a Samsung SSD, with a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, 32 GB of DDR4 3600 RAM and a 2080 Ti graphics card! All this headache just to emulate Raiden arcade roms that could easily be done with any other emulator on a Pentium 1 CPU from the 90s! Not sure what the devs were thinking with this one.

I'm a bit of a fan of the Raiden series and I while I applaud the ones who put this together and brought with it Raiden and all three Raiden Fighters games, there is one important element missing and that is the inclusion of Raiden II (my favorite game in the series) which seems pretty inexcusable considering it came out between Raiden and Raiden Fighters. Still for what it's worth, this is a good deal. I just hope they add Raiden II in the future.

I read other reviews here saying the emulation was poor so I wasn't sure about getting this collection, but when the price dipped to $2.49 as per a sale, I decided to give it a try. It's true that the frame rate does get choppy in moments of high activity, and I guess if you're very used to playing a version that doesn't it might bug you, Since I'm used to playing NES games, and don't recall the original Raiden games in great detail, I found this to be a minor issue. It didn't stop the games from being fun shooters. It was said that you can get a similar collection, minus the original "Raiden" on Xbox 360 but it's worth noting that version, used, goes for around $30 on Amazon if you want a complete edition. There ARE some qualms, most notably that you can only click to Resume Game on the pause screen, and that IS a problem for a fast paced shooter like this, when you want to get your hands back on the controls in short order. It's said here that it doesn't save local high scores and although I didn't check, I personally don't care much about the score as much as I just care about completing the game, if at all possible (They're VERY difficult, as is expected). If you do care about logging your score, I can see why this would annoy you. At the end of the day though, it's a fast and fun shmup with classic appeal. If you can get over those minor to moderate irritations then I'd say it's certainly worthwhile when on sale. It's not perfect, but for four classic games it's alright to me. If the issues mentioned DO bother you, then I might suggest trying Raiden III and Raiden IV, both available here on GoG.

I cannot launch this game on the Mac at all. The GoG should not sell this for the Mac.