Not if you’ve heard of wikipedia:
Yeah, I’m bored and I’m trolling. Obviously shooters are colorful games. Jesus…
Nice! There’s one other thing I can confirm. My copy has shipped!
I’ll hopefully have it on Monday and will be able to sort all this out at that time. :)
mame ftw
If RFA hadn’t gotten a US release confirmed like this, I may have bought a JP 360 because it’s not just Shikigami no Shiro 3 that’s stuck over there, Death Smiles just came out (Cave!) too. The 360 is the shooter machine in Japan. sigh
Have you ever played Raiden? I’m guessing you’ve probably played Raiden II or DX or even the original. The Raiden games are classic designs with a standard fire and bomb control design. They are not “bullet hell” style games. They’re fair to the player, with set patterns you can exploit, but really you don’t have to do that to get through a level. You can just have those OMG REFLEXES and survive.
RFJ is the culmination of the Raiden Fighters series. It has a ridiculous number of player crafts to choose from, each with different main fire capabilities, movement speeds, bombs, etc. There’s so much variety there and it lets you match your ship selection to your personal play style. The game also adjusts difficulty to your ability level. If you completely rock out, it will go from level 5 right to level 15. Why bore you with the stuff in between, you know?
It also has this super cool medal system that helps you build high scores. Your drone ships will drag a medal around in front of your craft. Destroying things on the ground leaves behind medals. Fly your ship around the screen and as the medal in front of your drones touches those on the ground, it will multiply and grow in size up to a maximum of 2,048,000 points. You have to be careful though because you can easily bump into the medal and claim it too early!
Once you manage to get the 2mil medal, if you can get a screen with 9 medals on the ground at the same time, all medals will turn to 10000 point medals, and will start multiplying as you pick them up, thus allowing you to score ridiculous points just by shooting stuff and claiming medals. This is the way to really rack it up. There’s this meta-game of scoring going on over top of these gorgeous backdrops, awesome bosses and just plain incredible animation.
I hate to say too much because part of the fun of these games is discovering these things for yourself, so I already probably screwed that up for you a little bit. Anyway, I think you can understand that with all those ships, the scoring system, the large number of levels and the beautiful looks, this is easily one of the most replayable shooters around.
These games aren’t emulated accurately in mame, most notably the glitchy sound and music.
Please go away, pirate.
Shiki 3 is on the Wii in the US.
There was a VGA PC DOS shooter (with red or blue / spread vs laser weapons) that WASN’T Tyrian or Raptor but did sort of ape Raiden. It was a smaller developer/publisher and the only thing I recall seeing for it was a smallish ad in the back area near where the XXX ads were in CGW.
Can anyone name this game based on my vague recollection?
I vote to ban mashakos for his blatant advocacy of piracy.
Since we’re cherrypicking from Wikipedia…
Looks pretty damn grey to me
And the rest of the wikipedia entry images…
Oooh, purple lasers!..and everything else is, of course, brown and/or grey.
Are you still going on about that? Get over it, already.
Clearly Gunmetal wouldn’t have a problem with brown and grey shooters ;)
Oh. I didn’t even know this was coming up. I’ve been wanting something like this for XBLA. I may have to slap down the 20 bucks, as you say! Thanks, Dave!
I can’t emphasize enough how much this particular game is great for beginner or veteran shooter fans because of the sheer variety contained within and the replayability of the levels. They’re short and manic with giant bosses that animate and explode with real personality.
I suspect it’ll be hard to find once the initial print run sells out, too.
Curses! Outed!
Now I’m confused. So this isn’t an XBLA release?
Wow, check it out, it’s a retail release: Raiden Fighters Aces.
I was a bit confused at first, too, even though Dave linked to it in the OP.
Then again, apparently SHMUPs are big on the 360 in Japan for some reason. Like retail games, not XBLA. GiantBomb did a nice look at some of them.
sigh Just because it’s a scrolling shooter doesn’t mean it has to be on XBLA.
Hey, it’s a bonus. I just assumed it was XBLA when you mentioned it was $20. I didn’t know there were retail games that cheap except for older games. Plus, that means it has 1000 Gamerscore up for grab, not just 200, so… bonus! :) I’ll probably get it mostly based on your assurance that the game is friendly to relative novices (but also has replayability). I haven’t been able to enjoy a shooter in forever. The dreamcast remakes that came out on XBLA were all too hard for me.