Radiant Silvergun

Radiant Silvergun is essentially one of the greatest shoot-em-ups ever made, every time I come back to it I am easily reminded as to why it has such a legendary reputation. Released in 1998 in Arcade and on the Sega Saturn from incredible game makers Treasure Software (Gunstar Heroes, Ikaruga and Silhouette Mirage). This modern release features updated visuals, details and resolutions as well as a quality of life features not found in the original release. Your ship starts off weak but will become more powerful with a permanent classic XP based weapon system where your arsenal grows stronger the more you use each specific gun and will remain more powerful for each subsequent playthrough. It’s definitely on the slightly tougher side—don't expect to breeze through it on your first try, but as your weapons become more powerful and additional credits are unlocked you will progress further and further, as your skills increase you will be able you face higher difficulties. Enemies and bosses will attack with new patterns and additional weapons allowing each play through to feel new and different. The presentation is top-tier for its time and even by todays standards among the best aroun…

Pretty unsatisfying port. There are frequent and very noticable hiccups in framerate. This should be as smooth as butter. It's literally worse than playing the game in an emulator like SSF. It may well be just a wrapper around one. The stylish menu of the Saturn version is gone, replaced with something lower effort than most games debug menus. Yikes. And if you've never played before you wouldn't have a clue how the game works. It's very bad at presenting vital information. Giant deadzone of about 30% on the left stick makes the movement controls very unresponsive and this can't be configured. I do feel like there's a bit of input lag. And the game is maybe running slightly too fast? Not 100% on either but it does feel off somehow. It has really bad outdated scaling options. Nearest neighbour or bilinear. No pixel antialias option so any scale other than 100% looks messed up. For some reason the default aspect ratio is distorted (as you can see from the moon not being round) and you have to choose "classic" to view the game normally. Sigh...

for as good as treasure's action games are it baffles me tremendously that their shmups are so awful lol. needlessly convoluted controls, horribly unstable balancing, terrible camera behaviour, memorization centric level design. i just hate the way they design these. i feel like no normal person played it before they sent it out there. the port's good, at least? runs fine. looks good. sure. absolutely hate the game though.

radiant silvergun is a great game. this port is not. shame that quality of life for games is so taboo now, considering how ikaruga's pc port is much more polished.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ i went through the entire game with credit feeding to see the ending and then i played it like 2x over again and again and only NOW i realize you need to chain to upgrade your weapons jesus i got like level 10 at the very end wondering why this ♥♥♥♥'s impossible lol

Cleared the game without continues. It was a nightmare. I loved every second of it.