Raiden high score #4

Yeah man! Now this is a breakthrough game. Went right from playing Raiden II this morning and getting virtually nowhere to playing this and on my first credit, got about halfway through stage 7 before getting totally wiped out. I beat stage 6 without much fuss - which surprised me as I had never played it before. I dropped two bombs on the boss and blasted my way through to finish the stage.

If you have never seen stage 6, you start off after 5, landing back on the carrier from the beginning of the game and then taking off for space. Its a very cool moment and a nice break in the game. If the first 5 stages are a tribute to Toaplan's Sky Shark/Twin Cobra feeling titles, stages 6 and 7 are their take on a Tatsujin-like space stage - with a very similar midboss to one of the Tatsujin ones - a four-ship cluster that moves in a square pattern.

I'm not really sure how hard its gonna be to push through and get to the end of this one - pretty sure that's gonna take some time. I really should have practiced stage 7 with a few continues to see what's happening there, but there's time enough for that later.

Raiden high score #3

I use to think Seibu just put out some pretty blah stuff - especially compared to later Toaplan and early Cave, but this is yet anopther company that has snuck up on me and I find myself really, really digging their back catalog.

Raiden is pretty much a tribute to Sky Shark with about double the difficulty and double the cheapness of side field point blanking. There are quite a few frustrating moments where you are in the zone, feeling the flow of the game and whap - bullet from behind.

But I still can't get enough of this game. It's the intenseness of the stages and toughness of the game from early on. I find myself being able to glide through stages 1 and 2 most times, but from stage 3 on, it gets intense. As it stands right now, stage 5 is my sticking point. This score at 755,470 feels pretty good as I had near perfect runs of the first three stages, but 4 and 5 need a lot more practice!

Otogi Matsuri signed - Joker Jun + Btooom! rancor lot

Shmups forum gentleman rancor has become my go to guy in Japan and over the last few months I have been picking up superplays, games and other stuff to satiate my gaming palate. This lot of goodies arrived about a month or two ago and had rancor's trademark Japanese Kit-Kats and hand wipes from game centers in Japan. I finally got a copy of the official Akai Katana superplay by Cave and its pretty awesome- also pretty strange as they used the X360 port for all of the three versions of the game.

I also got the INH The Aces High Raiden superplay DVD, which is fantastic. It covers runs in Raiden, Raiden II and Raiden DX as well as having two CD's full of music from the series and "rare tracks".

But the cream of the crop out of this lot was the Joker Jun mangas. Now, I have just started in on reading a few series and I'm digging manga stuff a lot at the moment. Junya Inoue has to be one of my favorite game artists of all time and I decided to take a look at his manga work via some scanlations on the web and got totally sucked in. His Latest, Btooom! is like a combination of the series Lost and the game Halo and I won't say any more for fear of spoiling it. Check it out, really good stuff.

Otogi Matsuri was Joker's first manga, and it has a lot of characters from ESPrade and Guwange and is about teenagers saving the world from traditional Japanese evil spirits and I dig it. The art, of course, is fantastic. This issue I got has been signed by Joker Jun himself and has one of the characters from the series exclaiming "Fight" - which is pretty bad ass. It's a welcome addition to my collection and at somepoint here, I have to frame it and give it the treatment it deserves.

Big thanks to rancor!

Raiden high score #2

Got the JP PS1 port about a week ago, right when I got my JP 360 - and this is all I have been playing. It's a fantastic port, feels like its a perfect recreation of the arcade, right down to the need to actually credit up before you play.

I had been playing with the 1 player ship and decided to give the second player ship a try after my umpteenth run this morning and beat my previous high score by like 100K instantly. I died at the middle of the fifth stage, but seeing as how I had never played that stage, I was pretty happy with the result. I know that there are a ton of cheap moments, like tanks firing from the side fields, but I really don't care. I like hard, old-school shmups and this fits the bill perfectly.