Radiant Silvergun
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Radiant_silvergun.jpg
Radiant Silvergun is a vertically-scrolling shooter video game, developed by Treasure Co. Ltd. It was released in arcades in 1998 and subsequently ported to the Sega Saturn, with added cutscenes by noted animation studio GONZO. The game was not released outside of Japan.
The game is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the 'maximalist' school of vertical shooter design. (Contrast this with Ikaruga's studied minimalism.) It features a unique and innovative weapons system, with seven weapons available at any time. The player has three buttons to control the weapons; the weapon fired depends on the combination of buttons pressed.
The weapons scheme is as follows:
A: Machine guns
B: Homing shot
C: Diagonal explosion shot
A&B: Scanning lasers that lock on and fire constant electricity
B&C: Scanning "shield" that locks onto any enemy in the radius and fires a homing missle
A&C: Forward & reverse Machine guns
A&B&C: Sword
The sword also can absorb any pink shots enemies fire, absorbing the energy in them to charge up a powerful, screen-clearing attack. This strategy is used a good deal in the game to avoid dying and quickly kill bosses. If a player does not kill a boss in a certain ammount of time, the boss self-destructs and the player earns no points. This forces the player to level up their weapons quickly, otherwise the second-to-last boss will self-destruct, and the final boss will be invincible. This results in the bad ending.
Unlike in most other shoot 'em ups, there are no power-ups. All weapons are available from the start. Weapons can 'level up', however, becoming more powerful as the player uses them to score points. (Failure to properly level up the weapons in the early stages leads to a very frustrating, and even impossible, later game.) The game is designed so that there is almost always a 'right' weapon for any situation. Indiscriminate firing is severely punished.
The game rewards players in great ways by comboing enemies of various colors. Whenever the player kills enemies that are the same color, while ignoring the other two colors, they get faster upgrades and massive points. The levels are designed so usually, the player can go as far as possible on one color, hit one of another color, and then have the rest of the level as the third color. As such, the game highly rewards memorization.
Treasure prefaces every boss fight with the evocative phrase "NO REFUGE" and some cryptic advice on how to fight the boss in 'steps', alongside the Engrish meme "BE ATTITUDE FOR GAINS". This advice has attained some fame among the game's fans for its Zen obliqueness.
The Saturn release of the game is not particularly rare, but demand for the game is so high that the title has become the archetypal "eBay darling", with copies changing hands for over £100/$100 on a regular basis. While not as valuable or rare as some Neo-Geo titles, the acclaimed gameplay makes Radiant Silvergun one of the most sought-after and prized titles in gaming history.
External links
- KLOV entry for Radiant Silvergun (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=R&game_id=9239)
- Translations of Radiant Silvergun-related materials (http://www.emuxhaven.net/~silver/)fr:Radiant Silvergun