Raiden III

[Jedi Master Thrash]

I just picked up Raiden III for PS2 used.

It's pretty much what you expect. Game hasn't really changed since Raiden Trad on my Genesis. Except of course that all the backgrounds a 3D rendered now.

Game's pretty good. The only issue I have is that it kinda feels like you're flying through molasses. They should have upped the movement speed just a notch. But surprisingly, I still don't have too much trouble evading the bullets, mostly because the collision detection is extremely forgiving. You pretty much have to get nailed dead-on by a bullet to get destroyed. Normally you might complain, but because of the somewhat slow ship speed, the forgiving collision detection balances it out perfectly so the game remains playable and fun.

The game includes TATE mode. It actually includes 4 modes. Regular and TATE, and then a "wider" version of both.

Since I can't rotate the projector screen, what I did was put it in Wide-TATE mode, and then set the projector to 16:9 mode, so it made the playfield super-long, and then just lay down sideways on the couch and play.

 

[vbt]

it must be really cool to play in Wide-TATE on Raiden 3 with a projector.

 

[Jedi Master Thrash]

One other interesting tidbit I forgot to mention.

On all other games I've played, the "X" button is the OK/enter button.

So when I first load it, and it says "no save file found, do you want to create a new save file?" and I select "Yes" and click "X".

Then it says "No save data loaded, do you want to play anyway?" and I select "Yes" and click "X".

Then it says "no save file found, do you want to create a new save file?", and once again I select "Yes" and click "X".

And then it says "No save data loaded, do you want to play nayway?"....

And after going round and round half a dozen times, I finally figured out that the "X" button was mapped directly to the "No" choice. So even though I selected "Yes", the "X" button chose "No". And if you answer no to both questions, it keeps repeating the questions over and over.

In Raiden III, the "[]" and "O" buttons are accept, and the "X" is cancel.