Radiant Silvergun INFO BOX SYSTEMS Arcade, Saturn PUBLISHER ESP Software RELEASE DATE (Arcade) Japan - ?? RELEASE DATE (Saturn) Japan - 07/23/98 Radiant Silvergun... such a cruel game. Never have I played a game so determined to keep me from fully enjoying it as I have with Radiant Silvergun. I'm sure it's a fine shooter, but the game doesn't seem to want to let you know this until you've already piled a ton of hours into the game. First off, this is a vertical shooter, and like most shooters of this kind, you blow up the enemy ships while dodging their bullet spray. To keep things interesting you have seven weapons that you can use at any time in the game. You can use them by either pressing one of the many buttons on the Saturn pad, or using the three A, B and C buttons in different combinations. Either way, there's always a weapon for every situation. Much like Ikaruga, this game also uses a chaining system. In Radiant Silvergun there are three colours of enemies; red, blue and yellow. Killing three ships of a single colour starts a chain, now keep killing ships of that same colour to keep building your chain. Kill an enemy of a different colour and your chain is done. I'm cool with that. Unfortunately, your weapons level up as you score points with them individually. That's a neat idea too, it's too bad that if you don't know how to chain your weapons will barely level up at all and bosses will end up taking ages to finish off. Hell, some bosses are almost impossible to kill before they simply leave because your weapons are too weak. This drives me bonkers because there are lots of bosses and it already takes a LONG time to kill each one when your weapons are sufficiently powered up. Honestly, that's probably my only major concern with the game. I'm sure once you've gotten fairly good at chaining a large portion of the game, this isn't as big of a problem, but I just can't get into the game knowing it's going to give me an extra hard time because I don't know how to chain. Your ship moves a little slow, and all those weapons can get really confusing during tense moments. But I guess these are things you get used to as you put more time into the game. It is a pretty game, and Sakimoto's music for it is starting to grow on me (big gasp), but it's just not the type of game that immediately grabs my attention and never lets go. You're going to have to earn this game's respect before it's going to let you enjoy it.