Raiden Legacy

This is a port of the emulated mobile collection, complete with wonky touchscreen menus and an always-on shooting feature that can thankfully be turned off. The sound is off, with music slightly sped up and sound effects either not happening when they're supposed to or randomly varying in volume. Worse are the jittery framerate which takes a dip whenever things get too hectic. There are also no online scoreboards and the game resets your personal highscore with every play. By far the worst offender of all though is the fact that the game constantly crashes.

The Raiden series of shooters are some of the best you will ever play. Great power up system and a crushing difficulty. However, it is quite apparent this collection is just the games running on MAME packaged with a modern front end. The games will frequently hitch in frame rate and a lot of screen tearing is present. The games are most certainly playable and the music has been tweaked to sound much nicer. It's just disappointing that the games run no better that just playing them on MAME directly.

Raiden Legacy seems to use emulators software as well, but I noticed a very annoying micro stutter with all three Games from the Raiden series included. My specs is a C2D at 3.4 GHZ with 460GTX. I am able to compare really this version well to the M.A.M.E version, which is definitely better, since it is smoother and really original. I do expect a new title on the PC to run abosutely smooth, no jitter, no stutter at all, especially if hardware specs should be really low, as Raiden was a Bitmap only game. Conclusion, I rate only 2 stars. If you are able to run the M.A.M.E version, use this instead.

I read the reviews, saying it was poor emulation etc. Those where from 2013, so I bought it, thinking it was updated and fixed, or just unlucky people with computer issues etc. Well, the game is frameskipping/lagging a LOT, so much it is unplayable, I tried using an older version and the newest version available through GOG Galaxy. That the menus are somewhat skipping when loading a new screen I do not care about, but the games are unplayable, I tried every option, resolution, scanlines etc, nothing works, the sound does not sound so good either. Raiden 1 does run a bit faster than what I am used too, then suddenly stutters for about an second. And then you are basically dead, when the frames "catch up" I do have The Raiden Project on PSX, Raiden Trad on Mega Drive, so it is a game I am familiar with, maybe my computer is old? But if my Playstation can run Raiden perfectly fine, my computer should really not have any problems with it.. (On a sidenote, it is strange reading the system requrements the old games require today, since I remember the original requirements for many of the old games.. Even the non emulated ones..) If this Raiden collection is ever fixed/patched and plays smooth, it would easily be a 6 Stars out of 5 for me, but at the moment (4/2019) it is not, and looking at other reviews it was not in 2013 either. So if not now, probably never. Too bad, since I really wanted to play Raiden Fighters.