Raiden is a great 2D arcade shoot 'em up and a showcase game for the Atari Jaguar's capabilities! The game was also released for various gaming consoles and the MS-DOS PCs.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Based on the original arcade game Raiden, the year in 2090 A.D. and mother Earth has fallen to deranged aliens. The World's Alliance of Nations developed a supersonic attack fighter called Raiden to defend the Earth from the enemy squadrons. You are the pilot who must take control of the experimental fighter and destroy the alien armadas that just happen to look like odd variations of typical military tanks and planes, with alien gadgets attached in them. Raiden is a pure 2D arcade shoot 'em up that offers various power-ups upon destroying certain enemy units. The Blue power-up grants you with a more powerful laser, a highly advanced weapon that fires forward. The Red one gives you multiple, spread shots. "M" gives you forward firing missiles, the "H" gives you homing missiles and the "B" power-up gives an extra nuclear bomb. Note that, apart from the Jaguar version, Raiden was also developed for the PC MS-DOS, the Sega Genesis (aka Mega Drive), the Atari Lynx, the SNES, the TurboGrafx-16 and TurboGrafx CD.
GRAPHICS / SOUND Showcasing the Atari Jaguar's capabilities, Raiden offers the vertical shoot 'em up excitement of an all-time arcade favorite with brilliant sounds and exceptional speed and motion. The graphics are colorful, well detailed and smooth and look very close to the arcade (note that there's a golden "dashboard" on the right side of the screen that gives valuable information such as the score, the lives remaining and the credits left in order to keep the arcade's aspect ratio. Each level has a different music score and a different landscape to fly over. The game is split into different hostile environments like deserts, beaches, forests or even another planet and a pirate space station in the more advanced levels!
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Arcades (original version)
Hardware information
Jaguar
CPU: The main processor is called "Jaguar" and it is based on a RISC 3000 MIPS. Co-Processor: MC68000 at 13,3MHz used as a general purpose control processor. MEMORY: 2Mb (64bit bus usinf 4x16bit fast page mode DRAMS GRAPHICS: GPU is called Tom at 26,59MHz, 32bit RISC architecture, 4Kb int. cache. Object Processor: 64bit RISC architecture (could do a variety of graphic architectures). Blitter: 64bit RISC architecture managing high speed logic ops, z-buffering, Gouraud Shading (64bit int.registers). DRAM Controller, 32bit memory management. SOUND: Sound chip is called Jerry. DSP 32bit RISC acrhitecture with 8Kb int.cache. It has CD quality sound while the number of channels used depends on the software. Two DAC (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound signals. Full stereo.