Raiden is a vertical scrolling shoot 'em up released in September 1990 by Seibu Kaihatsu. The first installment in the popular Raiden series, it was Seibu Kaihatsu's hit game.
Story
The year is 2090. Earth suddenly becomes a target for a race of deranged aliens known as Cranassians. Following the invasion, a new cutting-edge weapon, based on one of the destroyed alien starships, the Raiden Supersonic Attack Fighter, is built to save humanity from the clutches of the crazed aliens.
Features
Main Weapons
The Title Screen for Raiden.
- Vulcan Cannon: The main spread weapon. The more upgraded it is, the greater it spreads, which annihilates enemies on different sides of the screen from one area.
- Ion Laser: Fires straight beams that does twice the damage of the vulcan spread.
- Thermonulear Bomb: Gives a heavy blast, taking out most regular enemies at once and severly damageing bosses, You eventually run out of bombs, but obtain them again by shooting a heavy enemy (not a boss).
Sub-Weapons
- Nuclear missiles: Fires six missiles that go straight (takes 1 sec. to reload).
- Homing missiles: Fires multiple homing missiles at random enemies (0.5 sec. to reload).
Additional Information
When a player comes behind the other player, an array of stars will start to fly across the screen, which has twice the damage of the Vulcan spread. When a player dies, the fragments of the gunned-down fighter becomes projectiles that harm all enemies on-screen.
Items
- Red beacon: Gives the Vulcan firepower to the player who obtains it.
- Blue beacon: Gives the Laser firepower to the player who obtains it.
- M: Gives the Nuclear missile sub-weapon to the player who obtains it.
- H: Gives the Homing missile sub-weapon to the player who obtains it.
- 1-UP: Gives the player who obtains it an extra life stock.
- P: Maximizes the players current weapon sets to full power.
- B: Increases bomb stock by one.
- Medal: Gives a score of 300 points.
- Miclus: Seibu Kaihatsu's dragon mascot appears in Raiden and it's series, giving a score of 3,000.
- Fairy: A small humanoid creature that gives whoever obtains it 10,000 points.
Stages
There are 8 stages in the game (note: the Megadrive port features an additional bonus stage, whereas the PC-Engine Super Raiden port adds two more stages for a total of 10). When continuing after the player's defeat, they resume from a predefined checkpoint.
At the end of each stage, player gains stage bonus equals to the number of medals gained in a stage with current life, multiplied by number of bombs player possesses, multiplied by a 1000. If medal or bomb stock is 0, the count is equal to 1 for each affected field for scoring purposes. After defeating the Stage 8 boss, the mission is completed, and player receives 1 million bonus points. Afterwards, it will start back to Stage 1. This time around, enemies shoot faster and at a more rapid rate. After completing the second 8 stages the player is awarded 2 million bonus points, after completing the third 8 stages, the player is awarded 3 million bonus points, and so on. After the tenth 8 stages, the player is awarded 10 million bonus points. However, for the eleventh 8 stages and later, the amount of bonus points is variable (usually between 7-9 million).
The maximum score is 99,999,999. After reaching this score, the player can continue on playing, but the score stays at 99,999,999. After reaching 99,999,999 points, free play is enabled - the credit counter stays at 9 (the maximum number of credits) for all subsequent games until the arcade game is rebooted. This may be a software bug rather than an intentional feature as the sample gameplay sequences prior to starting a game are also disabled after reaching 99,999,999 until the arcade game is rebooted.
| Stage | Name | Boss | BGM |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Countryside | Desert Spider | Gallantry |
| 2 | City | Flying Fox | Lightning War |
| 3 | Ocean | Phalanx MK-III | Rough and Tumble |
| 4 | Ruins | Gijido | Gallantry |
| 5 | Enemy Ground Base | Land Crown | Fighting Thunder |
| 6 | Floating Continent | Guardian | Rough and Tumble |
| 7 | Space Station | Antonov Ma-27 | Lightning War |
| 8 | Enemy Final Base | Doreineji Core | Fighting Thunder |
Ports
The PC-Engine port of Raiden developed by Hudson Soft. Notice how the logo and Raiden Supersonic Attack Fighter differ from the original arcade version (as the logo is a plain sci-fi font, and the fighter is grey, rather than red, but marked with the arcade Raiden logo).
Raiden was ported to many consoles, including the FM Towns Marty, NEC PC Engine, Sega Mega Drive (Raiden Densetsu), Nintendo Super Famicom (Raiden Densetsu), Super NES (Raiden Trad), Atari Jaguar, PlayStation as The Raiden Project, Atari Lynx, Amiga, MS-DOS, and the mobile phone. The MS-DOS port was coded by Nigel 'Freddy' Conroy, Steve Cullen and Martin Randall, and was spearheaded by Martin Hooley. The original Raiden (not the Raiden Project) is available as a download from the Japanese Playstation Network store. The downloadable version can be played on the Playstation 3 console or PSP.
Trivia
- The title in Japanese translates to "Thunder And Lightning". Rai means thunder, and den means lightning. The closest English approximation of the pronunciation is /RHY-den/, not /RAY-den/.
- "Raiden" is the name of a Japanese WWII Fighter.
Gallery
External Links
| Raiden video games | ||
| Raiden series | Raiden ● Raiden II (DX) ● Raiden III ● Raiden IV (Overkill) ● Raiden V (Story) | |
| Raiden Fighters series | Raiden Fighters ● Raiden Fighters 2: Operation Hell Dive ● Raiden Fighters Jet (text transcript) | |
| Compilations | The Raiden Project ● Raiden Fighters Aces ● Raiden Legacy | |
| Other Seibu Kaihatsu/MOSS shmups | Stinger ● Scion ● Air Raid ● Viper Phase 1 ● Caladrius (Blaze) | |