Treasure's legendary shmup Radiant Silvergun is no ordinary arcade shooting experience, oh no. If you've never played Radiant Silvergun, then you've never played a shmupRadiant Silvergun, either. This is a shmup with fully voiced cutscenes, an RPG-like experience system in place of traditional power-ups, a rich orchestral soundtrack composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto of Final Fantasy 12 fame, and a lengthy story that technically encompasses all of human history.
The graphical settings are even more impressive, even if the various choices available to me have unhelpful names like"HI-RES+EFFECT" with no further description. Because of these painfully basic naming schemes working out exactly what each option does and getting the look I want takes a bit more time than it should, but at least they're well worth the effort.
Even the"improved" modern graphics managed to impress me. They paint over the classic art with a new, smoother, look that would normally see me running back to my ageing CDs in a flash. The replaced, rather than blindly upscaled, high resolution sprites can be thoroughly smothered in a whole range of bloom filters and attractively hazy blurs before being topped off with an almost filmic shimmer.