[Steam] Radiant Silvergun - Arcade 1CC - 22,686,270 Pts (Stage 4 Route)

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The Steam port of Treasure's Radiant Silvergun finally came out, courtesy of LiveWire.
It was supposed to come out the 18th of August but it eventually came out about a week ago.
Hopefully they port Espgaluda II to Steam next.

Very happy to finally have this on a definitive platform, even if the port is a little lackluster. It was always weird that this wasn't on Steam, Ikaruga has been on it for over 9 years at this point.

In terms of features this port is basically the patched Switch version that came out earlier last year, with nothing more and nothing less. Which was also a port of the old Xbox Live Arcade version, so we're dealing with a port of a port here.
The Switch version was better and worse in the fact that it fixed various graphical bugs like sprite warping, but it had more input lag by nature of it being on Switch, and the 360 version already had a lot of lag.
The Steam version is the best of both worlds here, as it has the Switch bug fixes as well as the same or less input lag than the 360 version, making this the definitive version of these modern ports.

The initial Steam release is a little jank:
For display options you only have the choice between a 720p window or legacy fullscreen exclusive, not even fullscreen borderless windowed.
Fullscreen exclusive is deprecated and obsolete at this point and can introduce some mad input delay as it forces the monitor into 60hz, which some modern displays really don't like.
Vsync is always on, adding like a frame of lag.
Mark from the Electric Underground did discover that you can disable this if you add "vsync=0" to the ini file in the game's folder, which is good, but you should really be able to disable this in-game.
It's only using DirectX 9, nothing more modern.

These issues -are- annoying, but luckily on PC you have a lot more options to tinker with stuff.
I'm personally using dgVoodoo to convert it to DirectX 11 and then using Special K to lower the input lag and play it in fullscreen borderless windowed.
After this the input lag feels about the same to me as playing it on Saturn Beetle with 1 frame of runahead, which is 2 frames of lag. Much better than 360 lag at least.

Extremely good game anyway, it definitely deserves the legacy it made for itself.
A++ presentation, amazing set pieces, very cool player ship that can use 7 different weapons at once, and a very involved scoring system with constant variety.
It's also an extremely unique game, there really is nothing like it (the closest being ZeroRanger
but still not quite). The experience system where score powers up your weapons is something that I've never seen in any other game since, even though it's really cool (and a good way to incentivize people to play for score).

Scoring is chaining enemies of the same color, with the chain bonus getting bigger every 3 enemies killed to a max of 100k. There is also a secret chain of red - blue - yellows where the chain goes up faster but yellows are pretty rare. Besides that there is boss destruction bonuses and secret dogs.
For optimization you can do weapon bonuses and grazing.
Weapon bonuses are 10k bonuses for using weapons in a certain way. For C Spread for example this is landing 16 shots without missing or blowing them up early. For Homing Plasma this is shooting targets for 10 seconds.

Stage 5 is about the hardest thing ever put in a videogame.
The rest of the chains in this game are pretty easy to learn and you almost never break them, but stage 5 you can practice for weeks to full-chain it only once, never mind optimizing it.
It's easily harder than everything else in the game combined, and it gives over 50% of your total score. The difficulty is very lop-sided and make-or-break as a result, it almost feels like the rest of the game is a 30 minute waiting room just to get a chance at the actual hard thing that matters. Ikaruga is definitely better in this regard, the score is more evenly divided and every section of the game is now stage 5 of Radiant Silvergun.

There surprisingly isn't a whole lot of documentation on this game.
The best guide I've seen is the one on the French shmup.com site.
It's all in French but you can translate it in the browser:
https://shmup.com/dossier/radiant-sil...

There is also the official JP guide book:
https://archive.org/details/radiant-s...

Also check out the shmups wiki video index on this game:
https://shmups.wiki/library/Radiant_S...

Buy the game on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/24...

00:00 - Intro
01:05 - Stage 3A
02:12 - Stage 3B
04:32 - Stage 3C
06:25 - Stage 3D
07:50 - Stage 3E
10:40 - Stage 4A
13:10 - Stage 4B
17:48 - Stage 4C
23:34 - Stage 4D
25:31 - Stage 4E
30:56 - Stage 5A
36:21 - Stage 6A
39:54 - Ending & Credits

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