Radiant Silvergun

For the uninitiated, Radiant Silvergun is absolutely daunting the first time you start things up. The right side of the screen displays all of the weapons you currently have access to, as well as the buttons that they're mapped to. Your eyes stare at the screen, trying to comprehend how you're going to manage seven separate guns at once. Do you unlock them as you go? Maybe grab power-ups from destroyed enemies? Nope! The weapons you begin Radiant Silvergun with are the ones you keep for the entire game. There are three base weapons that continually upgrade as you use them. Homing missiles, explosive diagonal blasts, and a deadly frontal ray offer good diversity in your killing powers. The four secondary weapons have more specific uses. Lock-on missiles, a sweeping laser, and rear assault fit right in with what you'd expect, but the final weapon is quite different from the norm. A short-range sword can be used to defeat enemies, as well as gobble up certain attacks, and figuring out how to use this bad boy is the key to mastering the game.

There are many shoot-'em-ups where enemies flood the screen with so many bullets that the games have become known as "bullet hell." Radiant Silvergun is not one of those games. Challenge comes from managing your guns so you can efficiently dispose of the vast assortment of enemies you encounter. The radar strike, for instance, is the only weapon that can pass through barriers, so using it to clear out foes in front of you is a great way to win a battle before your life is even threatened. At other times, your best bet is to fly toward the top of the screen and use your rear cannon, so you're safely out of harm's way while your enemies fire their worthless guns toward the bottom. But you have to play levels many times before you understand these methods. Furthermore, your guns are so weak in the early going that it takes an awfully long time to take down simple enemies. Because of these two elements, you have to spend hours upgrading your weapons and learning patterns before you're adept enough to triumph.


Those happy pink balls spell your doom.
There's no use sugar coating the experience of playing Radiant Silvergun during its first few hours. Unless you're an expert in this genre, you will die repeatedly, and you will be forced to replay the first level over and over again. It's exhausting. If you aren't prepared for this onslaught, it's easy to lose faith and move on to a less demanding game. And because Radiant Silvergun is so challenging, there's no reason to feel bad for admitting you're just not good enough. But if you have the dedication to see things through, Radiant Silvergun is richly rewarding. Every minute you spend playing makes you that much stronger, and it's empowering to cleave through enemies that stoically stood in your path when you were weaker. Every hour you spend fighting waves of enemies adds another life onto your total, so even those who aren't proficient in shoot-'em-ups should be able to amass a large enough collection to succeed.

Radiant Silvergun is never cheap. When you die, it's because you messed up. You misjudged an enemy's attack pattern or flew too close to a barrier. This knowledge gives you the strength to push on because if you stay attentive, you won't make careless mistakes that cost you dearly. Precise controls ensure you're completely in command of your craft. Whether you're weaving in and out of bullets, circling bosses to find their weak points, or wielding your sword like a dragon slayer, everything feels just as it should. Age has been extremely kind to Radiant Silvergun because the core mechanics are so well implemented. The visuals have been updated slightly from the Saturn original, and though it's clear this is a game that was first released more than a decade ago, it still looks sharp. It's easy to discern the background from the foreground, as well as identify enemies, and that instant communication is the most vital aspect of a shoot-em-up's visual design.


This boss demands an artistic style all its own.
The persistent Story mode is the most interesting way to play Radiant Silvergun, but if steep difficulty is too much to handle, you can dive into Arcade mode for a breather. Here, you can tweak how many lives you have, and that cushion gives you a chance to experiment without the fear that constantly hounds you in Story mode. If you're still stuck, Practice mode gives you a chance to test out the best strategy in a specific portion before you make a legitimate run for it. Here, you can tweak the speed settings, which gives you a chance to understand everything unfolding before you crank things up full blast. There's also a cooperative mode (online or offline) if you crave help from a more adept player or want to take a novice under your wing. Finally, you can tweak the difficulty, even in Story mode, so beginners have a chance to succeed. Turning things down to easy lowers the hit points of your enemies, so you can spend less time focusing on leveling up and more time having fun.

Radiant Silvergun has stood the test of time. The core mechanics are so well implemented that you can never blame the game for your mistakes, which goes a long way toward lessening the frustration. But it's impossible to completely eliminate the feeling of helplessness in a game this difficult. You will need to sink in many hours before you're strong enough to expertly gun down enemies, and it's hard to deny the tedium of repeatedly playing the first levels until things finally click. Those easily intimidated need not apply, but anyone craving a serious challenge should look no further, and the novel persistent upgrade system offers a healthy change from other shoot-'em-ups. When you throw in modern amenities, such as leaderboards and downloadable replays, this turns into an addictive challenge for anyone who loves chasing high scores. Radiant Silvergun is unkind to beginners but offers a satisfying experience to those who are willing to invest themselves in it.

Dream Trigger 3D Review

Unraveling the interwoven game mechanics of Dream Trigger 3D leads to the realization that this shoot-'em-up offers more style than substance.

The Good

• Interesting assortment of abilities and restrictions   
• Vibrant backgrounds make great use of 3D   
• Plenty of stages and challenges to complete.

The Bad

• Action is fairly shallow   
• Visuals sometimes get too busy.

A wire-frame dolphin swims through a pale green sea past translucent microorganisms. A swallow circles a fiery ball of light made up entirely of small glowing squares. A targeting reticle inspired by space combat games of yesteryear skims over a city of neon geometric shapes. The stages of Dream Trigger 3D offer a variety of visual delights, and each one is complemented by a layered audio track that changes in response to your actions. Your sweeps of the stylus reveal the enemies that hunt you on the top screen where you must vanquish them while dodging their attacks and grabbing power-ups. This unique pairing of mechanics is initially disorienting, but once you get the hang of it, you find that Dream Trigger 3D is a mildly challenging, mildly entertaining shoot-'em-up. It tickles your imagination but doesn't offer much depth, not unlike a pleasant reverie that fades in the light of the morning.

Hope you're handy with the circle pad.

Like any good dream, Dream Trigger 3D is full of vivid visual stimuli. The standout elements are the backgrounds, which make great use of color and 3D. Though the field of play remains static, many backgrounds are dynamic and create the sensation of traveling through a forest or speeding down digital pipelines. The "ship" you control on the two dimensional surface of the top screen is rarely anything that actually resembles a spaceship. In addition to the objects mentioned above, you control a cube with a sphere inside of it, a nuclear power symbol, or a simple point of light. Your enemies vary too (as do their projectiles), and you face off against squids, tangles of purple wire, and a host of geometric oddities. There are times when your ship, your enemies, enemy projectiles, and power-ups cross the line from chaotic skirmish to confusing jumble, but these instances decrease as you become more familiar with the game mechanics.

There are two fundamental steps to conquering your foes in Dream Trigger 3D. The second is to kill them on the top screen by maneuvering your ship directly over them with the circle pad, D pad, or face buttons (for lefties) and pressing a shoulder button to fire. But to kill them, you first have to find them. Foes remain hidden on the top screen until you reveal them using the sonar grid on the touch screen. Your enemies are visible on this grid as purple squares moving through a field of gray squares. By touching a square, you queue it up to trigger a sonar ping that ripples out in a two-square radius. Any enemies caught in the radius of the ping are revealed and ripe for the blasting. The trick is that pings are only triggered by a rhythm bar that regularly sweeps the bottom screen. This means that you can't simply touch a purple square on the grid and reveal an enemy; rather, you must anticipate both the flight path of your enemy and the timing of the rhythm bar to place your ping effectively.

Dream Trigger 3D's sonar mechanic is initially disorienting. Your attention is divided between the bottom screen, where you are trying to place your pings in the proper places with good timing, and the top screen, where you are dodging projectiles, destroying enemies, and trying to grab power-ups. Further complicating things is the fact that you have a limited number of pings available at any given time. Yet, this restriction is mitigated by the fact that your pings (16 max on a 12x16 grid) replenish automatically with each sweep of the rhythm bar (approximately every 3 seconds; timing varies by stage). When you consider that each ping covers a two-square radius, you can actually get quite a bit of coverage by swiping the stylus in a quick line or dabbing a few different spots around the grid. This drastically lessens the amount of attention you need to pay to the bottom screen, allowing you to focus on the prettier and deadlier action on the top screen.

It's like M.C. Escher designed a Rorschach test.

Avoiding enemy projectiles is one of your primary concerns up top, and the tougher levels can make the air thick with damaging bullets. You have four hit points that can be replenished by grabbing the intermittent health power-ups, but it doesn't take long to lose a life. As deadly as Dream Trigger 3D can get, though, there is another feature that makes it less menacing. Anytime you are attacking (there is only one attack), you are invincible. This allows you to move with impunity throughout the field of play, at least until your attack meter runs dry. You replenish this meter by revealing enemies on the sonar grid, and this correlation completes Dream Trigger 3D's intertwining web of gameplay mechanics.

Though it takes a while to wrap your head around it all, once you do, you find that the game is not as deep or complex as it initially seems. Your mind makes the connection between the sonar grid and the top screen, so you rarely have to look down. It's not very hard to stay in projectile-free areas until you are ready to strike or forced to evade, and then, triggering your attack ensures you can scoot around safely. Your attack meter becomes the only resource you really have to watch, but even it replenishes fairly regularly. You get into a rhythm of dodging, pinging, and attacking that provides the inherent satisfaction of vanquishing your foes and sweeping the board clean, but Dream Trigger 3D never manages to create much excitement or intensity.

This boss may look nasty, but his face is worse than his bite.

There are 55 stages connected by a web in the World Map mode. You unlock them as you succeed, opening up new pathways that you navigate by spending dream points you earn at the end of each level. Eventually, you reach the point where you cease to unlock stages in the course of play and must attempt to complete challenges to proceed. Some challenges pose tricky tasks, while others simply reward repeated play, and it will likely be many hours before you've seen every stage. Once unlocked, stages can be played in Free Play mode (where, unlike in World Map mode, you don't have to navigate a web) or Time Attack mode (where your best times are saved), but the leaderboards for each stage only exist on your system, and there's no way to claim individual times with your initials. This all but prevents you from competing against anyone but yourself, unless you link up with another Dream Trigger 3D owner and play local multiplayer. Versus matches place two players on the same screen in a race to earn the most points. You can only see your opponent when you reveal them with a sonar ping, at which point you can attack them and stun them for a few seconds. Scrambling to vanquish the most enemies can be hectic, but without projectiles or power-ups, these matches feel flat.

Dream Trigger 3D also features a dynamic soundtrack that waxes and wanes depending on your activity level. When you are attacking vigorously, it delivers some nice blends of electronica and familiar classical strains, but when things are quieter, the audio is not as energetic. The minimalistic sections feel lifeless compared to their full-blown counterparts, though they do afford you the chance to play with the audible chimes of your sonar pings. Like making sonar ping music, Dream Trigger 3D is a novel experience. The eclectic mixture of game mechanics provides some entertainment, but ultimately, it fails to coalesce into something really substantial. It's neat to try to figure it all out, but once you see this stylish game for what it is, you'll wish there was more to it.