raiden 2 - yay or nay?

saw a vid of this the other day, and thought i'd get a cross-section of opinion. the one i saw is raiden 2, but are 1 and jet worth looking into? and is it a straight jamma board, or do you need a certain motherboard as well.

oh, and prices...! lol

Raiden 2: yes, go for it. its one of my favorite shooters.

very challenging, and it has the old-school bullet patterns (fast, aimed directly at you) and loops after clearing the last stage. gameplay is straightforward: shoot everything, dodge, and manage your weapon level.

the first Raiden is a classic, and is not all drastically different from part 2. it basically lacks the homing laser weapon that's become standard in the series.

the "Fighters" games I have not spent much time with, but Jet seems pretty cool. the bullet patterns are a bit more modern and the game is full of secrets and hidden scoring tricks to figure out.


every Raiden board (with possible exception of part 3) is standard JAMMA. the "Fighters" games are all on Seibu's SPI hardware, which uses a ROM cartridge and motherboard. single PCB versions of the Fighters games exist too, but I believe that they use lower quality sound chips.

there are two different versions of the Raiden 2 PCB:
- original 1993 release, with high difficulty and a battery for saving scores.
- smaller 1996 re-release, with adjusted difficulty level and no battery.
sound is apparently crappy on this version too.

I recommend sticking with the bigger '93 version board.
for price, I think around $60-75 US for an original US or JP Raiden 2 PCB without any extras is typical.

i think youre confusing the raiden series with the raiden fighters series.. they are very different.

raiden 1,2,3, DX are oldschool as hell, slow ships and die-once-and-yer-fucked gameplay.

raiden fighters 1,2,jet are fast paced manic shmups with emphasis on medalchasing, very much like raizing/8ing games, sometimes this even means tactical suiciding.

i think all the games are ace but raiden fighters 2 really stands a bit taller than the rest, bloody brilliant game, one of the best ever made actually.

Isn't DX the same as Raiden 2 but with a few enhancements?

cheers guys. my mistake, it was raiden fighters 2 i was looking at. looks incredible.

any good suggestions of places to try for the SPI motherboard?