Raiden (Arcade)

Raiden is without doubts considered one of the greatest arcade shoot-'em-ups of all time! It's no surprise that would see numerous ports on many different systems.

Version Differences#

FBI Logo#

The US version displays the FBI's "Winners Don't Use Drugs" screen common of the era upon startup. Other versions go directly to the title screen.

Title Screen#

Japan/Europe	US	Korea	Taiwan

While Fabtek, I.B.L. Corporation and Liang HWA Electronics went to the effort to insert flavor text to reflect they licensed the game in their respective regions, Tecmo (who published the game in Japan) skimped on doing the same.

The same thing happened with Dynamite Duke.

Miscellaneous#

In the Japanese and Taiwan versions, during a solo figher gameplay, dying causes you to restart at a checkpoint. In the other versions, you simply respawn where you were and keep playing, and checkpoints are reserved when continuing the game after getting a game over.

The checkpoint behavior was used in almost all ports (e.g. Genesis and TurboGrafx-16/TurboGrafx-CD).

Invulnerability#

The very last byte of the main CPU ROMs is a flag which can be used to enable invulnerability. Add the below cheat to your raiden.xml cheats file in MAME (or the equivalent for whichever ROM set you're using):

  <cheat desc="Invulnerability">
    <script state="on">
      <action>maincpu.mb@fffff=ff</action>
    </script>
    <script state="off">
      <action>maincpu.mb@fffff=00</action>
    </script>
  </cheat>

After enabling or disabling the cheat, you'll need to reset the game in order for it to take effect.

When invulnerable, colliding with airborne enemies will still cause them to take damage, allowing you to destroy them by simply moving into them without firing.

References#