Radiant Silvergun Patch Adds New Scoring System, Two-Button Playstyle

A new patch for Saturn shmup Radiant Silvergun adds features from other versions of the game as well as a brand new scoring system.

It was created over the course of more than a year by Alex “trap15” Marshall, a fan hacker who takes a special interest in arcade shooters. He released it June 20 on his website from where the patch can be downloaded.

Marshall has added the Ikaruga scoring system found in the versions of Radiant Silvergun ported to the Xbox 360 and, now, the PC and current consoles. He also added a new “Special” scoring mode that combines the game’s original scoring system with the Ikaruga one.

His patch also adds a two-button playstyle that had been exclusive to the ST-V Titan arcade version of Radiant Silvergun in which there are only three weapons available to the player using two buttons, as opposed to the original game’s seven weapons for three buttons. When the arcade game is changed to “overseas” mode, it automatically uses that gameplay style.

Lastly, the patch unlocks the Option+ screen right from the start and adds two new options to it to control the new features Marshall added.

SHIRO! community member Privateye checked out the patch and described the scoring systems in more detail in the SHIRO! Discord server:

Radiant
Original chain system: kill three enemies of the same color to start a chain, then stick with that color to maintain it. Secret chain is the exception to this rule (red -> blue -> keep killing yellow)
Max chain bonus = 100K

Ikaruga
Ikaruaga chain system: kill three enemies of the same color to start a chain, and can to switch to a different color after every third enemy killed.
Secret chain bonus worth 10K is available (red -> blue -> yellow) but continuing to kill yellow won’t maintain it.
Max chain bonus = 25.6K

Special
Ikaruaga chain system: kill three enemies of the same color to start a chain, and can to switch to a different color after every third enemy killed.
Secret chain starting at 10K is available (red -> blue -> yellow) and can switch to a different color after every third yellow killed. This is the key to huge scores and rapid weapon leveling!
Max chain bonus = 100K

Unlike Ikaruga Mode in the PC / Switch / Xbox 360 ports, secret weapon bonuses (e.g. 10K points for locking on to the same enemy for 10 seconds with Homing Plasma) are available in Ikaruga and Special modes.

The new “2 Shot” setting mirrors the curious behaviour of the ST-V version running on a non-Japanese board. Gives the Spread weapon an additional backwards shot, which you don’t normally get on Saturn or ST-V even when Weapon Strength C is maxed at level 33.
Homing, Homing Plasma, Back Wide, and Lock On Spread are unavailable.

Control scheme:
A = Vulkan
B = Spread
C/X/Y/Z/R = Radiant Sword

The patch is applied by dragging and dropping the Japanese original game’s CUE file onto a BAT file that runs bespoke scripts that Marshall created. He did this, as he says on his website, “due to the lack of a real system for distributing CD image patches that only change files on the ISO9660 filesystem.” He clearly hasn’t heard of Knight0fDragon’s Sega Saturn Patcher, which does exactly that.

The patcher produces a modified CUE file and a modified BIN file of the first track but leaves the other track files, which are Radiant Silvergun’s music, alone.

The project’s Bitbucket page indicates that the earliest version of this Saturn patch was made in June 2023, although that wasn’t as far back as Marshall’s idea goes.

In December 2018, he privately made a patch for the ST-V Titan arcade version of Radiant Silvergun that adds the Ikaruga and Special scoring modes to it. A final version of it can be found in the download with the Saturn patch, and instructions for burning that patched data to an EPROM and installing it onto the arcade board can be found on Marshall’s website.