Radiant Silvergun

The final innovation comes in the form of the boss battles that punctuate each of the game's five lengthy stages. These hulking spaceships come in all shapes, sizes and behaviours, from a giant monkey that swings and rolls its way around the screen, through a space eagle that flings bullets like feathers, to the jaw-dropping final boss, a running colossus around which your ship spins and dives (incidentally, the inspiration for the final boss in Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Rez).

The skill is in taking these foes apart section by section. While it's possible to aim for the heart for a fast completion, you earn far more points for defeating every component of an enemy, which in turn levels your weapons more quickly. Every aspect of the game's design works together in concert. It is a master class in game design.

These systems would mean little if the game they underpinned was lacklustre. Radiant Silvergun instead delivers one of the most memorable journeys not only in the genre, but across the medium, its pacing balancing set-piece fights with lulls in the action to take in the rich, vibrant 3D world that passes below your ship.

The port to Xbox 360 is a good one, Treasure including far more options for players to tinker with under the hood than exist in the dipswitch settings of the original ST-V arcade board, even. However, the game's rich control scheme works poorly with the Xbox controller.

In the arcade, just three buttons are used to control the game, with combinations of those buttons triggering the secondary weapons. For the port, Treasure has mapped each of the weapons to a different button on the Xbox pad, making it too easy to trip over yourself in play. As such, the option to completely reconfigure the pad is welcome.

Play with an arcade stick or a fight pad (itself based on the Sega Saturn controller) and Radiant Silvergun feels much more comfortable, although there will inevitably be some learning curve for newcomers.

Since Radian Silvergun was released before the days of widescreen televisions, Treasure has been forced to include screen guttering, where it places extra HUD information such as a move list and an instant readout of the current level of your weapons. These elements can all be switched off and the screen stretched and reconfigured. There are numerous filtering options to smooth out the polygons and eight different wallpapers to use for the borders.

The game is broken into two key modes: arcade and story (which has short in-game cut-scenes, for the first time subtitled for non-Japanese speakers). Each mode can be played freeplay (with unlimited continues) or as score attack (with no continues), with the latter option the only one that feeds into the online leaderboards. The result is an assured, comprehensive port, even allowing players to upload their replays for a mixture of showboating and instruction.

As with so much of Treasure's output, Radiant Silvergun stands alone. There is nothing else like it. Distinctiveness doesn't guarantee quality but, in this case, it's backed by radiant brilliance.

It's a game that inspires strategising, play after play encouraging you to tweak your game plan in order to squeeze more score from a certain section, all the while building muscle memory and skill. And if you want to play it as a straight shoot-'em-up, hammering through continues without bothering too much with the rabbit hole of strategy, the spectacle is quite like any other.

It may not have the visual class of its younger cousin Ikaruga, but there is no other 32-bit era game that shines like this today; a true classic that is available to the world at last. And the scoffers? Well, the joke is finally on them.