Midnight Raiders

The main draw of this game is its live-action video to promote more "realism". I'm sure that realism is there somewhere, perhaps hiding under all those big square clusters of pixels. Raiders is one of the blurriest games I have seen for the Sega CD, and its video quality is damned near incomprehensible. Between shots of the mission leaders in a poorly-lit command room, and shots of the pilots in dimly-lit cockpits, you're shown grainy video of a target approaching. If you get your crosshairs over it and press the correct button, you're shown even grainer military stock footage of Apaches firing their missiles, which then cuts to a shot of a miniature model being blown apart - often over completely different terrain from the last shot (like forest to desert). Then, just when you thought it couldn't get worse, you're lowered into an oil facility to take out the terrorists on foot. When does this take place? At night! If you haven't picked up on the clues by now, grainy, blocky footage makes dark areas look almost ink-black. Since it seems like the game is always shooting in darkness, it dramatically decreases your ability to understand once single damn thing on the screen.

The entire gameplay of Raiders consists of watching a little bit of the plot, shooting some things, then watching another section of the plot until you reach the end. The plot sucks, and the shooting parts yield unimpressive explosions. It's too bad you won't be as excited about seeing the explosions as the overacting actors are, because that probably should be the best part of the game. The pitiful effects that reward your good shot are truly not worth the trouble - and the trouble I speak of is, of course, the blasphemous controls. You know you've got bad controls when you feel like Stevie Wonder could match your score. The crosshairs swim around the screen to begin with, and it's made even worse when you're expected to target something about an inch wide, while the camera shakes and bobs to simulate flight. Never once while playing this game did I accurately and deliberately lock onto a target. Instead, the only way to play Raiders is to flail your crosshairs around in the general area of your target and hammer the fire key. Often, the crosshair will eventually cross over the target while you're hitting the fire button, and mercifully register a kill - but not always.

Once you hit the ground, things get the tinest bit better. The camera still bobs and shakes, but you're now shooting men at close range who present much larger targets. In fact, the ground mission is probably the best part of this game. Of course that's not saying much, because you're still doing mostly the same things you were doing in the air, and the developers manage to ruin even this. When you're shot down in your chopper, you're picked up and get to start over again. When you're shot just once on the ground, you die instantly and must restart the entire game. Hammering the fire key also no longer works. It did, for about five enemies, then the gun clicked mysteriously and refused to fire. I pressed every button to try and reload, or fix the jam, or whatever the hell it was, but it was no use and I was killed. I found a manual, read that the C button reloads, tried the game again, and this time pressed C many times when the gun clicked empty. It never reloaded, and I died. Again. Bear in mind there are no ammo indicators to go by, so I can only assume that I ran out of bullets. Read this and understand, the best part of this shitty game was cut short because it decided I ran out of fucking bullets.