ESP Ra.De.

ESP Ra.De. is an Arcade Shoot em Up released by CAVE. Known as "ESP Ra.de. - A.D. 2018 Tokyo" outside of Japan.

Story

We write the Year 2018 and an evil establishment is controlling basically everything in Tokyo.

And as if controlling both, the political and financial world is not enough, an invasion of evil clones is being prepared to replace all People in Tokyo.

Now this is where the Player comes into place, in his mission to stop this evil plan and regain peace in the City.

Controls

3 Button Layout

A Button: standard Weapon

B Button: kind of a piercing gun, important for Scoring

C Button: Ultra Wide "Panic" Shot for destroying a large amount of Enemies

Arcade Hardware

  • 8-way Joystick and 3 Buttons
  • Vertical Screen orientation
  • Yamaha Soundchip YMZ280B @ 16.9344 MHz
  • CPU MC68000 @ 16 MHz
  • JAMMA Standard

Characters

CharacterFeature
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Straight shot Type.
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3-way spread shot.
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Medium-wide forward shot.

Stage Select

By Holding a specific Button while selecting on of the 3 Characters, the player can choose which 3 stages are played at first.

Yusuke Sagami

  • A button : Houoh High School, Random, Random.
  • B button : Houoh High School, Shopping Mall At Night, Bay Area.
  • C button : Houoh High School, Bay Area, Shopping Mall At Night.

J-B5th

  • A button : Shopping Mall At Night, Random, Random.
  • B button : Shopping Mall At Night, Bay Area, Houoh High School.
  • C button : Shopping Mall At Night, Houoh High School, Bay Area.

Iori Mimasaka

  • A button : Bay Area, Random, Random.
  • B button : Bay Area, Houoh High School, Shopping Mall At Night.
  • C button : Bay Area, Shopping Mall At Night, Houoh High School.

Items

ItemEffect
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power up
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big power-up
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score items
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bomber energy
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1 up

Item System

As long as the weapon power is not at maximum destroying medium and big enemy targets will get the player normal power-up Items. After reaching full weapon strength the power-up items change to the score items. After collecting 200 score items, the score item counter in the top left corner stops. At this point, when the Players bomber energy is not at maximum, the counter is running back to 0 while the items change again, this time to Bomber Energy Item.

At this point the cycle begins anew but instead of counting till 200, the timer now goes up to 300, and the cycle after that up to 400 and so on.

Scoring System

The basic idea of scoring in ESP Ra.De. is to attack the enemy with the [B] Button to pierce the target and then killing it via the [A] Button.

After that the player has to collect the dropped items and start to attack other targets while the multiplier is still running.

The multiplier:

While attacking the enemy with the routine as mentioned before small bubble-like rings will surround the target.

The remaining rings after killing the target will build up the multiplier.

Formula: Multiplier = remaining rings + 1

By upgrading the main weapon to above level 4 the meter will be at maximum and thus granting the player a maximum multiplier of x16.

The maximum number of rings the player can create depends on the meter located in the lower left corner.

The counter only lasts for a short period of time when killing smaller targets but is longer while destroying bigger targets.

So the best strategy for scoring is to 'ignore' smaller enemies and fully concentrate on the bigger ones and after that killing everything left on screen while the multiplier is counting down.