000: Some Milestone History, and 3DS Emulation

Radirgy De Gojaru (ラジルギでごじゃる）was a score chasing focused mini-shmup released for the 3DS by Klon. “Who is Klon?” you might ask, along with “I thought MileStone/RS34 made Radirgy?”. I’m so glad you asked! The history is a little murky, given MileStone’s relative obscurity, and probably the embarrassing way they closed (ceo broke stock laws and went to jail), but I’ll give it a shot.

Klon co. ltd. was a company that provided development services for games, formed in 2003, well before the MileStone closure in 2013. Ex-MileStone people joined the company and formed a new sub team called Sakura Flamingo Labratory. Under this set of labels, the team released a trio of 3DS games, the aforementioned Radirgy De Gojaru, Karous: The Beast of Re:Eden, and Illvelo Dillinjah. Additionally they released one Xbox 360 title, a compilation of the five MileStone arcade shmups called Sakura Flamingo Archives (SFA).

All of these titles had issues which seems to indicate a time of turmoil in the wake of MileStone’s closure. SFA was littered with inconsistencies from the OG titles, strange bugs particularly around sound effects, as well as odd omissions like leaving out the ability to vertically orient the screen (an option that existed in the games the compilation was comprised of). The 3DS games were very limited in scope, but more importantly were plagued with performance issues, to a point of unplayability, depending on who you ask.

In 2016, Klon shuttered as well, and the newly formed RS34 acquired the rights to Illvelo, Radirgy and Karous properties and republished the titles under their label on the eShop. With the new stewardship, the games (Radirgy Swag, Illvelo Swamp) have been supremely excellent, and are well worth your time. Aside from some shenanigans caused by western publishers, things have been much smoother under RS34 and are looking great with Radirgy 2 just around the corner in December (just got delayed to March).

This brings me to the reason I wrote this post. Emulation has come a long way, particularly on 3DS, and popping these games into Citra has proved to be a great experience. They don’t hold a candle to either the mainline MileStone or RS34 titles, but they are fun idle games with good sountracks, worth a credit or two. An additional technical note: ’new’ 3DS’ have the ability to be overclocked, so I tested that feature with these games, to see if OG hardware could run them at better framerates with some tweaking: the answer is no, play them in Citra. Preservation is often touted as the main selling point for emulation (for good reason), followed up by game enhancement (upscaled textures, better anti-aliasing, higher resolution internal rendering); both of these are cool, but until running into these titles I hadn’t thought about emulation’s ability to take busted games and make them fun.

Note: This post is an archive from my original cohost post on it https://cohost.org/superfunc/post/3035380-shmup-history-time-a