In the last month, I’ve bought Guardian Heroes and Radiant Silvergun, two hard-to-find Sega Saturn games that were recently re-released on Xbox Live Arcade. Then again, given that Saturn games are notoriously hard to emulate, I think that everything in the catalog would technically qualify as “hard-to-find”, unless you’re willing to part with a lot of money on eBay. One of my brother’s old friends bought his Saturn over to our house one day., but I don’t remember what games he brought over. I don’t even think we actually got to play them…we just watched.

I probably don’t have a chance in hell of beating Radiant Silvergun, even after setting the difficulty way down and the lives counter way up. The main reason I’ve even heard of this game was because I played Ikaruga, its spiritual successor, on Gamecube. I don’t know which is supposed to be harder, but I think I actually came close to beating Ikaruga one time.

Guardian Heroes looks like a lot of fun. I think that one was six players or something when it first came out. Unlike RS, this one actually came out in the United States. Of course, me never owning a Saturn and my one Saturn-owning friend being more into sports and fighting games than beat-em-ups or RPGs (and Blockbuster not renting out Saturn titles to go with its PlayStation and Nintendo 64 stuff), I never got a chance to play it until now. I’d say it shares a lot of similarities with Castle Crashers, but since this game technically came first, the comparison sounds rather silly.