January 26, 2009 -Although the title is Ultimate Shooting Collection, it really should have been Dreamcast Shooting Collection as all three games were originally on the venerable Sega Dreamcast. Contrary to popular belief, there are still games being made for the Sega Dreamcast, per my review of Wind and Water Puzzle Battles, which was released at the tail end of 2008. In fact, all three games were released after Sega stopped officially supported the Dreamcast, but that didn’t stop either developers or gamers from continuing to shot it love. Here’s a quick history of each game before we begin the actual review.

Chaos Field was originally released for the Dreamcast in December 2004, variants of the game were ported to the Playstation 2and Game Cube. This game is basically nothing but Ikaruga boss battles but instead of black vs. white bullet absorption there are two fields: Chaos and Order.

Radio Allergy, which was released in early 2005, is also known and most often referred to as Radirgy This too was ported to the Gamecube and PS2, each with their own exclusive gameplay move. Radirgy has a Jet Set Radio feel to it in terms of graphics and music. This was released in early 2006 and considered the most popular of the three shooters in this collection.

Karous is my personal favorite of these games (Probably due to the fact I have played it so often I can beat it without losing a life.) Karous (Which is meant to be “Karasu, which is Raven In Japanese) was released in 2007. 2007 was an amazing year for the Dreamcast as it gave us Trigger Heart Excella and Last Hope in addition to this fun little shooter. Until WWPB, Karous was considered the last Dreamcast game.

So now we have all three for a price of $29.99, and two of these games have never seen English language releases. How do these titles stack up despite originally being released on a system nearly two generations old?

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Three shooters for thirty dollars. This is a great deal, especially when you realize each of these games were between thirty and fifty bucks when they were first released. Kudos to UFO Interactive for localizing Karous and Radirgy. I remember how excited I was when Radirgy was announced for US release, but then it was cancelled at the last second due to Nintendo politics regarding smaller publishers for the Cube. It’s a long annoying dramatic story and I’ll spare you the details, but I can’t tell you how happy I am to see some of the last Dreamcast games make their way stateside. Finally US shooter fans can experience some of Milestone’s best games and really test their mettle as a gamer. Maybe someday we’ll see Last Hope and Dux get the same treatment.

Big thumbs up to UFO for giving us this compilation and a nice tribute to both Milestone and Sega.

Miscellaneous Rating: Good