M2 Is Bringing Armed Police Batrider Back, and One of Arcade Gaming's Toughest Shooters Is Getting a Second Chance

Japanese preservation specialist M2 announces a new ShotTriggers edition of Raizing's 1998 vertical arcade shooter Armed Police Batrider featuring M2 Gadgets and Super Easy mode.

Japanese developer M2 has officially announced a new release of Armed Police Batrider, the extraordinarily demanding vertical shooter originally developed by Raizing and released in arcades in 1998. The announcement came during M2's October 10 ShotTriggers tenth-anniversary presentation, although platforms, pricing and a release date remain unconfirmed. Batrider occupies a special place in arcade history because its mechanics are considerably more complicated than the average exercise in dodging brightly coloured projectiles. Players assemble a team of three aircraft selected from eighteen available machines, including guest characters from earlier Raizing games. Each aircraft offers different weapons and movement characteristics, while the game's dynamic difficulty system adjusts the challenge according to player behaviour. M2's new edition will include the original arcade experience alongside additional features designed to make its complicated systems easier to understand. The company's established M2 Gadgets interface will display information about scoring, hidden encounters and other mechanics that the original game largely concealed from players. A Super Easy mode is also planned, with individually adjusted enemy attacks rather than a simple reduction in bullet counts. That distinction is important because Batrider's challenge involves much more than the number of projectiles on screen. The game previously appeared on Sega's Astro City Mini V, but this new edition represents a separate preservation project. M2 has built an impressive reputation for treating classic shooters with unusual technical care, so Batrider is in experienced hands. Whether those hands can make the game less inclined to murder beginners remains to be seen.