Fantastic if you're into scrolling shooters like me. If you're not familiar with this genre though, this won't convert.
Which brings me to my next point, as a soft and pasty modern gamer of today's age- the punishing difficulty of this game will send you and me running to our mommies. To play through any one of the three versions of Raiden in this collection with the standard three continues on normal dificulty is pretty much impossible. To complete a game like this legitimately would take many, many days of practice of the sort that a discliplined zen master would be familiar with.
Having said that, that's kind of what shooters are about- overcoming frenzied madness and dodging thousands of oncoming dots with your intergalactic star destroyer. I grew up on games like this as a little kid with shooters on the Sega MasterSystem and Genesis- games like Gradius and R-Type. Wicked games, and so particularly odd and Japanese within their very distinctive genre.
In short, if you don't appreciate the character and frenzied madness of this dying category of games- this game won't win you over because of its basic nature. If you're like me though, you'll kind of love it because of it's basic nature!