RayForce

About RayForce

RayForce (1994) is Taito's vertical shoot 'em up with a lock-on laser that hits up to eight enemies on a lower plane, made by a team told it was not allowed to make shooters, and later released as Layer Section and Galactic Attack.

RayForce in Depth

The ship, the RVA-818 X-LAY, has two weapons. Its main gun fires straight lasers that grow stronger with power-ups, while a lock-on laser launcher, also upgradable, targets up to eight enemies at once with a reticle, hitting enemies on a lower plane than the ship that the main gun cannot reach. Unlike most shooters of the time, there are no screen-clearing bombs, a deliberate return to older designs.

In the distant future, a supercomputer called Con-Human, built to manage Earth's environment, becomes sentient and insane after a cloned human mind is linked to it. It exterminates 99.8% of humankind, makes corrupt clones of living things and turns the Earth itself into a planet-sized mobile fortress, its own body, to hunt down the survivors' space colonies. The X-LAY is one of the ships built to destroy it. At the end, the pilots destroy Con-Human and the fortress's core, and the badly damaged X-LAY drifts in space as the screen reads "Mission Complete" before the pilot's life ends.

Making RayForce

Nakamura directed it with designer Tomohisa Yamashita and Katou, drawing on Taito's Master of Weapon for its top-down view and on Konami's Gradius for an "inorganic" world, and the team's experience on Darius II made balancing easy. The Taito F3 hardware's scaling limits pushed them towards simple geometric background shapes, as in Space Harrier, Metal Black inspired the dust clouds of the second stage, and Zuntata composed the music. Shown at the 1993 JAMMA show, it was released in Japan in February 1994, and Game Machine listed it as the third most popular arcade unit in its 1 April issue. The 1995 Saturn version drew mixed reviews: Sega Saturn Magazine and Maximum found it fun but outdated, while Next Generation praised its "quality development" and lack of slowdown and GamePro its "gorgeous" backgrounds. EGM ranked the Saturn version the 86th best console game in 1997. A planned sprite-based sequel, R-Gear, became the 3D RayStorm, and the prequel RayCrisis followed in 1998.