Ray’z Arcade Chronology

良くも悪くもアーケードベタ移植です。ゲームの完成度自体は素晴らしいです。 ただ、この値段なら家庭用の追加要素を入れるだとかXbox360でリリースされていたレイストームHDも収録してほしかった。

HDとはいったい？　と思うほどドットの粗さがそのまんま。文字やエフェクトはかなり酷い。 それと合わせて敵の弾が見にくい。弾幕が多くなると処理落ちの様なスローがかかる、現行マシンならあり得ないし避け易くするための意図的な物なら演出を工夫しなさいよ。 そんな映像がウィンドウモードでも画面いっぱいに表示される。起動オプションも反応せず、毎回マウスでサイズ調整するのが非常にうっとうしい。 これって90年代の初代プレステの基準で画質や演出が突出していて大人気になった物なので、今の世代では普通のレトロゲームでしかない。 それなのに画質や遊びやすさに大した調整が無いのは致命的。特にレイクライシスの面倒なシステムは最初から隠し要素解放とかするべきだろう。これでは当時のオリジナルも別で収録してる意味が無い。 参考として、過去にプレステ3で出したレイストームHDがしっかりフルHD画質で追加機体もあり、とても満足の内容だった。 この辺りを踏まえると、付加価値が無さすぎる。はっきり言ってぼったくり。

[b]TAITO > CAVE[/b]

プレイシティキャロット某店に入り浸っていた20代の頃、 大好きなゲームは、THE OUTFOXIESと、BOSEのスピーカーシステムが組み込まれたこのRAYFORCEだった。 あれから数十年、自分の人生を金に換える期間を経て、無駄金を使っても気にならない年になってこのゲームに再開できた。 あの頃記憶していたスコア稼ぎのためのロックオンの順番などはもう忘れてしまっていたが、 プレイしている瞬間はあの当時の自分に戻れた気がする。 アケコン、買おうかな

Even if you suck at the game, the amount of explosions and perspective use in this game is just amazing. The lock on system is an interesting gimmick as well, but it is a really good fun just watching everything blow up and stuff.

This is currently the best M2 port you can get on Steam, hands down. While it's lacking in the bonus stuff you'd see in one of their newer console ports, like their godlike DaiOuJou port, its extremely accurate and has all the modern QoL bells and whistles. As for the games themselves, well, Rayforce is undoubtedly a masterpiece and its worth it for that alone, and I'd argue it's the best game Taito has ever made. If you have any interest in shmups its definitely worth a shot. The other two additions are just a bonus. This port is undoubtedly the definitive way to play these games, and I doubt that's gunna change any time soon, if ever.

レイストームを今どきのPCで遊びたい人にとてもよいものですが、いつのまにか１面のボス前でしばらく固まって、そのまま復帰できず必ず落ちる現象に遭遇していました。再インストールして、セーブデータをすべて削除して、クラウド同期をしない設定にしたら落ちなくなりました。レイストームを今どきのPCで遊びたい人にとてもよいものです。

At the time of this review, I played 10 hours, mostly Rayforce, and it's addicting. To me as quite a newcomer to Shmups this feels a lot like a racing sim where you can spend hours in order to learn a track, find the right breaking points, where to accelerate and so on. Rayforce is roughly 40 minutes long but to master it you might want to replay it over and over and improve your strategy. The game is super responsive (make sure to turn V-sync off) and offers a quick save and quick load system to practice difficult areas - and there are a lot of them. Once you finally managed to clear the game with just one credit, i.e. 3 lives, the endgame starts: score high. To use the racing sim analogy again, the enjoyment lies in the road to perfection, finding your own strategy, learning the patterns and improving your knowledge and skill. There are no unlockables, no exp, no gear, just you and your fingers VS the game! Tip for beginners: start playing with the keyboard or the D-pad, there's just the four directions and diagonal movement without anything in between, plus you might want to quickly tap the directional buttons quite often which is easier with digital inputs in camparison to anaologue ones.

i got this mainly for RayStorm since that game is the most memorable for me, the other 2 games are incredible and i definitely did enjoyed my time playing those. While the collection is fine, i wish it included the ps3 version of Raystorm HD since it looks way better instead of this "neo-HD", the 360 version would've been fine too, aside from that, you should get this when its on sale.

The Rayforce series is a state of the art for its time both artistically and gameplay-wise, and does a lot of things better than shmups do today. The way the first Rayforce convinces you the entire adventure is in one contiguous world is spectacular in a way that almost no other game in the shmup genre pulls off as fluently, Eschatos is the only other example that comes to mind. There is a level of "show, don't tell" storytelling in the first game that you never get to see in most action games, and all three of the games have absolutely astounding music and level design. Taito uses the lock-on mechanic to great effect, not only as a way to keep the pace of each stage, but to create an intelligent scoring system, predict the player's movements to telegraph attacks to them more naturally, and signal who is enemy and who is foe (see: Rayforce Area 2) without needing to outright tell you. The weapons feel powerful and rewarding, and yet the games still remind you that you are a part of a larger conflict bigger than yourself, and don't shrug off their lore even though there's little time to explain it. The scoring system and boss patterns present choices that are at odds with one another: the lock-on system rewards you better for delaying your kills to get as many locks as possible and in the correct order, and the bosses all have individually destructible parts, but faster kills make the game easier most of the time (and are often necessary to get the good ending in Raycrisis). So you have to carefully choose between survival play and score play, because the game's difficulty adjusts to your ambition, on top of each game having an automatic difficulty system "game rank" depending on your performance. The "port" is okay. There's no stand-out emulation bugs (these aren't ports) and it's not lazy, there's some QoL tweaks, a replay system, and a nice HUD giving you a quick rundown on the game's story that a lot of people who played the original would've missed out on. These are the arcade versions, which depending on who you ask are either the definitive versions or the most mediocre ones. This is also the first time I've seen anyone bother fixing the incessant flickering in Rayforce. If you weren't aware, Rayforce uses a temporal dithering system to get more colors and cascading shadows on hardware that didn't support it, and it only looks right over an interlaced composite signal. You can fix this on PC using a very subtle motion blur shader, and that appears to be what they're doing here with the "Burn-In Reduction" option. Not sure how LESS changes in color are supposed to prevent burn-in, but whatever. It's still not good enough because you can see some flickering on shadows on some levels but it's a lot better than the alternatives so I applaud the attempt. I still think playing the Saturn version on real hardware is the better option if you care about authenticity (nobody is buying an F3 cabinet to play this) but for someone who hasn't played Rayforce before I don't think it's a big deal. If you don't have a Saturn then this is the best version of the game. Also THANK YOU for calling it Rayforce and not one of the million other stupid names, anything other than the original arcade title is WRONG. Raystorm and Raycrisis run good too. PS1 emulation is a lot easier to get right than F3 emulation so my expectations were pretty high, and it certainly meets them. I do wish there was an HD resource pack to go with them and not just a binary "do you want hi-res mode or not", but whatever. You're getting three games for the price of one here so it's hard not to call this a steal. Turn up the frame blending in Rayforce just slightly to fix the flickering, maybe add a better fake CRT option (based on CRT Royale with composite video emulation for peak pixel smearing effect) and it's golden. [b]EDIT: I have a Sega Saturn controller and I like playing the game with the binds from the Saturn version, as god intended. At first I was confused where the control settings were at, but then I realized the pause button is a button that isn't on my controller (Select) so I've updated my review. If you're wondering where all the tweaks are at, check your Steam Input binds.[/b]