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• Special Demonstrations... New
Probably the best old shmup you'll ever see.
Rayforce was an STG that was way ahead of its time when it was first released. The scoring system is so versatile and complex that it's hard to believe that this was a game released in 1994. A lot of really old shmups are extremely basic but Rayforce has more in common with newer shmups like Ketsui with it's complex scoring system that requires quite a bit of experimentation to find the best way to score in.
Since this is an old game all of the hitboxes are really huge and you don't have any smart bombs.
By picking up powerups you increase your shot and laser level. Three red items increase the power of your shot and laser items increase the number of lock-on lasers you have. Gold shot powerups give you an instant shot level. Red enemies always drop a powerup.
Enemies in this game exist in either the foreground or the background. You can lock onto enemies in the background with your homing lasers by hovering over them with your reticle.
You can lock onto a maximum of 8 enemies at max laser level and every next lock gives you a bigger score multiplier for the enemy score value. The multiplier is as follows: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x, 64x, 128x. As you can tell you want to destroy as many enemies with a level 7 and 8 lock as you can, favorably on enemies that have a high base-value.
A lock expires after like 5 seconds. This is not a lot of time for you to make chains in and most chains really come down to the wire whether you can pull the chain off in time.
Not all enemies give a score multiplier when killed. Usually only the enemies that die in a single laser hit do and big enemies that take multiple locks to kill don't. It's easy to tell anyway since things that do have numbers pop out of them.
An important trick for scoring is doing something called "empty locking". By locking onto enemies that don't give a multiplied score you can expand the first locks and kill other things with the valuable later level locks.
You won't get any points for an enemy that happens to leave the screen before your homing laser kills it during a laser release.
Shot powerups behave somewhat oddly. Their initial trajectory when they're shot out of an enemy is random but after a few seconds they will start to home in on your last known position. They leave the screen immediately so they're quite easy to miss.
Once at max shot or max laser level every powerup you pick up slowly increases in value like medals in Garegga up to a max of 10k, which is quite a significant amount. It's okay to let one drop but when you die the value resets.
Dying in this game is quite bad for score. Besides that it resets your powerup value chain you also lose a power and a laser level, essentially meaning that you lose your level 8 lock and your primary source of score until you pick up another laser item, which can take a while. You can be lucky and after a death the game will immediately spawn a laser item but whether it drops a shot or a laser powerup is completely random.
The game does have a rank system but it's nothing you can really control or should care about. When you die the rank lowers a bit for some time. Too low rank is bad for score since less enemies get spawned.
Because of Randorama's ST a lot of misinformation about this game exists in the community regarding it's mechanics and scoring strategies. Besides false facts about elementary things like the multiplier value which you can check in literally 5 seconds the guide also details secret huge boss bonuses that simply don't exist or are literally impossible to pull off like the stage 6 midboss bonus.