Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

quence that compresses in a few notes the es-
sence of life. Waiting for tomorrow, for the end
of school year, for the reply from your lover, for
a better occasion, for a happy event.
Waiting for time to crunch away the days of
our lives, focusing on what tomorrow may give
us, while today is spent contemplating trivial
matters.
On Standby.
Then, after entering a whole alien world
and its majestic symphony, the pilgrimage be-
gins.
Rayforce, as I have written so many times
across the chaotic ocean of the internet, is a
simple but elegant game. It’s basically Xevious
on steroids; you have to lock-on to enemies
on the plane below yours and shoot them with
lasers, while using the main gun for the enemies
on the same plane as you. The more enemies
you can destroy with one row of lasers (up to
eight), the more points you get. Basically, the
value is:
Value of enemy*2^n-1 (for 1 ≤ n ≤ 6),
value of enemy*2^n (for n = 7,8)
With n being the number of enemies
116 The Gamer’s Quarter Issue #3
locked-on and destroyed with a single volley of
lasers. It’s easy to figure out that yes, the game
is pretty simple and all you have to do most of
the time is learn how to get eight lock-ons at
once. Power-ups and peculiar techniques to de-
stroy bosses complete the score-based aspects.
But I’m omitting some important par-
ticulars: first and foremost, the entire game
is based on the ability for the F3 hardware to
easily handle scaling effects. This means that all
objects that are located below you can actually
move up to your plane. As if this wasn’t cool
enough, the plot is perfectly integrated with this
simple design trick. What you must do is pene-
trate the Earth’s defenses and enter the planet’s
core in order to make your enemy implode.
Wait, who is fighting whom?
Let’s go to 2003. Actually, Raycrisis was
published in 1998, but I only bought it in 2003.
I had – for years – the OST and, like the other
two OSTs, I can spend entire days listening to it.
Raycrisis is somewhat disappointing gameplay-
wise, but this is another issue. This jump into
the future is to explain Rayforce’s past.
The plot is simple. In a distant future, the
Con-human, a vast artificial network, is created
to easily handle all of the data floating around
cyber-space. The problem about the birth of
Con-human is its awareness, and it begins en-
croaching all of the man-made objects in space
and remapping them as part of its cognitive
system – its body.
In Rayforce, the last survivors of human-
kind live in a base on the dark side of the moon,
because the Con-human was successful in ab-
sorbing the whole planet as its body, and started
exterminating human beings or enslaving them
and cloning individuals for feeding purposes
– human psychic energy being the best for the
Con-human’s purposes. The project Meteorite
is then launched: an attack to the core of the
planet, to the glandula pinealis of Con-human
– the centre of the now hollow Earth.
Since you have to penetrate the Earth’s
core, all of the stages are designed in such a
way to tell this story – First you penetrate the