Please add New York City 2001 as the new map for Season 11

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.

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.