![]() ![]() Let go of the button and you’ll unleash a torrent of homing missiles, which can take down several foes at once if it’s timed right. ![]() Anything that flies into it, regardless of their elevation, will be targeted. This system is called NALS – No blind spot All range Laser System. Soukyuugurentai removes this disconnect completely by giving you a huge targeting grid, enabled by holding down the fire button. Games like Xevious and TwinBee – and Raystorm, for that matter – divided enemies into “air based” and “ground based” – air based enemies should be shot with your regular weapon, while ground based enemies needed to be bombed using some kind of small targeting cursor. There have been all kinds of visual tricks, including multi-layered scrolling, to try to emulate the feeling of flying through the sky, but from a gameplay standpoint, it’s always been a bit limited. In vertical shooters, it’s always felt like you’re floating on top of the scenery rather than soaring above it. Soukyuugurentai is largely amazing because it gives a tremendous sense of depth and scale to what is basically a 2D game. The name means “Blue Sky Crimson Lotus Squadron” or something like that, although its English title used in the rare Western release is simply known as Terra Diver. It’s published for home platforms only in Japan by Electronic Arts, of all people. The spiritual successor, Eighting / Raizing’s Soukyuugurentai, sticks mostly to sprites and carries on that legacy. Of course, Rayforce‘s successive games, the two Raystorms, completely changed gears and went 3D, using polygons instead. ![]() It was all done with sprite scaling and other kinds of clever graphical manipulation – stuff that looks a bit cheesy now, but was damn impressive back when Mode 7 was a selling point. There were floating platforms, held together by some kind of structure, and if you destroyed them all, they’d plummet helplessly into the sea below. One of the coolest moments of Taito’s Rayforce (hilariously also known as Layer Section, also known as Galactic Attack, also known as Gunlock) was when your ship began its descent from outer space, dove into the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet, and began fighting bad guys above the ground. ![]()
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