Taito is one of the most historically significant companies in gaming history, and that is almost entirely due to Space Invaders. The 1978 pioneer of shoot-em-ups kicked off a genuine worldwide craze, and Taito watched their coffers fill with cash hand over fist. Plenty of great games followed, but none would have the impact or financial success of Space Invaders. Taito helped create the arcade scene with that game's focus on achieving high scores. Sadly, the company never quite got the swing of making home games, and their relevance diminished right alongside the arcades they helped to build in the first place. They weren't even able to hold onto their crown in the shoot-em-up genre for very long, but to their credit, they kept right on swinging anyway.
RayCrisis [$9.99], the final installment in their Ray series of shooters, was one of their last arcade hurrahs. Released in 1998, it serves as a prequel to the stories of the first two games. You play as a hacker who makes a last ditch effort to get into the systems of a rogue AI and shut it down before it can cause even more damage than it already has. Your hacking takes the form of a space fighter, of course, and the AI's antibodies look very much like the sorts of aliens you blast at in a lot of other games of this sort. Well, it was the late 90s. We were all very concerned with jacking into cyberspace and all that stuff. The stages reflect the AI's present state of consciousness, but they too take on familiar forms: a ...