One of the earliest standouts in the iPhone’s shooter catalog was a port of rRootage, a challenging and varied effort from indie developer Kenta Cho. Though the initial iPhone port lacked sound and suffered from sluggish performance, it was an impressive achievement in its time.
At some point, rRootage disappeared from the App Store, though ports of Cho’s Tumiki Fighters and Noiz2sa remained available for purchase. This weekend, rRootage returned to the App Store as rRootage Online (Free) an all-new port that boasts improved gameplay performance, music and sound effects, and online leaderboards.
rRootage is a stage-based vertical shooter that pits players against a series of challenging bosses, each of which wields a number of attacks and difficult bullet patterns. Each stage can be played in one of four gameplay modes, three of which are inspired by genre classics –
- Standard mode, in which players are armed with a laser cannon and a limited supply of screen-clearing bombs.
- IKA (Ikaruga) mode, in which enemies spew out bullets in two different colors. The player’s ship can switch between these colors at any time — players can absorb same-colored bullets to charge up a powerful counterattack, while opposite-colored bullets are deadly.
- PSY (Psyvariar) mode, which rewards players for scraping the ship against nearby bullets without colliding with them. Graze enough bullets and you’ll be rewarded with temporary invincibility.
- GW (Giga Wing) mode, in which players can engage a reflector shield to gather and reflect nearby bullets. The shield can be used an unlimited number of times, but it needs to be recharged in between uses.
rRootage offers much more variety than the typical App Store shoot-’em-up, and like the PC original, it’s available as a free download. Shooter fans should definitely check this one out.
Tags: Free Games, kenta cho, rrootage, shooter
Another one of Kenta Cho’s marvelous independently developed shooters has made its way to the iPhone. Tumiki Fighters ($0.99) joins Cho’s previous games rRootage and Noiz2sa in the iTunes App Store.
Tumiki Fighters is an imaginitive horizontally scrolling shooter in which defeated enemies can be attached to your ship to increase your firepower. A few minutes into the game, you’ll find your once-tiny ship transformed into a screen-filling Death Katamari. It’s awesome.
While attaching dozens of downed enemies to your craft gives you enough firepower to take out pretty much anything that gets in your way, it also makes you a bigger target. Players can retract all attached ships at any point during gameplay, however, adding a degree of strategy.
Tumiki Fighters is one of Cho’s most popular shooters — it saw an upgraded Wii port last year (under the title Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy), and remains a fun and worthwhile play for any fan of shoot’em-ups. The original (and free!) PC version is available at Cho’s website, if you’d like to give it a shot before dropping 99 cents on the iPhone version.
Tags: dreamwave, indie, kenta cho, shooter, tumiki fighters
Fans of the “bullet hell” approach to shoot-em-ups hold designer Kenta Cho in high regard. Cho has crafted some of the best freeware PC shoot-em-ups in recent memory, including Tumiki Fighters, Parsec47, and rRootage (which saw an excellent free-to-play iPhone port last year).
Today, homebrew developer ZodTTD brings a port of Kenta Cho’s Noiz2sa ($0.99) to the iTunes App Store. Originally released in 2002 (as the first shooter to be released under Cho’s ABA Games label), Noiz2sa is a challenging vertically scrolling shooter with abstract backdrops and enemy characters. The simple, geometric character models allow players to better focus on the thousands of enemy bullets that must be dodged.
The iPhone port of rRootage turned out much better than I would have expected, thanks to its precise, touch-based control scheme. If Noiz2sa can live up to the same standard of quality, it could easily rank among the platform’s best shooters to date.
Tags: bullet hell, kenta cho, noiz2sa, rrootage, shoot-em-up, shooter
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One of the earliest standouts in the iPhone’s shooter catalog was a port of rRootage, a challenging and varied effort from indie developer Kenta Cho. Though the initial iPhone port lacked sound and suffered from sluggish performance, it was an impressive achievement in its time.
