Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[freeformschooler]

I did a search for this and found no posts at all, ever, containing "rrootage". I mean, what? COME ON PEOPLE. We've had several Touhou topics.

Ah well...

rRootage is a truly cruel bullet hell game that can be explained as "bullet hell stripped to its essence". There's no characters, no fancy spellcards, no customization, no super pretty bosses. What it does have is:

-Perfectly escalating difficulty, starting from way-easy stage 1A to impossible stage 0C

-For each difficulty "tier" (1, 2, 3, all the way to 0) there is a stage at the end with an R (3R, for example) which uses, mixes and creates convincing random bullet patterns that are completely unmemorizable.

-All this above made uniquely for four different game modes:
1. Normal mode is your standard bullet hell shooter. I believe that you go slower while holding down the shoot button. You have bombs, too. However, bombs decrease what your end-of-level bonus score is, same with lives on the rest of the game modes.
2. Psy (Psyvariar?) mode, where grazing bullets builds up a meter that, when full, makes you invincible for a short period.
3. Ika (Ikaruga) mode, my favorite mode. In Ika mode, your ship is either red or white, and there's red and white bullets in every pattern. The color you are deflects bullets of the same color, but dies to bullets of a different color. X (or whatever button is your bomb button) switches you to the other color -- but it takes a moment, and during that time you are vulnerable to ALL bullets.
4. GW (Gigawing) mode. I should note that this WOULD be the hardest mode due to the sheer quantity of bullets per level. However, you have a meter that when full, allows you to deplete it near-instantly to deflect all bullets for the short timespan of approximately a Psy mode invicibility. It takes a little bit to refill. In the mean time, good luck bro, you'll need it.

-All of the above modes share a couple of features:
1. Being close to the boss makes you deal more damage. I'm pretty sure this applies to all modes but it could just be Normal Mode.
2. Enough score and you get an extra life. This is why lives are precious -- lose no lives (or bombs in Normal) during a boss and your end-of-boss score will phenomenal, usually enough to get you an extra life on top of the score you've already built up while fighting the boss. Losing any lives will make that chance extremely slim. Yes, don't lose lives so that you can have more lives.
3. There are five bosses per slot (level, like 4B), and each boss has two different sections (bullet pattern combinations): regular, and critical. The boss goes into critical bullet pattern when low on health. Critical bullet patterns are usually quite a bit harder but not always.
4. The game has some kind of built in FPS cap/issue/whatever - when there's a ridiculous amount of bullet on the screen, no matter how fast your computer is, it slows down a bit just because it's nice like that. This doesn't happen that much.

That's very close to all there is to say about the game. Even if it sounds boring I highly recommend giving it a go. One of my favorite shooters. Comes in windows, mac and linux flavors (also in a lot of Linux package repos).

What do you guys think? Anyone played it? Anyone interested in playing it?

[ein]

Love the game.
Ika is my favourite mode too.

* runs off and redownloads.

[freeformschooler]

I KNEW you would be the first one to post.

Recently I've been attempting to a playthrough of tiers 3-5 on GW mode without using reflect. Very difficult.

[breadbocks]

I've played it a bit, and the problem with it is that there's no sense of progression. You don't get stronger or weaker, no attacks require charging, there's no level build up to the boss. Nothin.

[freeformschooler]

Actually, the game encourages the "real" sense of progression of the bullet hell series -- the bosses get progressively harder per stage (and usually per boss in a stage), and your ship thing doesn't progress at all, so literally the only way to keep up is to get better at dodging bullets. The progression is on the part of the player. If you can't get better, you can't beat the next set of bosses, outside of sheer luck.

[breadbocks]

That's the thing; It doesn't feel like progression. It feels like you're just working your way through a long line of bosses.

[freeformschooler]

I get that feeling when playing through each stage (5 bosses is a bit much) but can clearly tell that things are getting harder from level to level.

But that may be because I'm a pansy.