Genre: Variable Bullet Hell 2D Shooter
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
Developed by: Kenta Cho
Download Here

The Scoop: rRootage is the absolute best kind of free game. It isn’t great “for a game made by one guy,” or great “for a game released for free.” It’s great, period. No qualifiers necessary. I own dozens of $10 downloadable titles on my Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii, and rRootage contains more value than nearly all of them.

Like Warning Forever, rRootage is a 2D shooter consisting of nothing but a series of boss encounters. No scrolling stages, or enemy waves. Just your ship, lots and lots of insane bullet patterns to dodge, and a boss at the top of the screen to destroy.

What I love most about rRootage is that it has four modes of play, each one copying a different popular shooter franchise. Ika mode imitates Ikaruga. Enemies will fire white or black bullets, and you can swap the color of your ship to absorb either one type of the other. Psy mode imitates Psyvariar, which allows you to deal more damage when “grazing” as close as possible to enemy bullets. GW mode apes Gigawing, in that you can charge-up and unleash a temporary shield that reflect bullets back at the boss. Lastly, Normal mode doesn’t imp any specific game – your Special just clears bullets from the screen, giving you some breathing room.

What sets rRootage apart from other free shooters, and earns its position as a TFG Signature Selection, is that each of these four modes contains 50 stages. For a grand total of 200 unique levels to make your way through. Each one with their own unique bullet patterns.

With so many stages, the increase in challenge is very gradual. You can select any stage at any time. If you were to hop into a late-game level right from the start, you would likely be annihilated. But by starting at the beginning and working your way up, it becomes very satisfying to see each mode’s stages get checked off one by one. Each stage is only the smallest amount more difficult than the one that preceded it, so it’s motivating to know that if you cleared that, you can clear this new challenge too, with a little practice.

Kenta Cho has other brilliant 2D shooters that we’ll eventually profile, but I advise you to not rush through rRootage to get to them. The game’s bullet patterns are subtle and clever in ways they might not initially appear to be. What initially seems like an incoherent and impossible mess of bullets is always an actual, discernible pattern that quick-thinking and observant gamers can conquer. Satisfying.
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Links:
OSX Fan Port
ABA Games Wikipedia Entry
Free iPhone Port
Gameplay Video
TIGdb Entry

Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Tailspin-esque Game
Platform: Browser (Primarily Flash)
Developed by: Team Skyrates
Play Now!

The Scoop: Skyrates is an air pirate-themed realtime MMOG. The basic hook in this and other similar titles is that doing much of anything takes a long, long time. In Skyrates after you’ve signed up for your account and ran through basic training, you’re turned loose in the world to earn your fortune by trading, hunting down air pirates, or completing missions. But flying from your starting island to its neighbor to make your first trade takes about 90 real world minutes.

In the beginning, when you’re most excited about the game, this realtime pacing can be frustrating. There simply won’t be anything for you to do more often than once an hour (if that). But eventually, the idea is that gamers will be able to fall into a routine of what the Skyrates Team refers to as “sporadic play.” Skyrates isn’t something you can sit and spend 30 straight minutes with, but it is something you can check on several times throughout the day, to see how your little air captain is progressing.

The team has built in various mechanics that help facilitate this “twice daily” play style. You can queue up elaborate action lists for your pirate, like telling him to travel to Island A and buy 100 Ore, then travel to Island B and sell the Ore, then buy 100 Grog and then sell that and island C, etc. As you progress you gain the ability to lengthen your queue. I’ve been playing for about a month now, and can queue up a full 24 hours’ worth of actions. The next time I log in, I’m present with a log of everything that transpired, while I was away.

The main difference between Skyrates and it’s other realtime MMO peers is that Skyrates runs off of a flash client, and isn’t just in-browser text-based. In most titles when you go to battle you’ll get a text readout of what transpired (example: “Your armada defeated player B’s and sustained X% damage”) – the game is just crunching various combat and economic formulas.

But in Skyrates, combat and trading is handled like a real game. In combat you control your plane’s movement and speed with the arrow keys, and can perform maneuvers such as barrel rolls and loops with the numpad.

The game itself is very addicting, and has multiple reward loops running to keep you coming back for more. As you earn money via trading profits or pirate bounties, you’ll be able to trade in your old plane for one that’s faster, has a greater range/top speed, more cargo space, and other improvements. As a trader, I spend a lot of time salivating over that next big upgrade to the size of my cargo hold.

Additionally, you can upgrade your pirates skills by spending his or her accumulated Flight, Trade, and Combat points. Like plane purchases, you’re never far away from having enough points to boost your max flight range, or your gun accuracy in combat.

My addiction is probably also fueled by the fact that I adore the setting. Any game with floating islands and air buccaneers more-or-less automatically earns a place high on my “games to watch” list. Less compelling was the decision to make all the races humanoid animals. I picked the walrus-looking fellow you can see above, but most of the races came off as very furry-esque – an observation that hit close to home when I wandered into the Skyrates Roleplay chatroom one evening (no joke).

My addiction to games of this type normally follows a pretty predictable arc – I become addicted and check in on my progress several times daily, until I’m forced to spend some time offline by work/vacation/whatever. When I get back, I never resume playing and can’t recall why I found the experience so compelling in the first place. Will Skyrates be the game to break this cycle? Who can say. All I know is that for now, I’m happily heading towards sky-island Tortuga to load up on crates of diamonds – they’re being sold at a great price.
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Links:
Wikia Wiki
JayIsGames Write-Up
Developer Postmortem
Rock, Paper, Shotgun Write-Up

Genre: Platformer
Platform: Windows
Developed by: Nifflas (Nicklas Nygren)
Download Here

The Scoop: Within a Deep Forest is the first major indie game release from Nifflas. He was an unknown at the time of the game’s release, but has since built up a monstrous (in a good way) reputation for himself, thanks to a string of beautiful, atmospheric indie game hits. We’ll eventually get around to covering those titles, but felt it was appropriate to start here.

The gameplay is simple, but that simplicity hides within it an incredible amount of complex platforming and puzzle-solving. Gamers play as a perpetually bouncing ball. Holding down the A button will make you bounce higher and more violently, while holding S will give your bounces less… bounce. Don’t be fooled by this simple control setup and your cute, 16-bit style blue ball, however. The game very rapidly becomes an ever-escalating gauntlet of ball-bouncing platforming precision.

The platforming is brilliant in its simplistic difficulty. Most of the time, all you need to do is bounce from one platform to another. But it’s never as easy as that. With too much upward momentum, you might bounce off a ceiling, missing your jump. But if you overcompensate the next time with a lower, more horizontal jump, you might bounce right off the far side of the platform you need to reach. The platforming action is pure. It’s skill-based – there are no enemies, time limits, or other gimmickry to get in your way.

It’s also maddeningly difficult.

I think Nifflas knew he was making a very very challenging experience, and compensated with the soothing, atmospheric music and visuals that have since become the trademark of all his titles. After I died for the 12th time on a particularly devilish section filled with wind-fans intended to blow me off course, I asked myself “Why do I keep persisting? What is it about Within a Deep Forest that makes me continue attempting to bounce a silly ball through these environments, when I would have given up on most any other game?”

The answer lies with the environments themselves. Indiegames.com described the game’s environments as “…lush, moody worlds that deceive the player about their size through layers of mystery and detail… drenched in twilight, the horizons frayed with purple. Small pixel creatures lend hints of life and detail to the game’s massive rooms.” This is remarkably more accurate (and poetic) language than I myself could have come up with.

Compounding the soothing beauty of the environment is the game’s non-linear structure – a structure and encourages (and indeed, requires) exploration. As the game progresses, you’ll gain access to new colors of bouncing balls. Each with their own specific characteristics, which allow them to access new heights (or depths) of the game’s hub, and thus new worlds to spin off into and explore.

The entire experience is sublime; it’s the kind of game that simply can’t exist in today’s retail environment. In fact, I’m not sure it ever could.
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Links:
JayIsGames Review
Youtube Clip
Creator Interview
Wikipedia Entry