rRootage: The Definitive Review
自動作成された巨大戦艦を撃破する
1Of all the videogame genres, none is more tied directly to the medium’s absolute roots than the STG, the Shmup. I’m not talking about the lineage back to Spacewar!, but more its lesser-acknowledged genealogical parent in Pong. If you correctly connect the dots and read enough Tomohiro Nishikado interviews, you’ll see that Space Invaders has much more in common with Breakout than you might assume. Breakout is self-evidently an expansion of Pong and Nishikado himself testifies that Breakout was the basis for Space Invaders’ fundamentals. The parity is pretty obvious - static blocks become advancing aliens, the bat becomes a gun, the ball now a rigid, vertical shot. And of course, Space Invaders founded the entire Shmup genre. Thus we can thread genre pinnacles such as Ikaruga2 or DoDonPachi into that eternal golden braid3 stretching all the way back to 1958’s Tennis for Two. In this sense, the Shmup is part of almost a prime archetype for all videogames, sitting alongside the racing simulation, the adventure and the adversarial combat title4 as the four great gaming archaea that can place their births in the 1970s, in that very first flush of popular videogaming. They are the genres that can now claim a half-century of existence5.
One thing that seems distinct in the Shmup genre is its propensity for amateur releases. For some reason, and despite the absence of genre-enabling tools like RPG Maker, the Shmup seems to inspire a healthy thread on non-professional releases. It’s impossible to ignore the remarkable quality of ZUN’s Tohou Project and, as we predictably home in on the target for this piece, it’s equally impossible to talk Doujin Soft Shmups without mentioning the legendary Kenta Cho. Easily confused with Cho Ren Sha 68K, perhaps the definitive Doujin Shmup, Kenta Cho instead set about a furious mission to create remarkably stylish and professional quality Shmups around the same time that Cho Ren Sha 68K gained its first Windows port. The early 2000s see a flood of interest in novel and hybridised Shmups thanks partly to the huge cultural impact of Ikaruga in 2001, forming a kind of renaissance for the entire genre that culminates in professional PlayStation 2 releases like R-Type Final, Gradius V and for something more keenly aligned with Treasure’s exploration of the avant-garde, Psyvariar6.
Kenta Cho’s work sits absolutely within that timetable and at the high end of quality. Noiz2sa, released in 2002, deliberately abstracts the maelstroms of Cave and Raizing pixelart into a visual style of polygonal primitives that provides a kind of hyper-cool, hyper-modern take on the barrage Shmup. And it was completely free to play. Kenta Cho’s philosophy extends to open-sourcing his best work, something which should be absolutely commended. In 2004 he releases Tumiki Fighters, his first horizontal shooter and a wildly entertaining hybrid. In this really quite excellent and lovely interview, he relays a love of Namco’s early-80s arcade titles and his admiration for the company’s continual innovation in design during that period, and innovation becomes something he greatly values in his own work. And it’s immediately obvious - Tumiki Fighters is a delightfully playful fusion of Cave’s phenomenally good Progear No Arashi and Keita Takahashi’s Katamari Damacy. And it’s brilliant fun. Progear was a direct inspiration for Kenta Cho’s other great gift beyond the game this piece is supposed to be about - BulletML. Dazzled by Cave’s innovative and newly intricate bullet patterns in Progear, Kenta Cho decided to codify a scripting language for danmaku barrages which underpins the creation of perhaps his best game, the peerless rRootage.
rRootage is, at its heart, a huge boss rush. Your task is to shoot abstracted polygonal bosses and avoid their barrages, working through a huge set of stages that starts with leisurely placid milk runs which escalate towards 2nd-loop double Hibachi affairs. Kenta Cho references Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Rez as the core inspiration for his vector-based geometric graphical style and this is clearly expressed in rRootage’s clean-and-green vector aesthetic. Your ship is a rotating cylinder of long, thin rectangular strips circling a single central pixel and the bosses are a collection of overlaid triangles and quadrilaterals that form a kind of spectral analogy for the big-metal hardware of the traditional Shmup boss. But to see this as purely a stylistic choice underestimates the thinking at work. rRootage is as much a training tool as it is a game, so that raw vector approach not only echoes the professional simulatory environments of our 1980s youths7, but purposefully reduces the visual code of the danmaku Shmup to a crystalline diagram of informational minima. In the disorienting blizzard of a dense bullet curtain, such a simplification is more than welcome, for rRootage makes it very clear where the single-pixel lethality lies in each bullet, as well as signposting that single pixel of vulnerability on your ship with the same visual clarity8. This is the real concession; visual latitude as a training aid to build that instinctual feel. The player’s predictions of where those all-important pixels may collide is utterly key to surviving the gaudy pastel shades of Cave’s most savage onslaughts, where the company’s signature aesthetic choices may offer a useful contrast between bullet and background, but still generates a kind of colour overload where those central pixels of death can be easily lost within the mass of visual snow. rRootage’s devotion to the visual parsimony of the diagrammatical will, perhaps, grant your visual cortex an overlay of sorts to decode any given danmaku storm. Kenta Cho’s BulletML allows for all manner of familiar, pre-existing bullet patterns to be issued by the bosses, but random factors apply chaos to the rigidly-defined kaleidoscopic symmetries. This makes for a procedural barrage that keeps the player in a state of adaptation rather than rote learning, another aspect of the training philosophy that makes rRootage so special. This generation of emergent bullet fields hones the visual discipline necessary for true danmaku play; namely that one focuses on the minutiae local to the player’s central pixel rather than the screen in its entirety. The only way to survive is to twitch through the dots about to hit you instead of looking forward to plot longer trajectories and end up filling your cognitive buffers to overload. The theory seems sound - visual focus in the centre of vision is precise but costly, but peripheral vision is optimised to track movement. Therefore, maintaining focus on your ship’s central pixel and letting the periphery be sorted by innate survival instinct is the optimal approach. rRootage also helpfully manages slowdown in the intermediate stages to give fledgling players a helping hand. When densities are so high that you have to graze bullet volumes to navigate, it takes a fearless hand to push through, and slowdown is most certainly welcome to build that fortitude. This game really is an exquisite learning tool, an undeniably precious crucible cast in a visual style that harmoniously serves its purpose.
I’m fairly confident that if I could tick off all of rRootage’s stages, I’d be able to take on just about any hardcore Shmup. The rRootage I first played is different to the one you can download now. The original release was a straight DoDonPachi-style arrangement but subsequent updates added three new play modes. rRootage now offers Gigawing, Psyvariar, and Ikaruga configurations, allowing players to specialise into that trio of exploitational methods for managing bullets. Gigawing’s bullet reversals, Psyvariar’s grazing mechanic, Ikaruga’s polarity-based modulations are all there to be mastered. While this demonstrates ably Kenta Cho’s deep love of the vertical Shmup, digging into the game’s files reveals further references to barrage patterns from Ketsui, Guwange, Progear and DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou. In a very precise way, rRootage captures and preserves the Shmup renaissance in a beautifully compact and accessible package. For modern players, that 21-year-old release runs perfectly on Windows 10 machines, aside being somewhat archaic in terms of graphical scaling. You’re pretty much doomed to low-res fullscreen or playing in a relatively tiny window. More recently, 2021 saw rRootage Reloaded, an updated version for the Nintendo Switch and I’ve seen a fair few (presumed) forks of rRootage in mobile form with games like Danmaku Death. But I feel it’s time to start lobbying Kenta Cho to pick rRootage back up and retool it as a historical repository. I imagine it’s a grievously large task, but could you imagine a version that contains every boss from every relevant shooter? A definitive catalogue and the ultimate training aid. Surely that’s a noble goal, even if it could contain just the Cave bosses. But then, with rRootage being open source and BulletML readily available, perhaps I should be undertaking that task myself. After all, Kenta Cho has already given us so much. If you want a real insight into his charity, consider that rRootage’s menu screen will show the boss for each stage and then it’ll start launching its barrages for you to simply observe. In that flat-poly, vector style it takes on something of the demoscene extravaganza in its flurried geometry, but you can sit and watch the waves of the latter stages in a kind of transfixed awe that the human mind is even capable of navigating through it. Traditionally, and in 2003, the only way to see those kinds of late-game bullet storms was to be skilled enough to reach them through play and yet in rRootage, Kenta Cho gives you them for free. Just like the game itself9.
[21]
I took this Japanese text straight from the readme.txt and Google translated it so don’t blame me if it’s gibberish. Feel free to correct it, though!
I will write about Ikaruga at some point, when I feel prepared enough to do it justice. When I'm around 75 years old.
Ref: Hofstadter, D. (1979)
Yeah, that’s right, I fucking said it. Atari's Combat and Capcom’s Street Fighter 2 are directly related. :o
Pinball deserves to be thought of as its own phenomenon entirely, and digitised card games don't really count. OR FRUIT MACHINES.
This is not to exclude the ongoing work of Cave or real oddities like Takumi’s Mars Matrix, but it seems churlish to argue against Ikaruga’s potency at the time, and its ability to make the Shmup seem both vital and stylish within the contemporary videogame milieu. Even if devotees like myself may overstate Ikaruga’s relevance to more populist audiences, its position as a figurehead can’t be disputed.
As mentioned in earlier pieces, children in the 1980s were regularly exposed to visuals from high-end, professional flight simulators and CAD visualisations that were dominated by vector lines and phosphor glow, seeing as all footage was captured by pointing a camera at a computer monitor. While the visuals were sparse, the stark lines nonetheless conveyed all the necessary information with considerable efficiency. The visual mode was eventually rendered utterly obsolete in 1985 by Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing video, the newly-minted Yorkshire TV ident and the intro sequence to the ITV gameshow Catchphrase. Just two years later, CGI would be revolutionised yet again by a particularly inventive advert for Smarties.
In a sense, all danmaku Shmups are about a single pixel trying to avoid single pixels, which recalls the raw simplicity of Pong's own pixel-on-pixel romance. The intentions may be inverted - Pong is about making sure the collision happens - but the simple purity, that of fate being down to single pixel collisions, remains the true mechanistic core for both Pong and the modern Shmup.
There is a lingering sense that rRootage really shouldn’t be alone in being both a training aid and a reduced-code repository for a genre’s soul. I wonder if we’ll ever get a similar tool for tile-based vertical puzzlers or 2D platformers, where the visual language is reduced down to the academic necessities and the true aesthetic beauty of the game in movement is revealed. This is a noodle I have chosen to keep out of the main text, as a massive paragraph on the innate artistic qualities of the videogame would threaten to overtake the entire piece.