This port of Kenta Cho's indie PC title was among the very first shooters released on the iPhone and to kick off this section with the least interesting tidbit you are ever going to read let me say that it was the very first app I ever downloaded back in 2008 and it is still among a very elusive list of shooters that I keep installed on my iPhone and that I still occasionally boot up.

rRootage is best described as a training tool that still manages to be heaps of fun. Where other shooters (excluding Darius Alpha) challenge players to make their way through long stages to finally be pitted against a highly perilous boss, here you get to take a shortcut right to the big guys. There are 160 stages consisting of nothing but boss battles and if that doesn't already sound like enough content to keep you going until retirement, the fact that each stage consists of five bosses with two pretty independent phases each should.

Furthermore, the stages are split up into four different modes with clear inspirations from other games. The standard mode allows the use of mundane bombs that erase any bullets within a circle-shaped blast for a few moments. Psy mode borrows Psyvariar's scraping mechanics so letting shots pass through your ship without hitting your hitbox fills up a meter that once full emits a protective shield around you. Instead of a bomb you can trigger a spin move that makes the meter fill up faster. Later levels in this mode allow near infinite use of the shield by precisely timing the launch of the shield and by precisely steering into a dense heap of bullets in time, which is a lot of fun as you effectively become invincible. Ika mode offers a simple take on Ikaruga's black (red) and white (blue) color changing system. Enemy projectiles come in both colors and you can absorb them as you change your ships color accordingly, automatically returning them to the boss. GW mode is inspired by Gigawing by equipping you with a recharging shield that bounces back enemy projectiles similar to Ika mode. There is a whole lot variety to it and you can always choose freely which mode and which level you want to tackle, so if any mode ever gets you bored or a stage proves to be too hard, simply pick another one.

Bosses begin to flood the screen with bullets early on and it only gets crazier as you go. So fortunately the game plays like a dream thanks to spot-on controls. They are so tight, it's hard to believe rRootage is such an early iOS game and so few shooters managed to replicate it ever since. They will definitely have you spoiled once you try them and they might even convince that friend/relative/acquaintance of yours who keeps nagging at how shooters can never work without an arcade stick, let alone on a touchscreen. Lazrhog Games didn't go for the approach of having your ship move straight to your finger's position, instead it merely mimics your every movement. Hence you can keep your finger slightly below the ship, knowing that next to all hazards come from either above or from the side, and not obscuring your view on the craft. The bright red hitbox indicator also goes a long way of easing your attempts at weaving through the bullet curtains. Tapping the screen with a second finger anywhere triggers that mode's special. It's no easy game by any means, but you can never blame the controls.

The game has an extremely simplistic look with a bland and repetetively animated grid serving as the background, changing color depending on the play mode. Enemy projectiles and enemies are made up of simple geometrical shapes lacking textures and your ship, well, it looks like an X-ray scan of a cylinder shaped creature emitting a constant green ray of destruction. Still, it manages to look unoffensive thanks to being coherent and somewhat fitting to the whole "it's not meant as a complete shooter experience" design. The constant array of bullets and nice touches like the glow emitted by bosses at certain times or the whole screen shaking after destroying a boss help make it quite nice on the eye. So we can expect the sound to be accordingly minimalistic and fitting? How do I put this now? It certainly IS minimalistic, though up to the point of simply being nonexistent. There is no music and no sound whatsoever, which can be relegated by listening to your own music in the background.

rRootage lacks an exit function during stages, so if you ever decide to start over or choose a different stage you will either have to lose all your lives or leave the ap and start it again. Battles usually take a long time, especially considering you always have to beat five bosses to end a stage, thus making progress, so this can become quite a nuisance when starting a level over and over again because you keep losing precious lives too early on. Also, bullet patterns start to look and feel all to familiar after a while, making continuous plays a chore. It lends itself way better to short gaming sessions. Still, this has been a free app right from its initial release, so there is hardly anything that should keep you from downloading it. Except maybe for the biggest downer of all: It has been taken off the App Store in fall 2010.

And this is the reason for it. When fraglab.at released their take on an rRootage port, lazrhog games was so impressed with the result, they decided to take down their supposedly inferior version right away.

Besides replacing the old, simplistic icon showing a blocky spaceship with some unrelated manga chick that would feel right at home in Otomedius (*shudders*) all changes indeed are for the better. The standard version offers all 160 levels and is still available for free, being financed wholly through an unoffensive ad showing only on the highscore lists.This time around there are online highscore lists and they use both Gamecenter and OpenFeint for the extra incentive of replaying stages. Achievements have been added as well, also for both tracking systems.

The graphics received a minor overhaul, looking a bit crisper than before and there even is an additional ad-free version available called rRootage Online HD, obviously boasting optional HD visuals optimized for the iPhone 4's retina display, which is a real treat for the eyes. Sound effects and music have also finally been added, although they don't do all that much to improve the experience due to their uninspired nature. At least the music is appropriately frantic. And then there is the menu button on the pause screen, finally offering an easier way of beginning a stage anew.

The final and possibly biggest change however has been made to the game's speed which has been increased quite a bit. On one hand it makes for a more intense experience and it helps keep boredom during easier sections at a minimum, but it also makes an already difficult game even more difficult, so in the end it's a personal choice you can't take for yourself anymore if you haven't already downloaded the original. No matter which version you are able to have access to, though, any version is well worth getting for some quick boss fight madness.

To put it bluntly, PicoPicoFighters is a tremendous achievement for a single man to be behind its development and it all the whining aside, Japanese developers most definitely are still able to create a highly enjoyable game.

To put it bluntly once more, there isn't a whole lot to say about PicoPicoFighters. It doesn't rely on any gimmicky gameplay twist and scoring only depends on shooting as many enemies as possible and retaining as many lifes as possible after completion of a stage for a nice bonus. It's this basic gameplay in combination with a highly stilized retro-esque presentation, a variety in level design found in few high-profile shooters, a meager size of 1.3 MB (!) and the low price of nothing point zero that make it an essential download for any owner of an i-device with even the slightest interest in shooters (and at least a certain degree of skill at them).

Music is basically nonexistant as to be expected from the small size of the game and sound effects are bleeps seemingly lifted straight from old DOS title xyz. Visuals are extremely pixelated, though clearly thoughtful designed, since you can still tell different things apart and especially the background varies greatly. The graphics manage to leave room for imagination, while not becoming an indistinguishable mess and seeing forests, streams of lava, space stations and such zoom by in all of their pixelated glory is a special sight to behold. What's more, your craft automatically speeds up and down in certain level segments without ever showing any sign of slowdown even during an incredibly fast flight through space at the beginning of stage 2.

Variety in level design doesn't end with the use of different tapestry, though. The game stays at a constantly high level of difficulty, but for different reasons throughout. Some sections feel comparatively old-school, like when small rows of standard enemies first appear on the left, then on the right and so on or when mines explode into three suicide bullets upon destruction or when bumps on the inside of a tunnel spill out a constant stream of enemies, flying off at an arc much like the rock-spilling volcanos in Gradius, all while additional turrets open fire. Other sections are closer akin to those found in modern danmaku, taking obvious inspiration from games such as Muchi Muchi Pork.

Enemy design mostly isn't as varied as the stage design is, but you'd be hardpressed to feel it dragging down the game or to even realize it, due to the constant need for focusing on your ship and on the action. Bosses are a lot more original, as they are huge constructions made up of numerous different tiles. Each of these tiles can be shot independently (if there is a clear path to hit them), but the ones necessary for winning the battle are the core-type ones. Destroying all of these also takes out the whole boss, but seeing how they withstand a lot of punishment you might want to get rid of some others in the process as well (and for scoring means). If rubbing your tummy with one hand and hitting your head with the other feels like second nature to you, it is perfectly possible to target specific tiles and form the boss just the way you want it to. If you, on the other hand, try and be as „smart“ as me by thinking „Ha, I'll just destroy all of those lightly-armored minor turrets first and have an easy time!“, then you're in for an unpleasant surprise once the few remaining turrets start going apeshit. They flood the screen in ludicrous amounts of bullets or pull other tricks on you like streams of bullets changing their path once or twice, heading right for you.

Controls are pretty much perfect for the device and you can never blame them for your eventual demise and even if you die, it's never too bad, thanks to the game being on the short side with four stages, the possibility to individually practice any level you've already reached, a replay function for your highest scoring game and the abundant powerup items, making sure you will rarely have to live with the standard pea-shooter. Your ship is controlled by touching any spot on the screen and moving it into the desired direction. Rather than moving to your finger and following it from there, your ship merely mirrors your finger's movement. Thank goodness the game also makes use of the full screen unlike a few other games, so you can steer to the very bottom of the screen, rather than see your ship miraculously shunning it.

Don't get your hopes up for a typo. Under normal circumstances, a typo would rank rather low on a list of things to hope for, but in this case, I assume I can't possibly be the only one who was hoping for this to turn out to be a (albeit unofficial) follow-up to the Konami classic XEXES. Even the “Rebirth” subtitle would perfectly fit such hopes, given Konami's rebirth line on WiiWare, bringing new entries in the Gradius, Castlevania and Contra series with it. Well, seeing EXEXE Rebirth listed here as a vertical shoot 'em up ought to tell you that Shinichiro Wakamatsu's app in fact has nothing to do with XEXES, which isn't to say that it's not a great shooter in its own right. Like PicoPicoFighters and rRootage, EXEXE Rebirth is coming straight from Japan and (again) like rRootage, it's based on an old PC game available as freeware. Also, it's a pretty much unlike any other iOS shooter.

EXEXE Rebirth is entirely focused on survival and score, foregoing any traditional sense of progression. You'll never travel anywhere past empty space, you'll never fight a single boss, the enemies never change, and reaching a new level after having blasted a certain amount of aliens only increases the maximum amounts of enemy bullets. So, briefly put, all you ever do, is dodging the same small bullets, shooting the same blue and red foes, and collect stars dropped by them upon their demise. There aren't even any upgrades to be found, and after four hits, you simply have to start all over again.

Although this admittedly doesn't sound like much, it's actually very well-designed, getting the most out of such a basic groundwork. This begins (but doesn't end) with the game feeling extremely polished. The framerate stays at a constant high, the simple background doesn't distract from the frenzied action, the relative touch controls are tight, and the options menu additionally lets you shrink the display, in order to have a dedicated border at the bottom where the finger can perfectly rest without obscuring your view on the battlefield. Also, while the enemies never change, you probably hardly care, as you're confronted with big heaps of bullets in no time, giving you little time to take your eyes off your ship for more than a brief moment. The blue foes can sustain more damage while staying at the top of the screen, whereas the red ones go down in a single hit and move straight down, potentially unloading their bullets right next to you or even from behind.

The heart and soul of EXEXE Rebirth is the scoring system. Similar to Battle Garegga, enemies drop stars, which are best grabbed consecutively without missing any, before they rapidly fall off the screen. Each enemy you kill earns you 50 base points multiplied by what is referred to as the “scoring rate”. Said rate is determined by how many stars you've collected so far. Picking up a single star increases the rate by one, a second consecutively grabbed star adds another two points, and so on up to an increment of +10 per star. Missing one of them won't set your scoring rate back to one, but it resets the increment rate per star, slowing down your scoring a tad. Downing enemies isn't the only way of earning points, though. It can even be beneficial to do the exact opposite and leave them be, as every shot fired off by the aliens also nets a base score of 100 multiplied by your current scoring rate. A single hit, however, completely depletes this rate.

For a meager dollar and 4.6 MB of storage space, you get a fast-paced and challenging shooter, requiring both good reflexes and quick thinking. You constantly need to observe and analyze the current bullet patterns and enemy positions, answering questions such as “Should I go in and destroy the cluster of enemies to get a couple of easy stars and prevent them from covering the screen in bullets even more than it already is, or should I ignore them, hide in the opposite corner and watch them release a slew of precious bullets?” and “Do I take the risk and dive in for that falling star, or is it too dangerous to put my scoring rate on the line?” and “Would I be able to catch all stars if I move over a notch and hit that one blue foe in addition to the ones already in my line of fire?”. Anybody looking for an alternative to Phoenix, should easily get his money's worth out of EXEXE Rebirth.