The Rush

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• Patch Notes·30 Apr 2026Official

  2nd Anniversary Update Live!

  Hello everyone, I hope you are all doing well. As promised, here is the actual game update to celebrate the occasion. It comes with quite a few goodies I hope you will enjoy! - An online high score leaderboard is accessible from the options menu. Your personal record should automatically be uploaded as long as you are connected to Steam, and the top 50 users are visible. - Various voice lines were added for both ships, courtesy of BuckChickens and Silphio. Voices can be disabled in the options menu as well if you feel like it. - Tweaks were made to many bosses (Hydrast, Narpass & Paylo, Duchminn) - Pongo now looses health naturally so he cannot be milked for graze - Sound and sprite telegraph for the closing doors in Stage 7 - Added a "Bright Bullets" setting that might improve bullet visibility - Capped the possible point gain from grazing - Added a telegraph to the static wall-based turrets, and altered their difficulty scaling - Capsules now flicker before turning into points. Their movement is now more consistent when being hit by player attacks, especially piercing weapons such as bombs. - Altered stage 2 terrain and enemy placement - Nerfed Beetle Platinum's Machine Gun a bit, and buffed its Triple - Beetle Platinum's Torpedoes (2-Way) no longer explode when touching the left edge of the screen - A few weapon descriptions on the intermission screen were made more accurate and ship-dependent - Reduced the difficulty scaling of the Zub's movement speed - Fixed bullet layering issues - Fixed Minor bugs - Minor sound effect & sprite changes Note: An older version should become available momentarily for the sake of compatibility with a specific game mod that was released recently. As usual, thank you for your interest in The Rush. If there is some kind of major issue I managed to overlook please let me know. Enjoy the update!
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• Announcements·21 Apr 2026Official

  Happy "The Rush" 2nd Anniversary

  "Yes, I am still alive." Hello everyone, it's been a while. I hope this message finds you well. I assume you've already read the title, so you must've figured out that it is this game's 2nd anniversary. Time sure does fly. I'll start by thanking all of you guys, the people of the internet that decided that this game was worth even a fleeting moment of your time. Hopefully you still feel that way after playing it, hah! I know there aren't a lot of you, but I'm very grateful to even have gotten this far. Next I ought to thank the wonderful people that have supported me during and after the game's development. I'm not sure they would like to be explicitly pointed out in this spontaneous post, but they are all in the game's credits of course. I couldn't have made The Rush without their support, and outside of the game I couldn't have asked for better friends. It does strike me as a tad odd, spouting all of this sentimental stuff as if I've won an olympic medal or something, when all I did was work hard on a simple game to give back to a genre I love. The Rush really does mean a lot to me, I guess, even so long after it has been completed. Well, thanks for reading all of that. As your reward, here's the part you perhaps wanted to hear: I'm working on an (admittedly relatively small) update for the game! There are a few bits that would like to change, polish, and spice up for this occasion. It will release hopefully over the coming week, but my schedule is a bit messy so it isn't a certainty. Additionally, I am well underway with a completely new game that will definitely be revealed over the summer. Stay tuned! Once again, thank you for your interest in The Rush. Happy 2nd Anniversary! - Hornbuckle
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• Patch Notes·31 Jan 2025Official

  Very Minor Update II

  - Normalized diagonal movement (you won't go faster when moving diagonally) - slight balance tweaks to enemy hp - Improved the attract mode sequence As always, thank you for your continued interest!
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• Patch Notes·28 Jan 2025Official

  Music Room!

  Enjoy a fairly basic music room in the options menu! Thank BuckChickens for the OST coming out as good as it did. I also fixed another bug with the medals on the select screen. That's all! :)
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• Patch Notes·26 Jan 2025Official

  New Year's Update

  "Yes, I am still alive." Even though I'm pretty much done with this game (which I have said before), it is fun to add stuff to The Rush once and a while to supplement my other projects. Here's what this update brings... - Rebalanced a number of boss attacks in regards to difficulty scaling and bullet speeds - Added a new attack to the Stage 1 Boss to prevent graze milking - Made Paylo drop a points capsule on death - Reduced the time it takes for a weapon capsule to convert into a points capsule by 8 seconds - Resprited Mr. Membrane - Fixed a bug with the displayed achievement badges on the Arcade Mode select screen - Added an achievement badge for the "Technical Monkey" achievement - Added a "Slowdown" setting, which when enabled causes the game's fps to drop when many bullets and enemies are in play (off by default) - Added a new achievement correlating to a secret in Stage 5 Thank you to anyone reading this, and to anybody who has stuck with The Rush!
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