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Oh, it's more than rudimentary - it's the entire basis of the gameplay. And I completely understand the appeal of trying for the maximum combo string - that's what's seen me getting little more than between four and five hours of sleep per night for the last couple of weeks.
Parappa the Rapper's the first bemani game that I played (and it predates beatmania by a year or so). It combines the idea of showing a scrolling form of notation for the rhythm with a call and response element - you, as Parappa, have to repeat the line of verse that's just come from the other character in the stage, with the game also showing you the timing at the top of the screen.
It's great, Parappa. Appealingly daft lyrics, characters and stages - there's a brilliant one just over halfway through where you've got to engage in a rap battle to get to the front of a queue for a public toilet before you shit yourself. The visual design is lovely - pop-up book characters (they disappear when they turn side-on and fold over when they bow down or lean backwards) in a bold 3D world.
Parappa introduces the idea of having the music change in real-time as your performance improves or worsens. Drop down to Bad or Awful and it wibbles around and goes all out of tune, while the characters and environments react to suit. Get all the way up to Cool and the trainer character disappears from the scene, allowing you to freestyle for mucho pointage.
It's a really good way of learning the placement of the PlayStation pad's facia buttons, too - I could never get the hang of which one was circle, which one square, etc, without looking down at them, until I spent some time with this game.
The one thing that I've never totally understood about it is the requirements for hitting and then maintaining a Cool rating. On the first stage, you can get it bit hitting an extra button inbetween each of those marked, but this doesn't seem to work consistently on the others. It means I've never completed the game to my satisfaction.
Somebody making a right royal mess of the most memorable level
It's kind of broken, though. You can pass a section by hitting the final beat of any phrase perfectly - doesn't matter if you've cocked up the rest, the last beat will always save you. Bit of a flaw, but the game's lovable enough that it's forgivable.
The developers, NanaOn-Sha followed it up with Um Jammer Lammy, which is significantly less well-known. Rodney Greenblat is on-hand again for character design duties and the core of the gameplay remains identical, but instead of a rapping dog, you're now a guitar-playing lamb. Or lamb-thing.
Again, I love UJL. The range of musical styles on offer is wider than that in Parappa and the levels are even more nuts - Parappa's are actually quite boring in comparison. There are a couple of stinkers, though, which can make it seem like a lesser game when you're stuck in the middle of them - a grunge thing with a lumberjack and an absolutely fucking terrible goth/prog thing that has *no* discernable rhythm and, as a direct result, is a bloody nightmare to get through. Such a shame - with the exception of those two levels, it's aces.
Quite interesting, that Wikipedia page - it seems that the fear of offending Christian America was still in full force and enough to drive publishers to censor even obscure releases with niche appeal.
First stage
Mamamamamamamamamamama!
Final stage in two-player mode
You can see from the first two of those vids how they altered the bar at the top of the screen to make it clearer when it's your turn - could get a bit confusing in Parappa when you first started playing it.
Parapper the Rapper 2 eventually appeared on the PlayStation 2 and used the exact same gameplay mechanics for a third time. It's widely considered to be the least impressive of the three games, and I go along with that opinion.
There are a couple of issues with the structure of the game. Finish it once and when you play through it again on the same save file, you'll find that the difficulty has jumped up, with the rhythms required of your fingers altering from your first run. Finish it a second time and it changes them yet again. The problem is that they're never as good as they were on the first run - they never *sound* as good, they're never as much fun to play. The third run is especially poor.
There are still some really nice high points, though. The hairdressing octopus is a stand-out level for the series, as is the mash-up level that takes place within a retro-styled videogame. The music gets slated as not being up to the first game's standard, but that's a load of bollocks, really. If anything, it's better - still stupid funny.
First level
Octopus level
Between Um Jammer Lammy and Parappa 2, Nana-on-Sha, the games' developers, created Vib Ribbon for the PS1. It loses the call and response element of the presentation and instead places the main character, wireframe bunny Vibri, on the rhythm bar itself.
And this time, you don't get to see the button icons. Instead, you've got different types of obstacle to avoid, each of which has its own button. It's the same thing in effect, just that now you have the additional difficulty of trying to remember which button deals with which obstacle.
Oh, and it sometimes combines two obstacles together, meaning two buttons at the same time.
It has one of the best gameplay explanation vids I've ever seen - YouTube vid of it here (German version as I can't find an English recording and most people here will most likely have more chance of undesrstanding the German text than they would the Japanese, at a guess - I know I have. And the game in that vid is running on an emulator, hence the presence of a mouse pointer).
Vib Ribbon's big feature is that it loads the entire game into the PS2's memory in one go, meaning that you can take the CD out and replace it with one from your own music collection. The engine then creates a brand new level from whichever track on the CD you decide to play, which makes it a truly endless challenge.
It's a dead nice idea, but I've always had a little trouble with it. Because the game's having to try and make levels based on something that it's reading off the CD in real-time, there's quite often a tiny delay between the sound from the CD and the onstacle in the game, which is soemthing that I find offputing. I appear to be in the miority, though, so maybe it's just my eyes/ears playing tricks on me. And, to be fair, I never put a huge amount of time into trying out different CDs - really should rectify that situation, but I'm pretty sure that it won't work properly on the PS2 (as opening the disc tray resets the consoles, I think).
The other small problem I have with it is that the three tunes that are on the game CD are so good, it almost feels wrong to be playing it to anything else.
Vid of the first couple of songs (and the awesome title screen music).
Vid of the game playing with a regular music CD in the drive.
The original Parappa's just be released for the PSP in Japan and should be heading out to the US and Europe soon - the Japanese version of the original PS1 game had English text in it, though, so the same might be true of the PSP game if anybody wants to import. UJL and Parappa 2 will both work on the PS2 (obviously in the case of the latter, given that it's a PS2 game anyway) - dunno about the PS3. Vib Ribbon got a European release but never saw the light of day in the US - Sony US's hatred of anything unique coming to the fore, at a guess - and, as I say, may not work properly on anything than a PS1/PSOne. |
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