I’ve been on a quest of sorts for the past week. But
don’t give me too much credit, because it’s not a quest
for knowledge, love or even a search for my Film 184 books (status:
AWOL).
I’m searching for “Guitar Hero” for the Sony
Playstation 2. I read about this game last week, and from what I
can tell it’s the pinnacle of music and rhythm-based video
games.
I mean, for Ian Curtis’ sake (Ian Curtis equals God from
now on), the game comes with a mini Gibson SG ““ with a whammy
bar.
Having been a fan of the genre of rhythm video games since their
inauspicious beginnings, it brings a tear to my eye to see how far
we’ve come.
Many who hang out at the arcade and play “Dance Dance
Revolution” likely don’t know this, but the
now-lucrative rhythm genre began with a small Playstation game
called “Parappa the Rapper.”
The game told the story of a boy named Parappa who was in love
with a girl named Sunny Funny. Well, replace boy with
“beanie-wearing dog” and girl with
“anthropomorphic flower” and you get a better idea of
what we’re dealing with.
The game chronicled Parappa’s attempts to win over Sunny
through a series of ill-fated adventures to play through, including
an attempt to learn kung fu, getting his driver’s license,
and cooking Sunny a cake with the help of a cooking show hosted by
a manic chicken.
The catch was that you helped Parappa “rap” his way
through these adventures.
This led to all sorts of bizarre sequences, such as if you
happened to do really well on a level, the game switched into
“freestyle mode.” This mode combined previously used
verses from the level.
So theoretically, in the baking level, you can combine
“Crack crack crack the egg into the bowl” with
“M.I.X. the flour into the bowl” to produce
“M.I.X. the crack!”
This game was viewed as an oddity and a niche product when it
came out, but in the eight years since its release, music-based
video games have become a genre in and of themselves.
I never thought I’d see the day when the most popular
video game in the arcade wouldn’t be “Mortal
Kombat” or some shooting game, but rather a game where people
like me stomp on arrow tiles and humiliate themselves before
getting swept under the rug by an 8-year-old girl.
DDR, of course, is just part of the story. Some other popular
music-based video games include the drumming simulation
“Beatmania,” as well as the recent “Karaoke
Revolution,” which may end up being the best drunken party
game of all time (though it remains to be seen how “Guitar
Hero” fares in that avenue).
In fact, with the recent release of “Guitar Hero,”
I’d love to see somebody attempt to create a band entirely
composed of these music and rhythm games. All we need is
“Bass Hero” and we’re good to go.
It’s very interesting that this genre has caught on to
such an extent in the U.S. because in Parappa’s day this was
viewed as a fad that would only catch on in Japan, where one of the
most popular genres is horse-racing simulators.
For all the advancements in the genre, though, there are a large
number of cookie-cutter moneymaking schemes.
Witness the recently released Mario version of DDR, which
advertises the player being able to dance to “remixes of
Nintendo hits” and goes on to proclaim that dancing is
exercise and prominently displays its calorie counter feature.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my music
video games to be my exercise. That’s what iPods and the
Wooden Center are for. No, in my music games, I want to RAWK.
And that’s what “Guitar Hero” will let me do,
and that is why I must have it. Yet as I scour the Internet and
various Best Buy and EB Games locations looking for this holy grail
of axe-shredding, I can’t help but remember one thing.
If it weren’t for Parappa’s quest to get play from a
walking plant, I wouldn’t be able to RAWK on a mini SG at the
expense of my roommates’ sanity, and you wouldn’t be
able to get yourself embarrassed by an 8-year-old girl at DDR.
Humphrey is still upset about being humiliated by an
8-year-old girl at DDR. Send him a sympathetic e-mail at
mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu.