Review: Parappa The Rapper (PSP)
Besides the fact that I have a hard time spelling "rhythm" (where are your vowels, man!), I've always been a huge fan of rhythm games. To me, music is always an integral part of the gameplay experience; not only does it set the mood it gives you a prompt to feel nostalgic if you listen to it outside of the game itself. To this day if I listen to Terra's Theme from Final Fantasy 6 I am taken back. Wistfully I start to recall my room at my dad's house, huddled in front of my small television and absorbing every small detail of that world. I can remember the way the air smelled that summer. I can remember the ambient noise of lawns being mowed outside, while I chose to stay indoors and play video games. I can remember my dad getting angry that I didn't want to play outside like a normal kid. When I hear a song from the Playstation 1 classic Parappa The Rapper, I am taken back to when I got my first job, and my first paycheck. I'd go to the game store attached to the nearby Hollywood video and play demos for hours, debating what I should spend my hard earned retail-slaving cash on. I didn't own a Playstation at the time (I was an N64 guy) but I played a hell of a lot of Parappa at those demo stations. I loved the art style - so clever and unique for its time. The music was catchy and full of humor. It was just so completely different from any other game on the system at the time.
Now that I've aged a bit I've started amassing all the old games I never got to own. When I saw that Parappa was being released for the PSP in honor of its 10 year anniversary, I absolutely had to add it to my library. The game is a faithful port - nothing has really changed except for the screen aspect ratio (the PSP being in widescreen). You can do some wireless multiplayer and send a demo to a friend, but the core concept is still the same as it was 10 years ago. You are a cute anthropomorphic puppy-child who finds ways to achieve goals in life through rap. Confidence for talking to girls, a driver's license... all these things in life can be yours as long as you know how to freak and flow at the same time. The controls are simple: press the button displayed on the screen at the proper time to match whoever you are rapping with. Each button is mapped to a different word in the verse. If you press them out of order or too fast, you mess up your song. The more you mess up, the more at risk you are of failing the song. It's a proto-rhythm game that set the standard for Harmonix and Konami to revolutionize the genre with their respective titles.
I am returning to this game after playing through Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Frequency, DDR and Donkey Konga. Each of these games have similar play mechanics: the button you need to press is mapped to an icon and it floats across the screen. Hit the button at the right time to the beat of the music in order to win. So why is Parappa all of a sudden so maddeningly difficult? It literally took me three or four tries to get past the intro level.
I had to re-map my thinking of how the rhythm game works. I was used to a more logical approach, as Harmonix utilizes in Rock Band. The "notes" on the screen are mapped to sounds that make sense. Move your fingers to a lower button on the fretboard of your guitar and it usually makes a lower sound. Hit the red drum pad mapped to the snare, and you make a snare drum sound. In Parappa it's completely different. You have no idea what Parappa is going to say until you press the button (or if you are familiar with the song already). This was very disjointed for me. I always pressed the buttons too soon or too late, causing Parappa to sound like some sort of anthropomorphic puppy-child suffering from Tourette's.
I found it fascinating that my mind couldn't figure it out. "I am good at video games!" I told myself. "I even run a website about them!" This didn't bolster my confidence by any means. Master Chop Chop Onion Head Guy Man Dude kept telling me that I suck and should probably die in a fire (I am paraphrasing, here). It eventually required me failing a verse, and then learning from that failure. There was almost literally no way for me to predict the notes coming, and they just came too fast for my mind to process. This trial and error style of game play proved frustrating, but isn't that what video game nostalgia is all about? We often return to games we used to love as kids and find them vastly more difficult than we remember. We each have our own individual time line of growth as gamers, and going back to the front of the line can be fascinating, maddening and ultimately rewarding. It's like having a high school diploma, going to college, graduating college, and then trying to go back and taking a high school algebra class. Except a lot more fun. Unless you really like math, I guess.
Parappa the Rapper for the PSP stays true to the original for better or worse. I still get that swelling feeling of nostalgia when I hear the soundtrack and I enjoy having the ability to look back every once in a while at what used to be the pinnacle of innovation and quirky, different game play. If you've never played Parappa and are a fan of the current lineup of games that make you press a button in time with music, grab this version. It's neat to see where it all came from.
Score: 3/5 A classic that's interesting to nostalgia fans, but falls short of current-gen rhythm games.
What say you?!