Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

Kick! Punch!  It's all in the mind
If you wanna test me, I’m sure you’ll find
That all the things I’ll teach ya is sure to beat ya,
Nevertheless you’ll get a lesson from teacher now.
 
If you recognize that verse, you probably have played PaRappa the Rapper (PtR).  The game came out for the original PlayStation in 1997.  The game developed a bit of a cult following because of the wacky animated characters and the goofy rap songs that accompanied them.  Now Sony has rereleased the title as a PSP game.  Does the transition from the PlayStation to the PSP flow smoothly?

The graphics in PtR are faithful to the original, but they have been enhanced with widescreen graphics for the PSP.  The colors are bright and bring to life the characters in the game.  The rest of the game is intact, with the paper-thin characters moving smoother than a South Park animation.  The cartoonish style of PtR makes the characters memorable.

A few CGI animations have been placed in the game.  While they aren’t distracting, they don’t have a lot of detail to them either.  They do stick out though because of how much of a change it is between the two.

The bars at the top of the screen which show you which buttons to push can be a bit hard to find.  When I first started the game I expected it to be on the bottom.  The icons for PaRappa and whoever is rapping with him are pretty small.  The button icons that are displayed in the upper rows are difficult to see as well.  It wouldn’t have been difficult to make these icons a little bit bigger to make them more visible.

PtR is a music game, and if the music sucks, then you won’t want to play the game.  Luckily the tunes in PtR have a good catch to them that will make you sing the songs in your head long after you have played the game.  The characters help because of how memorable they are, but the music is the star of the show.

The voices used really match the characters in the game.  Sunny Funny has a breathy voice that matches her personality.  Katy Kat and PJ Berri (a bear), PaRappa’s two other friends in the game have voices that hit the character’s style dead on.  However, there really isn’t any real lip-synching with the action.

The game uses the four face buttons and the L and R buttons.  The game requires you hit certain buttons in order at specific times.  Sometimes you need to repeat hitting the same button multiple times in a certain rhythm.  The repeated hitting of the buttons can be very tricky because of how the buttons are on the PSP.  It just doesn’t seem to want to move up and down quickly enough.  There also seems to be a slight delay when hitting the buttons sometimes.  I can’t tell whether this is an issue with the game or the PSP.

In PtR you follow the dog PaRappa along with his friends as he tries to impress Sunny Funny.  To do this he learns how to fight at a kung-fu dojo, gets his driver’s license, raises money for a new car, and a few other tasks that really don’t make a whole lot of sense unless you actually follow the story through the cutscenes.

The premise of PtR is easy.  Hit the corresponding button when the icon representing PaRappa moves over it.  Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  But there’s a catch.  With a rhythm game like Dance Dance Revolution, you hit the arrow when the scrolling arrows line up with the guide arrows at the top of the screen.  With PtR if you try to do this, you’ll actually see yourself ending up failing the level.  PtR requires more feel than sight.  Because of this the game can get fairly frustrating, especially when you have to hit the same button seven times in a row at just the right rhythm.

The problem with this is that if you are going by sight and not feel, it’s easy to get discouraged or scratch your head wondering what you did wrong.  Once you get the hang of it, it does get easier.  Still, even if you have the rhythm of a person with two left feet, you can still get past some of the levels very quickly.  You can attain a rating of “COOL,” “GOOD,” “BAD,” and “AWFUL.”  You need to do a little freestyling if you want the “COOL” rating, but there isn’t much incentive to do that other than some slightly different animations.

That’s all there is to the game.  While the songs are different and each one has a different vibe to it, there really isn’t a whole lot to the gameplay.  While the game is a lot more interesting than Simon, the gameplay for the two are about the same.

There are only six songs to the game, and one song can be unlocked.  The songs are relatively short and once you have heard them a couple of times, you can find the beat pretty easily.  It won’t take you very long to get it finished either.  I wouldn’t be surprised if most people can complete all of the regular songs in about two hours.

There are a few additions to the game that you won’t find in the original PlayStation version.  You can rap head to head against someone, but what it mostly is pushing the buttons at the same time as your opponent and then comparing scores.  This is ad hoc though, so you have to be near your friend to do this.  You can also share a demo with four PSP systems simultaneously, but you have to be close together to do this.  You can also download eight remixes to the PSP.  The remixes don’t change the beat of the words at all, just the music in the background.

I was looking forward to PaRappa the Rapper before it came out, because I thought that I missed out on one of the great games for the original PlayStation.  When I finished playing it though, I felt that the original game either played better, or the catchy tunes and crazy character made gamers forget about the lack of tunes and the odd timings.  PaRappa means “paper-thin” in Japanese.  Unfortunately, that also could be used to describe the game in general.

Gaming Trend Score

63

1. Graphics: 72
2. Audio: 88
3. Controls: 60
4. Gameplay: 50
5. Value/Replay: 60
6. OVERALL:63