No discussion of obscure or overlooked Playstation games should be without mention of Masaya Matsuura's Parappa and Um Jammer Lammy follow-up, Vib Ribbon. It's Matsuura's best game. Far from it, in fact. But it is the most daring and confident, two virtues that Polygon Not Forgotten holds in particularly high esteem.
Like Jammer and Parappa before it, Vib Ribbon is a rhythm game in which the player responds to audial and visual signals with a combination of button presses. Rockband and beatmania fit this description as well, but they're not quite the same. The Masaya games revolve around a character, Vibri in Vib Ribbon's case. Rockband and beatmania revolve around an interface. Their levels are like Excel spreadsheets. Matsuura's are like...well, levels--moving a charming character through a system of obstacles. I like to call them "Mascot Rhythm Games" to differentiate them from the Rockband-type games.
This particular Mascot Rhythm Game is special in its incorporation of custom soundtracks to which it designed levels all the way back in 1999. By replacing the Vib disc with a music CD, the game would throw pitfalls, spikes, and loops at Vibri to the bass, drums, and lyrics of whatever you felt like listening to at the time. It bears emphasizing that the Playstation did not have a hard drive. Its RAM was extremely limited even at the time of its release, which is why 2D games were unfailingly better on the more RAM-intensive Sega Saturn. If the Playstation was to hold all of Vib Ribbon's graphics and engine in its limited RAM while playing a music CD, those graphics and that engine had to be extremely simple. And like the restrictions of meter forcing a poet to produce his best lines, the PS1's RAM restriction squeezed an astonishingly inventive minimalist aesthetic out of Matsuura and company.
Vib Ribbon's call-and-response style of rhythm gaming may be outmoded, but its aesthetic is something that will always be special.
Highest Recommendation
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