You Rappin' Good

One of the first games that got me into Playstation was the one pictured above. Parappa The Rappa. Around when the game came out, I was a pretty loyal Nintendo-ist. I had owned every Nintendo Console. I was happy playing my Nintendo games and reading my friend's Nintendo Powers. I didn't need the Sega Genesis, although when Mortal Kombat came out, the blood did seem enticing. Also the Aladdin on Genesis was better too. But I digress.

Parappa the Rappa came out and I was immediately intrigued and a little envious. First off, you couldn't do games like that on the N64 because the format issues. CDs allowed the games to have the storage capacity to support high quality music. On the cartridges, Developers were always forced to use some sort of synthesized interpretation instead of a full on musical score. Secondly, CDs were cheap(er). I didn't care so much for the price of the game, even though I was paying about 65 dollars for Nintendo 64 games and Playstation games ran around 30-50 dollars. But CDs were cheap enough where Sony was able to basically hand out demo discs for consumers to sample everything the Playstation had to offer.

That is where I first played Parappa and what eventually led me to buy a Playstation. For it's time, it was truly innovative. The music was catchy and the concept was solid. Going back now and trying to play it however....

The game is a mess. The judging is inconsistant. The menus and save system are non-existant. The loading is atrocious. And don't even get me started about the scoring system. I mean when have you ever seen a game arbitrarily give you points only to take them away a few lines later. The game will literally give you 30 points for one line. Take away 50 the next. And then for the next two give you plus 15 and 10. It's ridiculous.

I am being a little dramatic however. Parappa was a fine game. One of the pioneers which created the music game genre that we all know and that I love. It paved the way for DDR, Bust-a-Groove, and even the Guitar Hero of now.  While playing the two sequels and the "spiritual successor," I thought about how and if there would be a possibility of a sequel. It's fun to entertain the thought, but there would have to be a drastic change in gameplay for it to be good and while I have fond memories of playing Parappa in the past, I can safely say that I'm just fine listening to the soundtrack.

Thanks for reading,
David