yesterday, a friend of mines asked me to give them a hand with some troubleshooting. they’ve spoken to me how they finally wanted to give emulation a shot with their new big fancy pc beforehand, and the first game on their chopping block was um lammer jammy. we both hold the project diva series in strong adoration, so why not give the franchises that started it all a shot yknow? anyway the issue here, as they perceived it, was that the game was registering the inputs late. we both assumed it was a dreadful combination of their retroarch having some weird latency issues and lammer just being the harder game out of the psx duology. so we flicked on run-ahead, turned off v-sync, set hard gpu sync on, all that technical jargon, and we both started up parappa the rapper proper.

what preceded was the mortifying realization that these game were just like that. instinctively hitting the notes as parappa’s marker cross them only caused the game to call us out for our what it deems as bad rapping. eventually we started delaying our inputs just a few frames after the marker passes a note, and even then no matter what offset we set the game still felt disgusting wrong. what’s more is the tutorial even reenforces the notion that this game is a simple matter of timing ones’ input to the note, which, given that i went through the effort of setting up an gamepad viewer, pausing the game frame by frame, streaming it to said friend, all in a desperate attempt to prove we’re not going insane, is more than just a gross misnomer. (later found out that matsuura genuinely believed this as well and it’s not just some secret mechanic lost in translation, funnily enough within this same interview he attempted to preform a live demonstration of “how to be cool” where he failed to impress the game four times in a row. https://youtu.be/U_27Lkt-yIk )

eventually i phoned the person who gave me my passing interest in nanaoh-sha’s library and we learn that the intent here was for players to freestyle their way through the songs. believe it or not i actually welcomed this revelation! rhythm games have homogenized into this singular design approach where player expression is limited to the rudimentary act of following the notes as presented. while there’s nothing wrong with this scheme, parappa is peculiar because it aspires well above what contemporaries confine in by encouraging its audience to deviate from the chart a bit. step a bit outside the bounds the game laid out for you and, with just the right sense of rhythm, it’ll stop the game of simon-says and grant you the freedom to freestyle your own chart.

only took about ten or so attempts at scoring a cool on stage two for those wild romanticizations to be swiftly stumped into the dirt. creatively remixing the verses caused more harm than good, and harmonic improvisation pales in comparison to the score you’ll land by spamming the last note ad nauseam anyway, except, not really? sometimes the game punishes you for doing that too? sometimes it loves my incoherent remixing even though it just gave me a bad score for doing such?? who knows actually??? just follow the beat and Maybe It’ll Work Bro I Think???? such a sour mix of mechanical obscurity and variability, each attempt i make at understanding this game’s interworkings i descend further into perplexity. i’m too stubborn to let my cynical accusations towards a work sit without first trying to genuinely appreciate the design nuance and motive behind it, but, as i see it, no one has a thorough understanding of how parappa’s scoring system works and with the aforementioned live demonstration presented by its one and only director, i can’t help but feel the act of actually playing parappa is a contradictory, brutal chore that fails to hold much intrigue under the weight of its variability - a variability that even if understood is too strong for what the game demands.

that being said, i don’t have think anyone is coming to parappa for a Sound Rhythm Game Experience. one of the reasons the friend wanted to check out lammy was because they learned she was a guitar playing sheep who got sent to hell who also happens to be a lesbian. i mean, look at vivid the world artist rodney greenbalt managed to bring to fruition here, every fabric of it is downright charming. you’re a little teenage dog who’s trying to get with a sunflower, willing himself getting a driver’s license through the power of rap. there’s a place called “phat donut” that gets demolished and is renamed “flat donut” for the remainder of the game, like i can’t help but to appreciate that! even with how aggravating some of the charts can get, the track list is filled with back-to-back bangers and it’s equal parts irritating mechanically as it is cute. it’s that golden blend of brute honesty, slapstick, and humanism that makes nanah-ohsha’s games so infectious, and it’s what always drew people to their library to before any sort of mechanical ingenuity.

allow me to be a bit more formal about a game totally unconcerned about being pretentious and say matsuura is an auteur in the truest sense of the word. even discounting how his titles, even in all their rough edges, still hold a candle against games that were conceived with the backing of decades of hindsight in mind, the truth of the matter is that he codified an entire lineage of games in his first foray into an unfamiliar industry. i don’t really feel like it was a mistake that my first experience with parappa was one filled with bantering about how bizarre the hit detection is and laughing at the dog rapping to not piss his pants with a friend, because really matsuura only wanted to shatter the “wall between music and life” - and parappa more than accomplished that. oscillating between frustrating and bliss, memetic in its nature, that’s parappa.

Yeah it's a good game i loved it as a kid i havent played it like in years but i dont think that means i should adjust my score or replay it so as to get a more accurate picture of what a 'valid' score would be if I loved the game as a kid it means there is merit and value to it regardless of whether it's 'objectively' bad or good or whatever and im not saying that's an opinion anyone even holds for this game im just making a blanket statement that if someone rates anything a 5/5 or 10/10 jus tbecause it was amazing to them as a kid it's as valid a review as any other It's simply a review from a perspective of a 'child' and that perspective especially in video gaming is just as much appreciated as an adult opinion on a video game at least when it comes to them being targeted towards neither audience idk if i explained myself properly but yeah im giving it a 5 because i thought ti was awesome as a kid

Splinter Cell is at it's best when you take enemies into the dark before knocking them down, seeing as your character seemingly disappears into the shadows and the only thing you can see are those iconic NVG.

Thankfully you do that quite a lot in the game itself. This really is one of those classics that still holds up after all of this time, mostly holds up... yeah not every element holds up, the game at times is bad at telling you shit, yeah thanks game for not telling me that I can disarm mines that was cool.

Also the 'parkour'/climbing mechanics are very inconsistent in both what you can climb on and whether or not Sam will climb it or go nope rather die rn and I have to say I am not a big fan of the more combat heavy sections in the last few missions, like the guns are not very accurate and for as realistic as the game wants to be, if a guard wears a fucking hat it will not go down in one headshot which is a baffling choice for a game like this but whatever.

And...that's kinda it, most of the gameplay still holds up, I like how you can increase/decrease your speed by using the scroll wheel on your mouse, it felt more natural than I expected. Being in the dark, hugging a wall as a guard goes by you is still pretty intense.

The story isn't remarkable but it's prb the closest a Tom Clancy game has gotten to actually being like one of his books since the game is very heavy on the politics behind what you're doing which is also refreshing as all hell for a Ubisoft game. Sam Fisher as a character is likeable enough and serves the game really well with his just following orders mind-set even if he doesn't quite get what's going on at all times.

While I know the linearity of the game is an issue for a lot of people, for me it was a plus as it meant that no matter where I was going, I was taking the correct route and not accidently making the game super hard on myself without knowing, which isn't to say that this happens a lot in non linear games but I can 100% see it happening in this game if every mission had 3 really different ways of doing it and the game is allowed to be more cinematic this way.

Idk what else to say its like 4am rn and I just beat the game, it was really fun, I'd rate it higher but the elements that didn't hold up were really annoying at times and I feel like the next few games will only expand and improve on this game's formula so I'll most likely end up enjoying those more.

Still it's a pretty great stealth game and a classic in it's own right. Worth a shot if you like stealth games and are interested in the series.