Pong and Beyond

622nd played so far

Genre: Music
Platform: Playstation
Year of Release: 1999
Developer: NanaOn-Sha
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

A line moves in tune to the music. A bunny, sort of made from that line as well, moves alongside. Rhythm game controls let you do so. It looks stylish, if simple, if that makes sense, and having read about the game in the past, most of that seems to be because memory was limited and this was the best way to make sure you could play with your own CDs.

Our Thoughts

It feels like there are two main ways to make music games more complicated. One is speed – if you have to respond faster and more often, it gets more difficult. The other is through complexity – pressing multiple buttons at once or doing so in different patterns. Vib-Ribbon brings in the higher speeds on its more difficult songs, but it’s the complexity where it got me.

At its most basic, four different shapes come down the track, each corresponding to a different button, and you press them at the right time.  When it gets more difficult, it starts to combine the symbols. You have to unwrap the shapes and figure out which two buttons to press. Not having internalised them, and not really having easy mnemonics memorized, that actually makes it quite complicated.

It becomes a pretty difficult game when we tried the Smash Bros soundtrack, where there were a lot of combined symbols while greatly sped up. It’s actually quite pretty to go through, the line art aesthetic being simple enough to create something simply artistic. It’s those graphics that add to the fun view, more so than others form the season sometimes do.

Final Thoughts

Vib-Ribbon is, for someone with my sense of ribbon, as hard as something like Guitar Hero (the colours get to me. They don’t always map to my fingers). And while predating the more complex looking music games, the simplicitly created by the constraints actually help make the game better for me.