 Um Jammer Lammy for Sony Playstation
Having enjoyed my formative years in the late 70s and early 80s when the arcade and home videogame industries exploded into prominence, I'm an unashamed, card-carrying member of the videogame generation. I fell off the wagon in the wake of the big video game crash of the mid-80s, moving on to bigger and more important things, like teaching yoga at the community center, selling bootleg t-shirts outside sporting events, and doing voice work for a highly controversial series of gay porn cartoons. But recently, a game was released that was so strange, charming, odd, and just so insanely fun that even non-gamers were transfixed, as was I. Parappa The Rapper remains one of the most unique games that you'll ever see. In the game, Parappa wants to get with a girl named Sunny, and he wants to impress her by rapping at a big concert. To bone up his skillaz, Parappa goes through several different teachers who teach him a new song. The teachers rap a verse, and Parappa has to mimic it, or more directly, the player has to mimic it by pushing the correct buttons as indicated by an on-screen diagram, all while trying to maintain some semblance of rhythm. An on-screen indicator shows you how well you're doing. You begin a stage on "good" and matching the patterns will keep it here. If you get off track, though, you watch your rating fall to "bad" and then down to "awful." If you stay "awful" for too long, your teacher will flip out and end the stage. However, if you do well enough, and raise your rating to "cool" and keep it there, your teacher will step aside, letting Parappa freestyle like mad. This leads to wild and often bizarre animation changes, none more strange than the famous bathroom stage. Parappa gets in line for a gas station restroom with each of his previous teachers, and if he gets "cool," the scenery dissolves away into a swirling rainbow of colors where Parappa rides a small rail car toward the bathroom while the disembodied heads of his teachers swirl around him. Seriously.
The animation in the game, done by an artist by the name of Rodney Greenblatt, is wonderful, and all of the characters are two-dimensional and flat; meaning that when the turn away from the camera, than fade to a thin line. They have no depth, like a sheet of paper. And the storyline of the game is decidedly, well, trippy. The situations and scenes that Parappa gets into are surreal to be sure. The game is insanely fun, quite addictive, and particularly great in groups.
Um Jammer Lammy is the sequel to Parappa, and the spirit of the game, as well as the appearance, is perfectly intact. Lammy, the lead character, is not a rapper, however; she's a guitarist in a band called Milkcan. The goal is basically the same as in Parappa – Lammy has to get to her band's big show on time, and along the way, she gets into various situations and has to get out of them using her guitar. The gameplay is identical, with the cool/good/bad/awful system still in effect.
The first stage of the game finds Lammy having a bad dream that sees her oversleep and miss her band's show. She rushes to the show, but she finds she's been replaced by a new singer (which is weird, since she's just the guitarist, not the singer) – Chop Chop Master Onion (Parappa's first teacher in a nice in-cameo). CCMO brings Lammy on stage and gives her a simple lesson which ends with a simple credo for Lammy: "My guitar is in my mind!" And this is where it gets just plain weird.
Suddenly, Lammy wakes from her bad dream to find that she actually HAS overslept, and that she only has fifteen minutes to get to her big show. She hurries out of the house and toward the arena, but along the way, she is stopped because the street is blocked off in front of a building that's on fire. She tells the lead firefighter that she needs to get through, to which he replies that if she needs to get through that she can help put the fire out. He hands her the fire hose, and then it gets REALLY weird. Lammy thinks back to what Master Onion said to her in the dream, and she realizes what she has to do. With a call of "My guitar is in my mind!" Lammy imagines that the fire hose is her guitar, and as the lead firefighter sings and the other firefighters perform a funk tune, Lammy plays her mental guitar and puts the fire out. Seriously.
After the fire is out, the firefighters treat everyone in the crowd to pizza (you heard me), including Lammy. She eats so much that her stomach swells to ridiculous proportions, as she heads off to the show. Along the way, Lammy passes by a maternity hospital. The nurses see her with her swelled stomach, and immediately assume she's about to give birth. They drag her inside, but when they find out she merely overate and isn't pregnant, they aren't too happy. To pay them back (for THEIR mistake) she has to get all the screaming babies inside to go back to sleep. The head nurse morphs into a centipede of about a million segments and starts lobbing singing babies at Lammy. Seriously.
The theme repeats through the various stages which see Lammy using her mental guitar to do things like fly a plane with an insane pilot, go to the forest and use a chainsaw so she can make a new guitar (don't ask), and escape from a desert isle. The desert isle stage actually replaces one in the Japanese version which had Lammy dying (!) and going to hell (!!) after getting hit by a car (she shouldn't have overslept, I guess), where she has to battle her evil doppelganger named Rammy. Seriously.
Really, no description I can write will accurately express just how absolutely bizarre this game is. The storyline is just so strange and surreal, and some of the animation so odd (particularly the "loading" screens), that it really has to be seen to be fully appreciated. The game is a bit more difficult than Parappa was, and there are some nice additions. A two-player mode has been added, which allows you to either take on the game cooperatively, or face off against either a human or computer opponent. After completing a stage, the stage boss will present Lammy with a gadget that she can use with her guitar to change its sound; a harmonizer, flanger, wah-wah, distortion, and reverb. Also, once you've completed the game, you're allowed to go back to any stage you wish to attempt to get a "cool" rating, just like you could in Parappa. You also are able to go back through the game while playing as Parappa, a nice touch. If you dug Parappa, you'll dig Lammy. The game is just delightfully demented, and quite possibly, heavy hallucinogens were used in the creative process. Not like that's a bad thing, and I'd say heavy drugs would definitely make playing the game even more enjoyably surreal. So, drop that acid, hit that bong or lick that frog, whichever your preference, and enjoy one of the most unusual games you will ever play, guaranteed. Hey, don't bogart the frog, dude!
Review by Mario Speedwagon |
