Weird Fake Gaming Shorts

 

A couple of years ago there was a video put out by a group(?) going by the name of Badabun.  To my understanding Badabun are a shitty content farm type of channel that produces low grade insipid crap for 6-13 year olds, not the kind of thing worth looking up.  This video consisted of a guy sitting in front of a camera pretending to play Super Mario Bros on the NES while a TAS speedrun video played in a window next to him. He was claiming to have beaten the game in under 5 minutes which is certainly a feat that has been done by a great many people it seems but the fakery of this video was so obvious that it was laughable.  A number of other creators made their own videos clowning on this guy for being a dipshit, we had a good chuckle and we moved on.

Fast forward to current day however, in a new age of short form content and these fake gaming videos have become pretty widespread.  Not only that but the number of people now falling for it seems to have grown a great deal and it's making any faith I might have had in the general audiences in gaming spaces has now been well and truly crushed.  The short that inspired me to make this post was a guy playing a Super Mario World romhack where the footage he was using was so obviously either TAS or spliced that you would think a child would recognize the fakery but the comments section was filled with things like "omg this guy is the greatest mario player ever" with only a couple of comments calling out the obvious fakeness that went mostly ignored.  What made it even worse is that he had included a webcam feed at the bottom of the video showing his hands and the controller to add legitimacy to the video but even just glancing at it you could see it wasn't matching up.  Despite the guy in question putting the fact that it's fake blatently on screen for all to see, I guess most people's mindset is that "oh there's a controller feed there so it must be legit" and then go no further than that.

I've also noticed that this has been a massive problem for short form content regarding rhythm games.  There's a very simple rhythm game called A Dance of Fire and Ice that is just CRAWLING with hundreds of fake videos of people getting all perfects on meme songs like Rush E or really cringeworthy songs about that cocksocket, Mr Beast.  A lot of rhythm games come with autoplay features so you can see and maybe study the chart a while if you are struggling but these guys are taking autoplay footage, slapping on some footage of them mashing the keyboard like a child playing with a word processor for the first time and then uploading.  The fakery here is even more obvious that the Mario videos as well because just listening to the clacks of the keyboard while watching the gameplay clearly shows they aren't hitting those notes and yet at the end of the short they have a no miss all perfect clear AND EVEN THEN the comments are filled with praise by idiots.

The big question I have is just "why?", why go through all that effort to get a couple of thousand views on the most ass type of content that can be made on a platform like YouTube.  Even if you suck at rhythm games, let's say, and then you did a series of videos where you documented yourself practicing to full combo the hardest song in whatever game it was, I think that would be infinitely more appealing to more people.  People love seeing a shitty underdog struggle and train and then do a thing.  Uploading fake videos to get a couple of thousand fews so you can make a few bucks in ad rev is actually fucking pathetic.

I guess the solution is to stop watching YouTube shorts, I dunno why I bother anyway.  For some reason I click that shit every so often and I just end up mad or disappointed.  But either way, my bad habits with shitty short form media aside, fuck these users, put some effort into your fucking hobby

Parappa the Rapper is Shit (still love it though)

 

I have fond memories of Parappa the Rapper, as a kid I had a demo where I would play the first stage with the onion man over and over again.  I also have fond memories of playing the full game through during my first year of university but rhythm games have come a long way and going back and playing Parappa now feels like pulling teeth.

We do however, have to give the game some credit for being essentially THE FIRST rhythm game ever made and while playing it now feels terrible it and it's popularity essentially put the groundwork down for all the rhythm games that we enjoy today.  Also you cannot fault Parappa for it's music, the tunes found in each level are wholesome, catchy and stick in your head for YEARS.  I can still personally sing the entirety of stage 1 and 2 from memory and will, even today, find myself occasionally humming bits of the baking stage or the flea market.  Most of the content is Parappa is fun, bright, memorable and will never fail to put a smile on your face.

But it SUCKS as a rhythm game

Rhythm games are supposed to be a simple concept.  Music plays, notes appear on the screen and you make the inputs in time with the music.  This happens in Parappa, prompts appear at the top of the screen in time with the music and you push those buttons but it's basically a crap shoot if the game gives you a positive or a negative evaluation at the end of each bar.  I'm not bad at rhythm games, I play an absolute shit ton of them both at home and in my local arcades so I'm fairly confident that I don't just lack rhythm but after the first stage Parappa the Rapper just does whatever the fuck it was.

Out of curiosity I looked up videos of people getting Cool ranks in every stage and to my utter dismay it seems that getting good scores in that game have very little to do with the prompts.  Spamming inputs semi in time with the tunes is what seems to get you a good score and after the first displayed it almost doesn't matter what you do after that.  When you eventually DO get a cool rank the prompts just fuck off altogether and you are left do freestyle, which I suppose fits the theme of being a rapper but doesn't really make for a good rhythm game experience.

As a rhythm game Parappa the Rapper is fucking awful and it got away with it by basically being the only one of its kind.  That of course quickly changed but the catchy tunes and wholesome vibe of game basically left rose tinted memories in the brains of everyone that had a PS1 back in the day.  One thing I am probably going to do after this post though, is go and dig out my copy of Um Jammer Lammy to see if the timing problems that I have with this game, carried over to later titles.  It would be interesting to test it with Parappa 2 on the PS2 as well but I've not been able to find a copy of that.

Maybe I'm being a BIT harsh when I say it's shit because there is a lot to like about Parappa, it just sucks that it fails so hard at the one thing it's supposed to be good at which is being on rhythm

Museca Arcade

The strangely named Museca is a game that has been released recently to Japanese arcades and with that big strange controller I couldn't help but give it a try.  With so many rhythm games available in the arcade just how does this one stack up?

Well, I did the first thing one does with every Konami game and I scanned my E-Amusement card.  If you're unfamiliar with how gaming IC cards work, please refer to this video for a quick primer

After typing in a name and setting a pin number I was met with a whole ton of story, which is strange for this kind of game, that I just skipped through and went straight to the music select.

The games music selections at the start are you standard Bemani rhythm game fare with lots of J-Pop and a couple of Touhou tracks which seems to be a standard every sine Sound Voltex.  Usually I like to crank up the difficulty level since I play a lot of rhythm games but I couldn't quite figure out how to do it and since it was my first credit I didn't care all that much. 

The most interesting part of this game is definitely the controller

There are 5 buttons in a sort of Pop n' Music style arrangement that can be both pushed and spun.  Under the machine there is a pedal for a special type of hold notes but 2 of the 3 songs I played for my first credit did not feature any pedal action so I'm guessing that's something that only shows up at higher level play.  There are 2 main types of notes which are taps, where you push the button in and spins where you spin the button like a turn table.  It's fun to play and for my first time, surprisingly confusing sometimes.  Considering that I play a little bit of IIDX I thought 5 huge buttons would be easy to adapt to but I still found myself losing my place on the pad a couple of times, guess I'm just a moron.

When you finish, assuming you have a card, you are given a screen where you can unlock new music.  I could only afford to unlock songs on their easiest mode because buying intermediate or expert tracks is outrageously expensive on the in game currency.  Then again, It seemed pretty easy to gather so I'm guessing it won't be too long before I'm able to try some higher level stuff. 

Well, that's enough reading.  All in all I think the game is pretty good.  I filmed a video of me playing the highest level song available to me at the time so check it out.  I'll be coming back to this game a lot so watch this channel for some cool videos in the future