{"id":79549,"date":"2022-09-27T11:11:04","date_gmt":"2022-09-27T11:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/beyond-guitar-hero-the-viral-music-game-that-revived-my-teenage-obsession-games\/"},"modified":"2022-09-27T11:11:04","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T11:11:04","slug":"beyond-guitar-hero-the-viral-music-game-that-revived-my-teenage-obsession-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/beyond-guitar-hero-the-viral-music-game-that-revived-my-teenage-obsession-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Guitar Hero: the viral music game that revived my teenage obsession | Games"},"content":{"rendered":"
S<\/span><\/span>o, by now we’ve all seen Trombone Champ, right? The music game \u2013 in which you play a cartoon trombonist making noises that bear only the vaguest resemblance to music \u2013 went viral last week; if you’ve not seen it, here’s the tweet from PC Gamer that started it all. I promise that your day will be vastly improved by watching this video<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n This game is very, very funny. It’s \u201ca joke first and a game second,\u201d its creator Dan Vecchitto told the Guardian. Part of its comedy is in the presentation \u2013 the discordant visual details, the random made-up facts on the loading screens \u2013 and part of it is in the sheer ridiculousness of what you’re doing and how dismal it sounds. Here’s the thing, though: I’m a specialist in music games, with ateenaged obsession that lasted at least a decade, and Trombone Champ is genuinely a good and challenging rhythm game, as well as a good joke.<\/p>\n The act of moving a mouse up and down and pressing a button has just <\/em>enough in common with the act of playing a trombone to make this a legitimate interactive approximation. And, as I discovered when trying to get the highest possible score, an S-rank, on a few songs \u2013 motivated by some deep need to conquer the game \u2013 it is challenging to wring anything higher than a B out of the game’s scoring system . Being good at Trombone Champ is not only possible, but aspirational.<\/em><\/p>\n Trombone Champ has reminded me how much I miss music games. For a while in the late 00s they were everywhere, after Guitar Hero proved an unlikely breakout hit. From 2007 until 2010 or so, my living room was full of plastic instruments: drums and guitars for Rock Band, DJ decks from DJ Hero. Those toy guitars were just close enough to real ones to make you feel <\/em>good when you were playing, and far enough away to make anyone feel like they could actually be a rock star, at least when you’re playing on Easy. I did not stop at Easy; I defeated every song on Expert and became phenomenally good at playing pretend instruments \u2013 a talent that has garnered me admiration at parties but has absolutely no use in the year 2022.<\/p>\n Before Guitar Hero, my first experiences with music games was 2001’s Gitaroo Man, the unlikely heroic tale of a teenaged boy who is transformed into an anime superhero by the power of everything from rock and jazz to J-pop and electro-funk \u2013 every level changed genre, sending you off to fight musical battles with maraca-wielding skeletons or giant bee-men with saxophones, and culminating in an epic guitar solo trade-off with a rival superhero in space. I’ve never played such a musically creative game; its Legendary Theme was one of the first things I ever learned to play on an actual guitar. I played it over and over for two years until I finally finished it on Master mode, an achievement I am still proud of. that game was hard. <\/em>All music games were hard, back then, but also tantalisingly conquerable with practice and pattern recognition, like the arcade shmups that fascinated the generation before mine.<\/p>\n