Games That Time Forgot: Vib Ribbon
Then buzz it up
June 30th, 2005 at 16:00 by Stuart Heritage
It’s time for another Game That Time Forgot - a fond look back at a game that should have conquered the world, but didn’t. Today, it’s the turn of Vib Ribbon.
Vib Ribbon, released in 2000 for the PlayStation, polarised the video gaming population in a fingerclick. It simply didn’t bear any relationship to reality whatsoever. People either loved it or hated it. Naturally, hecklerspray loved it.
The heart of Vib Ribbon was a simple one. Press different buttons to jump over different obstacles. Easy. Except the game was wrapped in thirty thousand levels of weirdness to put you off.
You control a character by the name of Vibri - a jittery white
wireframe rabbit who runs along a single white line on a black screen.
If you jump over enough obstacles without making a mistake, Vibri turn
into a beautiful princess. Mis-time the jump, or press the wrong button, and she’ll devolve into a frog. And then a worm. And then she’ll die.
The game is incredible to look at - it’s so simplistic. A scribbly white rabbit running down one white line. That’s it. But when you start to mess up, the line goes bonkers and
starts to wobble about all over the place. This makes it difficult to
understand what’s going on, let alone time the jumps properly. And it hasn’t even started to get hard, yet.
As the game progresses, the obstacles combine, so you have to press
two buttons at once. And they come at you so fast, you slowly start to
lose your marbles.
"Is the jagged loop R1 and up?" you think as you start to panic, "or was that the combination for the spiked square? THINK, DAMMIT!". Gamers need a zen-like concentration level to even do remotely well at Vib Ribbon.
Frankly, gameplay alone would have been enough to hook hecklerspray, but that’s not even the best part.
Vib Ribbon is, at heart, a rhythm game. So it needs some
decent music to give it depth. Vib Ribbon’s music is possibly the best
in-game music you’ll ever hear, and it comes courtesy of evil geniuses Laugh And Peace. To call the tunes insanely catchy would be a grand understatement.
There’s Sunny Day - and a happier, more additive-crazed piece of music you’d be hard pushed to find. Sample lyrics - "Theres no time, Hurry up! Everything is so fantastic!" Or Overflowing Emotions,
a sad song about not being a baby of someone’s heart, with a
million-miles-an-hour middle eight that sounds like an explosion in a
drum factory that was only probably put in to make the game incredibly
hard for ten seconds.
When your brain can’t take any more of this fantastically A.D.D pop
music, the game unveils it’s joker: the game also works with regular music CDs. So
we put it to the test.
During our extensive testing, we discovered that Vib Ribbon hates the gentle pastoral folk music of Pink Moon by Nick Drake (CDs), and has no time for the claims that Histoire De Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg (CDs)
is a masterpiece. The game reacted violently to these pieces of music,
throwing relentless, spinning, crazy obstacles at us until we died before the first choruses of both CDs.
Vib Ribbon slightly prefers indie music. We Are Little Barrie by Little Barrie (CDs) and Loveless by My Bloody Valentine (CDs) calmed the game down somewhat. There were still some bizarre combinations of buttons to press, but at an easier pace.
Confusingly, Vib Ribbon gave the easiest ride to the music we thought would be hardest for it to cope with - Speakerboxxx by Outkast (CDs) and Anything Is Possible by psychedelic Brazillians Os Mutantes (CDs). hecklerspray managed to finish both CDs.
With the European release of the Playstation Portable around the corner, we can’t think of a game we’d like to see on the handheld console more than Vib Ribbon. It’s the nicest advert for mental illness around.
[story by Stuart Heritage]
