I GOTS BLIYSTAHS ON MAH FINGUHS!!!!!

http://www.dpadhero.com (NES ROM)



Yeah, that's right. So someone ported the rhythm music genre to the NES, and it's a pretty successful attempt. "Dpad hero" has 4 songs - "Sweet Child 'o Mine," "Harder Better Faster Stronger," "The Swing of Things," and "The Way You Make Me Feel." It's basically Guitar Hero with 2 strum buttons and the dpad acts as the frets. It is hard. But you can't fail and you have the option of just listening to the song, as some of the 8-bit tunage is quite good, especially "Sweet Child."
I think this would have gone over well if it had been released back in the day, but there's something about the gaming atmosphere we're in now that makes it particularly compelling. We all love teh Rock Hero games, because of a combination of the gameplay, music choices, and roleplaying quality. But this strips out almost all of that, and takes gameplay to a whole new abstract. The point of the game is to hit buttons on a controller. There's no metaphor. There's no role. This basically ends up being the case, sort of, with earlier entries in the music genre - PaRappa the Rapper, maybe, and DDR if you play it with the pad - but this really does away with all pretense. Even in the name, the notion is that this is all you need to be awesome. Gamepad dexterity. Look, there's even an audience, but no on-stage persona. Just people going nuts over dots and arrows hitting a NES pad. It's either a satire of the state of the music genre today, or the first really, truly postmoderm gaming experience, or both. It's also just pretty fun. And free!