“Kitty-ENN. Versus. GAAAAAS-OOOOOOOOO!”
…
“I will never ever run away, I will live to fight another day, I will make you re-a-lise, I’m always here, right by your side, now our love is sanc-ti-fied, I’m here to bust this groove.”
…
“It is me or is the timing off a little bit?”
“Nah. I’m just more skilled than you are.”
“No, I seriously think the timing’s off.”
“C’mon, man, stop being a sore loser.”
“No! I’m serious! I’ll go and get my PlayStation right now and prove it.”
“Fine. Go ahead. And you’ll see that I’m just better.”
“All right. See you in a bit.”
…
“So, do you believe me, now?”
“…Fine. All right. I believe you.”
—
That incident actually happened. The game in question was Bust-A-Groove, a PlayStation offering that helped spawn (or at least popularise) the now all but dormant music game genre. This was no Guitar Hero precursor, though; Bust-A-Groove was very much its own thing, and there hasn’t really been a game quite like it since. (Well, apart from Bust-A-Groove 2, but that’s sort of a given.)
Bust-A-Groove was a peculiar blend of fighting game (sort of) and rhythm-based music game. Each “bout” was a one-on-one competition between two of the weird and wonderful characters, and victory was determined by whoever the camera was closest to at the end of the bout. (Yes, really.) In order to attract the camera towards yourself, you have to correctly punch in the directional inputs on the screen and then tap either the circle or X button in time with beat “4” of a bar. If you press the triangle button instead of O or X, you’ll unleash an attack on your opponent, which will interrupt their flow if it hits them, but which they can dodge if they tap the square button instead of O or X.
That’s it. That’s all the game was, and yet it was massively addictive, thanks at least in part to the magnificent soundtrack. Each character, much like in a fighting game, had their own stage with unique crazy animations going on in the background, and each stage had its own piece of music that told you something about the character — it was implied that, in most cases, the “owner” of the stage was singing the song, and it helped give both the game and its cast a huge amount of personality.
Also it ended with you defeating a giant robot by standing on a rooftop and dancing at it, which was awesome.
The timing issue I alluded to above came from the fact that, at the time Bust-A-Groove came out, I was struggling on with a Japanese PlayStation, and consequently, in order to play European games, I had to prop the system’s lid open with a biro lid and a bit of Blu-Tac, boot it up with a Japanese game in, whip the Japanese disc out when it stopped spinning quite so quickly then quickly swap in the European disc. (I later acquired an actual European PlayStation after I completely knackered the lens on the Japanese system by doing this all the time. I promptly chipped it so that I could play import games. Still one of my favourite consoles of all time; I wish I still had it.)
Anyway, the fact that a Japanese PlayStation is designed to run on a 60Hz display and a European PlayStation was designed to run on a 50Hz display (this was the pre-HD era, folks) meant that the Japanese PlayStation ran slightly faster than the European game was expecting it to, meaning that the on-screen button prompts did not line up properly with the beat of the music. Having grown accustomed to this naturally, I didn’t notice it, but my friend Woody, with whom I was playing the game’s two-player mode, was immediately thrown off by it. (We were both absolute S-Rank Bust-A-Groove players, so every match should have ended in stalemate; he was perturbed to find himself repeatedly losing due to being unaccustomed to my PlayStation’s wonky timing.)
Not sure why I shared that little anecdote, but whatever. Bust-A-Groove was great… and I am now searching Amazon and eBay for cheap copies.
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