10 Best Rhythm Games Forgotten by Time

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Music has almost always been an inexorable part of the gaming experience, but it wasn’t until around the fifth console generation that music became a gameplay mechanic in itself. While some earlier-era games gave you tools to make simple music out of canned sounds like Mario Paint, games like Parappa the Rapper encouraged you to actually play along with the backing track in order to succeed.

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Since the Parappa days, rhythm games have gone through quite the ups and downs, from the oversaturation of plastic tat during the Guitar Hero years to the current indie renaissance of multi-genre rhythm games like Crypt of the NecroDancer. In that long stretch, plenty of otherwise quality rhythm games have been left to languish on the proverbial record store shelf. Or the proverbial Spotify playlist, I guess. Whichever metaphor tracks best for you. Some of these games may get a casual reference in a separate game or a throwaway VR title in the modern day, but for the most part, they’ve been forgotten by the music-loving public. That’s a little sad, so how about we go diving for jams?

10 Cool Cool Toon

Would’ve Made A Fun Animated Series

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

SNK

Dreamcast

August 2000

A lot of the most distinctive rhythm games in the earlier days of the genre came out of Japan. I don’t know if there was any particular reason for that, but whatever the cause, it gave us some lovably strange games with equally wacky soundtracks. If we’re talking wacky and strange, it doesn’t get more of both than Cool Cool Toon.

Cool Cool Toon is a Dreamcast game developed by SNK and released exclusively in Japan. It’s full of weird, wacky, and wobbly characters that look like something out of an early 2000s kids anime, and probably would’ve made a decent one of those besides. Gameplay-wise, it’s the usual rhythm menu: circular beat markers appear on a large ring, and you have to press the designated button in time with them.

However, the game takes this simple framework and puts subtle spins on it with each subsequent level. In the first level, the markers appear on the outside of the ring, and you have to move the control stick to them, while in a later level, the markers scroll into the center of the ring, while the rim is used for stick tracing. It’s a less-is-more approach to varied rhythm gaming, easy to grasp but enough to keep you invested.

9 Bust A Groove

No Relation To Bust-A-Move

Most rhythm games focus primarily on either making music or playing along with music, whether you’re strumming a guitar or laying down some fresh rhymes. Some rhythm games, though, are more about dancing to the music. Of course, in the PlayStation days, you couldn’t have something like Just Dance, which required a camera to capture your real dance moves, but Bust a Groove found a way to make it work.

Bust a Groove is a head-to-head dance competition game where you battle to see who can drop the spiciest moves on the flashing floor. As the backing track plays, a series of command inputs made up of both face buttons and directional movements appear on your side of the screen, and you need to quickly enter those commands within four beats to pull off a dance move. As the song goes on, both sides build up power, which allows you to use Jammer moves to interrupt your foe’s combo, though Jammers can be dodged with perfect timing.

The game hits a wide variety of musical genres, including disco, hip-hop, techno, and pop, with varying BPMs that gradually cut down on how much time you have to enter commands. It can get pretty hectic on the faster songs, and all the more satisfying to see your character really tear it up when you get it right.

8 Mad Maestro!

A Steady Hand Makes Magnificent Music

Rhythm games have covered a wide swath of music-making means, but to my recollection, there’s only one game that covers the specific niche of orchestral maestro work: the aptly-named Mad Maestro. I guess, technically, the maestro isn’t the one making the music, but who hasn’t dreamed of taking up the conductor’s baton at least once in their life?

In Mad Maestro, you take up the role of conductor over a series of progressively larger, fancier orchestras, carefully guiding them through a series of classical music’s greatest compositions. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mozart; we’ve got ‘em all, son. The beat marker moves in time across the D-pad buttons in a continuous sequence, but the tempo of the song is constantly changing, so you can’t just hit the buttons at the same pace forever. You have to keep an ear out for the timing changes and adjust your conduction speed on the fly.

Something neat this game does is specifically utilize the button pressure sensors that were added in the PS2’s DualShock 2 controller. If you press the button more forcefully, you’ll conduct more forcefully. Some songs require a gentler touch, and you’ll lose points for going too hard on these moments.

7 Vib-Ribbon

A Stealth PlayStation Tech Demo

Compared to today’s game consoles, jam-packed with professional-grade processors and RAM, the earliest 3D-capable consoles like the PlayStation were positively primitive. For its time, though, the PlayStation was quite the nifty piece of technology, not only able to showcase then-impressive 3D graphics, but also pull off a couple of little magic tricks through games like Vib-Ribbon.

Vib-Ribbon is quite possibly one of the simplest rhythm games ever made, not in terms of gameplay, but in terms of presentation. Both the main character Vibri and the world she lives in are rendered exclusively in a series of jagged, squiggly lines, kind of like the pulse on an EKG. Vibri marches through her squiggly world in time with the backing track, which also generates obstacles for her to jump over and duck under.

Here’s the fun part: if you booted up Vib-Ribbon via the game disc, then swapped that disc out for a regular music CD, the game could automatically generate levels from that CD’s music. This was thanks to a little trick the PlayStation pulled where it temporarily stored the game’s files in its internal hard drive so the disc could be swapped. A simple trick by today’s standards, but back then, storing an entire game on console storage was incredible.

6 DJ Hero

An Outlier Amongst Plastic Controllers

In the mid-to-late 2000s, the rhythm game genre was decisively dominated by Guitar Hero and its many competitors, like Rock Band. If you weren’t holding a plastic guitar, you weren’t playing a rhythm game. Whether or not this was good for the genre overall is a matter of debate, but there is one unusual game that came out near the tail-end of this period that’s worth highlighting. If you were tired of holding a plastic guitar, maybe DJ Hero’s plastic turntable was more your speed.

DJ Hero had the same basic concept as its guitar-slinging siblings; you pick a track to play, beat markers scroll onto the screen, and you use the special turntable controller to play along with them. The turntable controller had all a bunch of little features on it to make the experience more engaging, not to mention challenging. You had to scratch the record in time with the markers, flip the crossfader switch to follow the line, and turn the effects dial to add distortion.

DJ Hero had a bit more of a learning curve to it than Guitar Hero’s simple strumming, and that turntable controller wasn’t exactly cheap, so it didn’t do as well commercially. Out of all the plastic tat games that came out during that era, though, I still think it’s worth highlighting for bringing an exceptionally unique style of playing music to the table.

5 Um Jammer Lammy

Even More Underplayed Than Parappa

As I mentioned at the top, Parappa the Rapper is often considered the progenitor point for contemporary rhythm games. Parappa doesn’t get much in the way of modern exposure beyond cameos, unfortunately, but at least people generally know who he is. Less fortunate is the star of the Parappa spin-off game, the titular Lammy of Um Jammer Lammy.

Um Jammer Lammy follows the same basic gameplay loop of Parappa the Rapper, but with a guitar instead of rap lyrics. The teacher character in each level sings a song, and Lammy responds in time by laying down a fresh riff with her guitar (or whatever innocuous object she’s currently imaging as her guitar). If you’ve got the rhythm down, you can start laying down a freestyle riff, and if you’re good enough, the game will let you take the reins.

Parappa The Rapper gameplay and promo image

Parappa The Rapper Was the OG Rhythm Game

Man's best friend brought the beat to the Playstation console

Part of the appeal of Um Jammer Lammy is that, much like with Parappa, the game has a delightfully weird story, contriving all sorts of situations for her to overcome with the power of rock. At one point, Lammy even slips on a banana peel, dies, and gets sent to Hell, though they swapped this with something a little safer for the US version.

4 Rhythm Thief & The Emperor’s Treasure

Like A Groovy Layton

Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure

I have a certain affinity for “master thief” characters like Lupin III, the kind of guy who can rob you blind with both style and class. You might not expect to see any particular crossover between that archetype and rhythm games, but you would expect wrong, at least you ever bothered to play Rhythm Thief & The Emperor’s Treasure on the 3DS.

Rhythm Thief stars the mysterious master thief Phantom R, who uses the power of perfect timing and impeccable dance moves to swipe fine art and make a run from the lawkeepers and crooks of Paris. It’s basically a collection of rhythm minigames that make use of the 3DS’ touchscreen, face buttons, motion controls, or in some cases, all three. Whether you’re hiding from museum guards or running across rooftops, you’ll be doing it to the beat of the backing track.

The game has a bit of a Professor Layton vibe to it, with colorful, odd-looking characters and the occasional non-rhythmic puzzle to solve during the story mode. It also ended on a cliffhanger, which irritates me, because it never got a sequel.

3 Space Channel 5

One Of The Dreamcast’s Ambassadors

For those too young to remember, one of the most popular electronic games ever made was Simon, a little pad with four light-up buttons that you had to tap in sequence. It was a horrendously addicting little gadget, and as it turns out, it adapts very well into a rhythm game. All it needed was Ulala, the bubblegum-pink protagonist of Space Channel 5, to make it a little funkier.

A classic of Sega’s first-party Dreamcast titles, Space Channel 5 is, effectively, just Simon with a backing track. Our intrepid space reporter Ulala marches her way through danger, with hostile aliens spitting out a sequence of directional dance moves and forcing her to parrot them back to defeat them. Occasionally, the game will require you to use Ulala’s blasters, aiming carefully to shoot aliens and rescue innocent civilians while you keep the beat and match the pattern.

Unlike some similar games, Space Channel 5 doesn’t use a HUD for its beats. You have to listen to the enemies’ instructions and watch their moves to match them, then copy them to the beat purely by ear. It can throw you for a loop if you’re used to newer, more illustrative rhythm games.

2 Donkey Konga

Where DK’s Bongos Came From

In the fourth Super Smash Bros. game, Donkey Kong pulls out a pair of bongos for his Final Smash, requiring you to tap your buttons in time with a scrolling bar to deal damage. If you were new to Nintendo games at the time, this would’ve seemed like a completely random choice. Why would Donkey Kong own a pair of bongos? Well, I’ll tell you why: because of Donkey Konga, that’s why.

Donkey Konga was a GameCube-exclusive rhythm game released around the time Guitar Hero was tearing it up. The draw was a special peripheral controller, the DK Bongos, which you played by either slapping the individual drums or clapping your hands to trigger the sound sensor. This was all put to use in a rhythm game not dissimilar to Taiko no Tatsujin, in which beat markers demanding one or both bongos or a clap scrolled onto the screen for you to play along with.

Donkey Konga had a surprisingly sprawling soundtrack, including not just Nintendo songs, but covers of real-life hits like Earth, Wind, & Fire’s “September” or Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Or at least the PAL version had those songs; the US kind of got the short end of the stick on that front.

1 Gitaroo Man

A Hero With Hot Licks

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

iNiS

PlayStation 2, PSP

June 2001

One of my favorite rhythm games of all time is also one of the most obscure, a little PS2 title that hasn’t gotten anything in the way of references or cameos in subsequent years. That game is Gitaroo Man, a rhythm game with both a wholly unique style of rhythm gameplay and a certified banger of a soundtrack.

Gitaroo Man follows U-1, a total loser of a pre-teen who dedicates all of his time to trying to impress a girl who barely knows he exists. As it turns out, he’s the inheritor of the Legendary Gitaroo, a guitar-like instrument that transforms him into a super-powered warrior of rock. In each song, you do battle with another Gitaroo user, each one a different instrument, following the trace line and tapping in time with the icons to lay down concussive riffs, then using the face buttons to dodge incoming attacks.

Gitaroo Man’s soundtrack is truly the stuff of dreams, covering rock, pop, techno, jazz, reggae, and even a hybrid of heavy metal and orchestral. Plus, the game uses a randomized path system within its songs, so every time you play, you might hear riffs and beats that you haven’t heard before.