UmJammer Lammy (1999)

      The PlayStation fell ill to terrible, terrible games. Well, maybe it was just my PlayStation. I received mine pretty late into it's life cycle, and looking back on my collection, I didn't have any of the killer-apps that my friends fondly reminisce about. I never had a game developed or published by Squaresoft, not even a Final Fantasy. I never had a Crash Bandicoot. I never even had Metal Gear Solid. It could have been my age, or my ignorance, but I had games like Streak: Hoverboard Racing, A Bug's Life, Rugrats: the Search for Reptar, and Ninja: Shadow of Darkness. That just scratches the surface of filth. I had the first Tomb Raider, but even that was a port of a Sega Saturn game. Yet somehow, within this terrible pile of coasters, I enjoyed myself at the time. Then I got UmJammer Lammy. This game would not only be my first foray into the rhythm genre of gaming, but a massive wake up call to what I should be playing on my PlayStation: good games.

      Lammy opens as a Saturday morning cartoon, and keeps up that motif through the whole game. It even has the cliche catchphrases one would expect from a 90's cartoon protagonist. The overall challenge is to get Lammy to her band's gig on time, with the meat of the game leading you to that grand finale. Each challenge in the game is it's own little episode, which contains a brief introduction to the problem at hand, a song that you play through that solves said problem, and the outcome.

     Now, as a whole, UmJammer Lammy is completely ridiculous, yet this somehow not only works, but makes the game stand out with flying colors. All of the characters are represented by paper cutouts à la Paper Mario, but this fact is emphasized in the way they bend and move. There's absolutely no continuity as for what the characters are: they range from animals to aliens and vegetables. The songs themselves are fantastic, if not for their actual composition, then for how off-the-wall they are. Lammy has the uncanny ability to turn anything into a guitar to solve the townsfolk's problems; at one point, this lets her play a baby. I love everything about it. I think especially now, with the emphasis on realism in gaming, Lammy is refreshing and a necessary experience to remind gamers of what was so captivating about video games in the first place.

     Specifically for this review, I went back and played through the whole game- yes, the whole game. In one sitting. It's extremely short if your rhythmically gifted, but even taking that into consideration some of the challenges are pretty tough. Needless to say, it was a blast. Even if you haven't played the game, it is absolutely necessary to download the original soundtrack. I laughed. I cried. Well, not really.

Download the UmJammer Lammy  OST through filestube:

Buy UmJammer Lammy for, like, 2 bucks on Amazon:

Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout (1997)

      As mentioned prior, I love manga artist Akira Toriyama. Something about Dragon Ball Z's absurdly muscled fighters gently levitating in the air and screaming for half-an-hour has had me hooked for 12 years now. With continual re-releases and new toy sets based on a long-dead anime/manga, it's safe to say that Z's allure has captured the imagination and closet wrestler of us all. 

      And yet, while Dragon Ball was still a relevant series, there was not one good fighting game based on it. Beginning with the Famicom, every release had the potential to take all that was great about Dragon Ball's ridiculous fights and put them in the control of countless rabid fans with the one requirement of being a good game. That's all the fans wanted. Released for the PlayStation, Bandai delivered Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout.

      Final Bout was released just as the Dragon Ball series was finishing up in Japan, thus Bandai had the series' entire back-catalog to form the game's roster. Just thinking of all the potential "what if?" fights I could have staged makes me giggle. Given the PlayStation's limited memory, Bandai should have been frugal with their character choices. Instead, they opted towards having multiple iterations of the same character.

     I count at least five Gokus and three Trunks.

      And that's not even the worst of it! Following the character selection is quite possibly the worst pre-match taunt accompanied by the worst voice actors the English localization team could have found. In Bandai's defense, Final Bout was released even before Dragon Ball Z hit Toonami in '98. Not only were they localizing a game who's namesake was based on a show that hadn't made it overseas, but there also wasn't an established English vocal cast yet. However, this doesn't account for the actual fights themselves to still have the prerecorded Japanese voice actors for every Kamehameha, Big Bang Attack and jump. This provides a nice touch of inauthenticity, as the males in the Japanese Z have quite high-pitched voices, especially when in contrast against the American dub. Perhaps they were lazy? Maybe they wanted the presentation to reflect how half-assed the actual game play was. 

      Oh God, here comes the game play. There is not one thing about the controls that I can praise. I remember subscribing to Beckett's Dragon Ball Z Collector magazine when I was twelve, and they had a section in one issue dedicated to importing Dragon Ball games. They had a review of Final Bout, and it closed with how badly the controls were. Picture this: there's a tiny man who's sole purpose is to tell the characters in Final Bout what action to perform. In order to do said action, you have to manually write out what the action is, hand it to the little man, who in turn runs down the entire length of the PlayStation controller chord, and delivers the action to the character on screen. Beckett's simile was so spot on, that I'm actually questioning whether or not they're on to something. Playing this game requires an unforgivable amount of dedication, investment, and patience; it's almost like having a relationship with the game, yet I've had relationships that have lasted shorter than how long it takes Vegeta to turn around. 

      This game is not worth the 30+ dollars it costs to find a copy of the original 1997 American release, and it's not worth the fifteen dollars I spent importing it when I was twelve. There was a re-release in 2004 when Dragon Ball GT actually started airing in America, so the value has naturally gone down, but why bother?

Tenkaichi Budokai was a better game, so save yourself the trouble of discovering that you have a penchant for masochism and do not buy Final Bout.