Escape from Parappa Lammy Squad: Neon Tokyo Remastered
Kindling the backlog bonfire with Monkey Island and Nana-On-Sha
Good news, everyone! I’ve discovered a new system for making lists of media products that I will (eventually potentially) get around to consuming one day. You’ve heard of Letterboxd, but have you heard of Backloggd? As far as intentionally misspelt websites go, this is a good-un. And as you can see, I’ve got some gaming to do. This is just page one, but let me know what I should play next.
It’s an unintrusive system that lets you sort games by Wishlist, Backlog, Playing or Played. That last one, I’ve found, is a very useful way to catalogue the games I actually finish, a stat that would be pretty startling / professionally useful to look at going forward. My only qualm is that it doesn’t give you a timestamp of when you marked a game as finished to add that historical element. If one of my 50 followers happens to be a Backloggd dev…
Anyway, what’s this newsletter about? Well, I’ve actually managed to beat a bunch of games lately. Here, take a look.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F79a8a08b-d6ae-4583-9671-a88932bc2135_959x155.png)
An eclectic mix, no? I figured I should try and encapsulate my experience with some of them in bite-sized chunks. Maybe it’ll propel me into more backlog productivity.
Parappa the Rapper
Holy smokes. What have I been doing my whole life without encountering the work of Rodney Greenblatt? Admittedly, I was two years old and still playing with bugs in the yard when Parappa the Rapper came out, but still, there’s no excuse that I let it slide until now. It’s a rare experience when you play something so disarmingly brilliant, even though it’s ancient, but Parappa exceeded all of my expectations. It was pretty much the opposite experience to when I played the System Shock remake recently and bounced off its hard edges within a few hours. In fact, you could probably beat both Parappa games in the time it took for me to get fed up with Citadel Station.
In the rain or in the snow, got the got the funky flow - Prince Fleaswallow, 1996
Parappa the Rapper is ground zero for mainstream rhythm games. You can play both of them on the PS5, and they hold up brilliantly, but be warned, they’re not easy. The discombobulated rapping would get stuck in your head anyway, but you’ll almost certainly be replaying Cheap Cheap The Cooking Chicken’s Rap to get the timing right. “We’ll make a cake today that looks rich,” she says, knowing the phrase will orbit your brain for weeks to come. But hold out, it’s worth it. There’s a god-damn boss rush level where you have to rap battle all of the game’s characters so you can get to the front of the line for the toilet, lest you soil yourself. Precious few developers get to take swings like that.
Credits rolled, I was most impressed by Nana-On-Sha’s musical comprehension and how between levels, the studio would bounce effortlessly between different styles and cadences of rap rather than sticking with just one method of delivery. They could’ve done that, and it still would’ve been great. It’s not like the game needs to try to keep your attention with its stoner scholastic art direction and dumb-fun story, but I appreciated it all the same.
The moral project of the entire thing is just so refreshing too. “I gotta believe,” Parappa says. And you do. And you do.
I have no idea why we don’t have like five of these things. But I would never want anyone to churn them out. I just think Masaya Matsuura and Rodney Greenblatt should be given blank cheques to collaborate on whatever they want. That little beanie dog is clearly a cultural artefact in the collective unconscious, even now. There’s a reason ‘step on the gas’ went viral on TikTok recently.
Um Jammer Lammy
Before they tapped out of mascot rhythm games to the detriment of us all, NOS gave us Um Jammer Lammy in 1999, which I also ran through in a single sitting last week. It’s Parappa but guitar-based, and it kicks just as much ass as its predecessors. The fun part is that your comrades still sing, so you don’t lose the lyrical element (and your guitar has a voice of its own, anyway). And, as I learned last week during an interview with John Johanas, it was the inspiration behind Chai’s ‘garbage guitar’ in Hi-Fi Rush.
Lammy plays just about anything… vacuums, hoses, baby rabbits and aeroplane steering wheels as she embarks on a rhythmic adventure beyond time and space to get to her band’s concert. There aren’t as many earworms here, but it was a worthy experiment that no doubt laid the groundwork for Guitar Hero and its many copycats. I am dying to play the arcade version and Major Minor’s Majestic March, eventually. Can’t get enough of these guys. I’m obsessed. My girlfriend surprised me the other day with a little Parappa car that I zoom around my desk when I’m bored during meetings. Like the games themselves, it has improved my life immensely.
Escape from Monkey Island
We’ve moved past fixed cameras and pre-rendered backgrounds, but with every old game I play, I find myself wanting them back more than ever.
Here are three pre-re-bee-gees in a row from Escape from Monkey Island, a game that a lot of people think is the worst in the series. I had heard about its reputation ahead of playing it on my Steam Deck last month, and honestly, I understand why the detractors think this way, but only because the bar for quality in Monkey Island games is just absurdly high.
Look at that. My god. This whole section could just be screenshots of EFMI. It’s an eye-popping experience. The only other game to use the GrimE engine outside of Grim Fandango and the last official LucasArts adventure game. A special microcosm of video game history, full of prophetic gags and obscene puzzle solutions. That’s Monkey Island for you.
Yet perhaps the most startling thing about EFMI is its acerbic wit and skewering of millennium capitalist society, which feels raw and, inevitably, even more uncomfortable today. Big name-brand games don’t play in this whimsical realm of period analogue anymore, where you can get away with satire that is pretty close to the bone. It feels historical as a consequence, entrenched in its early 2000s political milieu, a diary of the anxieties and fears of its makers… as well as, you know, a fun, silly point-and-click adventure game.
Curse of Monkey Island was this left-field cartoon adventure that danced in the shadow of Disney’s animation heyday in the late 90s. It was tactful with the esoteria of reality that sept into it and maintained that endearing ‘what if Indiana Jones was just some guy’ feel. I liked it a lot, but I’m going to be thinking about Escape more. This one is more of an adventure manifesto, where the world beyond its development clearly felt too heavy to ignore. It might be anathema for the ‘pure escapists’ out there, but I relished in its candour. There’s a pompous populist in town who preys on Elaine Marley’s honeymoon to unseat her, the experienced choice, by promising free beer, good times and… not much else.
Elsewhere, a thinly-veiled caricature in (Aussie) Ozzie Mandrill is using vulturous tactics to buy up all of the real estate in the known Monkey Island universe, intending to turn its ‘unruly’ pirate inhabitants into compliant consumers who like to visit strip malls and frequent ‘Micro-Groggerys’ and ‘Starbuccaneers’. Guybrush’s own notoriety has been monetized in the form of ‘Planet Threepwod’, a gauche celebrity restaurant serving branded set meals.
Most of the game’s narrative, and even, to an extent, some of its puzzles, focus on the chilling monotony of modern bureaucracy and the epidemic dread bucket of political resignation. I wasn’t all that cognizant of this at the turn of the century, but I certainly am now, and I think it’s fair to say that all of these problems have Just Gotten Worse, like a neverending brown note waiting for a very ugly crescendo.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it. The internet did shatter my naivete and force me to Clockwork Orange every angle of discourse from the age of 17. Or maybe I’m just misty-eyed about this being the last Monkey Island game I had left before I ran out of them for another ten years.
But I dunno, man. This one rises above and provides so much more than its clever cultural ruminations. It also just feels inherently haunted, as if the developers longed to do something meaningful with this heritage property as they helplessly watched the curtain fall on an era of games that they were employed to make. If that was the impetus, then EFMI is a success, regardless of what the pearl clutchers may have to say about how ‘Monkey Island’ it is. It has made me think long and hard about how bleak and toothless the politics of prestige AAA games are in 2023, despite the ongoing downward spiral. Tank controls, though… I think we can comfortably leave them behind.
Coda
I’m going to cut this now as I’ve gone on too long, and the Substack editor is shouting at me. Honestly, I don’t know if there’s more to say about Neon White that I didn’t touch on in this interview with Game Director Ben Esposito. It kept up its brilliance to the very last demon. For me, it is the model speedrun FPS, at least for now.
I’m also only about halfway through American Nightmare, and I feel like Alan Wake as a complete experience deserves its own newsletter, same with Cruelty Squad and Ghostwire Tokyo. Don’t hold me to that, though. They might fall out of my brain by then. Who knows where we’ll go next. Maybe they’ll form a bundle later down the line, as not to force myself to homework some extra sections into this bechamel-filthy word lasagne.
In starting this Substack, the last thing I wanted to do was treat it like my professional work. I wanted it to be the opposite, an escape valve for my loose creativity. However, I’ve noticed that because writing is my full-time job as well as something I like to do for fun, I inevitably begin to adapt some of the bad habits from the professional side when I’m just trying to let the thoughts flow.
I’ve caught myself doing this thing where I try and hold myself accountable for the newsletter ideas I have in my own brain, like a nagging parent. I’ll also put all my ideas into a to-do list and pretend that they will stay there crystallized and brilliant instead of instantly decaying. I’ll stare at them every now and then as if that’s all the work done, upset that I haven’t annoyed myself into writing three articles a day - as if that’s how motivation works.
I started that ‘Save Point’ journal to give myself some numbered structure, and it ended up making Postmode feel like homework, where I’d open up my dashboard and try and ‘death by 1000 words’ my latest draft into completion every day before the weekly deadline. So it’s clear I need to do an about-face. This isn’t about structure, this is just about writing for fun and seeing where we end up.
With that in mind, I think I’m just going to start blank-slating these bad boys based on what is swimming around in my brain at the present moment, as there’s plenty of good stuff in there. I imagine it’ll feel good to arrive at something from nothing rather than deciding what I’m going to write before I write it and ultimately holding my creativity hostage. I don’t want to scan my earlier paragraphs before I write the next one. I just want to hit publish…
We’ll still have cool interviews and stuff, which require all-important planning. But let’s see how we get on with the tabula rasa approach. There might be a few smelly boots, but maybe we’ll catch some big fish, eventually.
The Rec Room
Watch: Tim Rogers asks ‘What is Cyberpunk’ and makes me prepare to spend money on Buzz Ricksons in Japan later this year
Listen: If Dark Intro 1 doesn’t unsettle you into writing 600 words of clean copy in 15 minutes, I don’t know what will