I had never before asked myself what a game would be like that merged a forced-scrolling platformer, a gravity flipping puzzler, and a music/rhythm game. Had I tried to envision it, I likely would have failed. Obviously there’s someone out there with more imagination than me, because “Beep Brrp Bing Bang Bosh” is just such a game and it’s actually pretty awesome.
The first thing I love, is that it’s a great reason to dust off that old Guitar Hero or Rock Band controller if you haven’t used it recently. The second is that this is a music game where *all* the music is chiptunes (yeah!), a decision likely simply borne of necessity but I like the end result. The third thing is how seemlessly all the game’s various influences fit together. You have five characters, each in a coloured track that will be familiar to those who’ve played music games before. But instead of just hitting a coloured button at key times to stay in tune, instead you’re bouncing a character back and forth to avoid spikes with each press of the corresponding coloured button. Do that successfully and you stay in tune; do it unsuccessfully, and the characters you’re controlling can be impaled on spikes.
How is it that almost no one is talking about this ingenious indie game? I don’t know, but it’s well, well worth its 80 Microsoft Points asking price.
Here’s what the developer (Pentex) has to say about the game:
“bbbbb is the ungodly rhythm game child of running platformers, Rock Band and gravity flipping. Each lane controls an instrument, each button controls a character in a lane. Flip characters avoiding the spikes and keep the music going. And every so often there’s the wheel of fortune: characters are moved into new positions. There’s only a few seconds to get ready for the next onslaught. xD”
Writings of Mass Deduction 