TGS 2006: Parappa the Rapper PSP Preview

September 22nd, 2006, 21:49 Posted By: wraggster

Heres an excerpt:

It's hard to knock a plucky little puppy like Parappa the Rapper, but disappointment set in with this first PSP entry in the franchise almost immediately. It's not that this is necessarily a bad port of the classic PlayStation music game, it's just that all it there is to this is a port of the PlayStation game. There's a multiplayer mode added, but that's never been a strong suit of the series (it also wasn't playable here at TGS.) The rest of it is the same: the graphics, the stages, the music, the challenge, the design ... the one single disc in a series that's three deep.

What's inspired the bad feelings for this port is that the graphics are very pixilated in the port, and after witnessing the smoothness capable in Flash-style vector-based graphics such as those displayed in the buttery LocoRoco, Parappa just isn't his cool-assed self anymore. The visual techniques used in Parappa seem ripe for redoing using more modern vector techniques versus single-dimension polygons used in the old game -- flat is flat -- and even re-rendering the characters from the old game for this new game's sharper resolution could have made this a keeper port. Gitaroo Man from Koei came to PSP with so much color and beauty that it hurt our eyes, but Parappa seems to just lay there on the PSP screen. It wouldn't have taken much to make us less snobby about this port -- obviously, there's only so much you can and should do to a game with a paper cut-out dog rapping with a ganja-infused frog -- but the fact that they did nothing just leaves us with little to crow about for this otherwise welcome return for Parappa.

Full Article at IGN

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