R (Rock’n Riders)

Publisher: FAB Communication
Developer: Pixy Corporation
Release Date: 4/1/1999
Date Played: 5/11/2020
Region: Japan
Time Played: 25 minutes
What’d you think?: This game is wild. You play as all the members of a J-rock band (with the wonderful outlandish fashion you’d expect) in two very different game modes.
In one, you’re snowboarding down a mountain (all the way from Oregon’s Mt. Hood to Las Vegas, a 950 mile trip) and cutscenes before imply that you’re being pursued by some sort of Stormtrooper riot police-y uniformed hostile force. That isn’t present in the snowboarding, just other snowboarders that can get in your way, a trick system I didn’t figure out in time, and some other objective I failed to complete that I’m still unsure about. It played reasonably well and I’d have liked to have seen more.

The other part of the game is the “music room” where you can take individual band members and play up to 12 different musical phrases by pressing buttons. None of them choke the other ones out so you can mash up quite a cacaphony. It’s a little silly doing it alone, and I wonder if it’s possible to play that mode multiplayer so multiple band members can be going at once. There didn’t seem to be any scoring or guidance on what to play when.

There’s also a separate “photo disc” with a bunch of photos of the real band that the game characters are based on. The bassist is smoking cigarettes in most of the photos of him.

Cover Art for R's Photo Disc
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p115vLMMhl8

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