It is weird just how obscure this game is, today. It’s a spinoff from 1996’s “PaRappa the Rapper”, which is itself hard to find these days. But at least people have heard of it. When I go to retro video game stores looking for Um Jammer Lammy, I usually have to spell it out. The last place actually looked on eBay to see if it was a real game.
It really is!
Like PaRappa, Um Jammer Lammy is a call and response rhythm game where the stage singer sings a phrase, and Lammy has to answer it on her guitar by pressing the PlayStation controller’s shoulder buttons and the triangle circle square X buttons, on the beat. Miss one, you get a warning. Miss two, you drop a rank, from GOOD to BAD to AWFUL. Drop from awful and it’s game over. On the other hand, if you go above and beyond and play all the required notes plus even more notes — always with the music — you can ascend into COOL mode and really rack up the points.
There’s only seven levels; played perfectly, this is a short game. Playing perfectly isn’t that easy, though. Lengthening the game some is a two player cooperative mode, a two player competitive mode, a “COOL” mode, and the ability to replay the entire game as PaRappa, rapping the songs instead of playing them on guitar.
The Plot
Lammy starts the game jamming out with Master Onion, the dojo leader from “PaRappa the Rapper”. He’s rapping, and Lammy is playing lead guitar along with her band mates in MilkCan, bassist/singer Katy and drummer Ma-san.
It’s a dream! She wakes up and realizes she only has fifteen minutes to get to her first real gig with the band!
But first, she has to put out a fire, help out at a nursery, learn to fly a jet plane, carve a new guitar from a tree with a chainsaw, die and go to hell (in the Japanese version) or get flung onto a distant island (in the US/EU version), before she can finally meet up with her bandmates. She’s overwhelmed each time until she remembers to imagine she is playing a guitar instead of fire fighting, flying a plane, etc. And then it’s easy.
Lammy gets pregnant?
I’m pretty sure no other 90s video games, and maybe no other games ever, have the main character get pregnant, be marched into a delivery room along with a hundred expectant mothers, and forced to give birth right there and then.
She wasn’t really pregnant, though — she got all the pizza she could eat once she put out the fire at the pizza parlor, and was just a little bloated. The nurse was so disappointed that she wasn’t really pregnant, and forced her to care for the hundreds of baby rabbits just birthed by the other new moms. (Pretend the baby is a guitar!). After completing the level, the nurse demands she returns when she really gets pregnant.
Lammy doesn’t want to be a mom. She just wants to rock.
That’s not the store where I found the game, but I was a little amazed at how happening this retro video game store in Campbell was. That couple sitting down is playing Super Mario Kart for the Wii. Like… wow.
The folks at this store had never heard of Um Jammer Lammy. That’s fine, I’m used to that. But we went to another store the next day, and they had it! A sealed, new copy, for just $200. Um, no.
They called up their sister store, though, and they had it used for considerably cheaper. Complete in box.
Quest completed. I packed it away in my suitcase and carried it home to Connecticut.
Getting it to work is the hard part?
Like PtR and other rhythm games, it’s required that the player be able to hit the buttons to the beat. This is very hard if there is any sort of lag. I don’t have a PS1 anymore; I use emulation. This is a problem. Emulation does its best to act like real hardware, and 99% of the time, you can’t tell the difference. In rhythm games, you can tell the difference.
I tried PSXFIN first — no good. The sound was problematic — Lammy’s guitar playing was absent. The input lag was unworkable.
RetroArch has two PSX cores — Beetle PS1 and Beetle PS1 HW. I wasn’t quite sure what the difference was, so I tried both. The sound was decent, but I still wasn’t getting my button presses registered. The XBox controller I was using probably wasn’t the best, so I dug out an old PS4 controller, got DS4Windows running to get it to connect with my PC, and finally had the thing working.
There was still some lag, so back into the configuration to find the perfect alchemy of input latency controls, frame advances and so on to dial in the accuracy until I could no longer blame my bad scores on anything but my own bad playing.
It’s been 25 years. I’m not quite as pixel perfect as I was back then.
Making matters significantly worse…that music. I don’t even know that I’d be that generous; it was like a bunch of notes put together for the express purpose of making it difficult to hit the right buttons.
It’s all that and more. The next song, I haven’t finished yet. It’s much worse, but then again, it does take place
in hellon an island.