Well, looks like I won't need to add the rest of the shapes. Some day later I'll add the diagrams of the six compound obstacles, but it's four in the morning and I'm taking a break from an assignment that's worth twenty percent of my biology grade to write this. In conclusion, Vib-Ribbon is a great game if you can get a hold of it and are able to play it, and it has as much replay value as your CD collection. X: I soon realized that trying to memorize what buttons go with what obstacles in a way other than playing the game over and over until I learned them all was futile, so the best way I came up with to remember the X button obstacle was " Xig-Xag", and that's just terrible. L1: The letter L has a right angle, just like a rectangle that Vibri must climb over.ĭown arrow: Well, the obstacle is basically an arrow pointing down. Here are the four obstacles, and silly mnemonic devices to remember which button goes to which: You have to push the right button or buttons right as Vibri gets to the obstacle to successfully avoid it, and when they start sending you obstacles that move down the Ribbon at different speeds relative to each other, or that spin around the point where they're attached to the Ribbon as they move towards Vibri so you sometimes can't tell what obstacle they are or when they're going to hit Vibri - well, then the timing becomes very hard to pull off. Timing ends up being almost everything in Vib-Ribbon. Also, each of these obstacles can be combined with any other obstacle, to form 6 different combined obstacles, that require you to push two buttons at once when you get to them.
If they had used the Playstation controller's four symbol buttons for the four actions, the game would be impossible to play. The four are the L1, R1, down arrow, and X buttons - IMO, the four that are easiest to rest your index fingers and thumbs on, obviously laid out so you can always be ready to hit any of the four. (I think that's the "Vib-Ribbon") She's always walking forwards, so you only use the four buttons that make her avoid obstacles when she reaches them. In Vib-Ribbon, Vibri dances down a white line about a pixel thick that stretches off into eternity in both directions. I may have read wrong information, or there may be two Euro versions. Usagi tells me that his European copy has all seven songs. The European version is in English, but you would need a PAL PlayStation to play it, and if that wasn't annoying enough, it's also missing one or two of the songs, because they had all-Japanese lyrics. Once you look up what the menu selections mean (for instance, on ), it's not so hard. The Japanese version is in NTSC video format, of course, so it will play on modded U.S. Unfortunately, Vib-Ribbon was never released in the U.S., only in Japan and Europe. There's no randomization here, the levels are based on the song's beat and tempo, they are unique to a song, and are always the same for a given song. Since the whole game can be loaded into the PlayStation's RAM, you can take any music CD, and switch it with the Vib-Ribbon disc, and play that CD's songs as game levels. The great thing about Vib-Ribbon isn't the specifics of the gameplay system or the music it comes with, though - it's the replay value. All seven songs are tracks two through eight on the game CD (the first track is the game data), which is a nice touch for those of us who were immediately addicted to the catchy tunes and sometimes humorous pronounciations of the English parts of the lyrics.
#Vib ribbon how to#
The game features six tracks by J-pop group Laugh & Beats that were written to make good game levels, and one track sung by Vibri herself that teaches you how to play the game. Vib-Ribbon is a music game, and in some ways is typical of music games - the main object is that symbols move towards a point on the screen, in time with the music, and when they get there, you have to press a button, determined by the symbol. There's a good reason for this, though - because of functionality that will later be explained, the entire game must be able to be loaded into the PlayStation's RAM. Vib-Ribbon has primitive graphics - they're entirely vector based, white lines on a black background, like the original Asteroids arcade game.
It stars Vibri, a stick-figure rabbit who is probably female - it looks like she's wearing a dress, although that's interpreted from the fact that her body's triangular and her leg-lines come out from the base of the triangle. Vib-Ribbon is an absolutely wonderful PlayStation game, by the developer of Parappa the Rapper ( Nana On-Sha) and Parappa's producer ( Masaya Matsuura).