[review wip]

So this is one of those games that gained a popularity for how ridiculous trombone playing can be, but surprisingly it is NOT one of those shitty games that get attention for their intentional difficulty.
Trombone Champ takes you a deep dive into the musical culture of the trombone by having yourself play... uh... the legendary trombone, inspired by the ever acclaimed trombone memes you've seen around the internet in the past ages.

Being a very basic rhythm game with a parodic sense, the gameplay is pretty straightforward and simple: using your trusty mouse (and the keyboard, if applied) you input a sequence of notes that are drawn in the piano roll, but as you play the notes the trombone plays as well, making tooting sounds along with your input. The music library is composed mostly of classical music for your own pleasure, but some of them are remixes and original compositions, sometimes even the silliest ones so far, and the track selection screen is also well defined, suited with curious facts for each track selected, however, due to the simple nature of the core gameplay, there are few difficulty settings such as a intentionally too fast Turbo Mode. The game was released around September 2022 but since then got numerous updates adding new songs and few extra features, alongside some accessibility features.

Now the next part i'm going to tell here is quite spoiler territory, cause this game apparently deserves a bit more for a very unexpected extra feature which

Somehow, the game has also a (short) story which first time players may not see coming. When you start a new file you ask yourself why there's a narrated introduction, will instantly get confused by the sudden presence of baboons... and hot dogs, and there's apparently a collectible card section, which exists for the purpose of mocking free-to-play games that involve buying card packs from loot boxes. Yeah, that's right, the devs really sneaked in and placed this thing. At first, things may seem to not make sense until you get to encounter strange NPCs hidden through the game's menus, asking you to give them toots... and turds... well,

From my perspective, Trombone Champ is not meant to be a serious rhythm game like Guitar Hero, but a silly product just there for the funsies, but it didn't stop from this game having a really fast but unofficial mod scene since the game is made in Unity and uses r2modman, and i can tell you the mod scene is VERY EXPECTABLE.