The moment it turned midnight, as we entered 2024, I for some reason felt an inexplicable urge to play Um Jammer Lammy for the first time. I think I saw a clip on twitter of Lammy going to hell and thought that was really cool. I really can't remember, I wasn't the most sober at the time. Either way, I browsed eBay, cried and then begrudgingly loaded up an emulator in that order and well...man.
It's rare for me to just love everything about a game on sight but Um Jammer Lammy just feels so confident in how strange and joyful it is. For a start, the music in the game jams hard (Stage 2 & 6 being my favs), the art and character design is bursting with personality and originality in its totality, the story has a lot of fun with itself in an incredibly nightmareish way AND the best part is that it gets it all done within a couple of hours. In & Out. One & Done. Also Lammy is cool. I can see why everybody wants to be Lammy.
The only thing that's really stopping me from calling it perfect is that it is SO damn hard! Like, granted, playing it on an emulator probably doesn't help with some of the timings but I was never fully able to grasp what timing the game was asking of me. Sometimes hitting the buttons a bit early would work, sometimes it wouldn't. After trying stuff out and looking on the internet I'm convinced this game just has really strict inputs that a mixture of emulation and lack of skill gave me a difficult time with a bunch of tracks, some of them being brick walls. Or maybe the input timings are just weird. IDK, all it does is make me wish I had a copy I could run on original hardware so I could do the game justice. Maybe someday.
Until then though, I'm happy to leave my thoughts as is. Um Jammer Lammy is a short, special game that I'm sure is gonna stick on my mind for the next 363 days of the year. Bonne année, jammys!
It's rare for me to just love everything about a game on sight but Um Jammer Lammy just feels so confident in how strange and joyful it is. For a start, the music in the game jams hard (Stage 2 & 6 being my favs), the art and character design is bursting with personality and originality in its totality, the story has a lot of fun with itself in an incredibly nightmareish way AND the best part is that it gets it all done within a couple of hours. In & Out. One & Done. Also Lammy is cool. I can see why everybody wants to be Lammy.
The only thing that's really stopping me from calling it perfect is that it is SO damn hard! Like, granted, playing it on an emulator probably doesn't help with some of the timings but I was never fully able to grasp what timing the game was asking of me. Sometimes hitting the buttons a bit early would work, sometimes it wouldn't. After trying stuff out and looking on the internet I'm convinced this game just has really strict inputs that a mixture of emulation and lack of skill gave me a difficult time with a bunch of tracks, some of them being brick walls. Or maybe the input timings are just weird. IDK, all it does is make me wish I had a copy I could run on original hardware so I could do the game justice. Maybe someday.
Until then though, I'm happy to leave my thoughts as is. Um Jammer Lammy is a short, special game that I'm sure is gonna stick on my mind for the next 363 days of the year. Bonne année, jammys!