The year's last Ura Oni feature lies ahead! On your mark, get set, ...
Chicken Race (チキンレース) Maoto Naka| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (163) | x6 (261) | x7 (513) | x9 (852) |
Taiko Switch
235
none
chraceThis ending year sure has had plenty of Oni difficulty juggernauts, which makes the more endearing how one of these ended up with the modern console game whose launch is notorious for not packing quite the punch on the difficulty spectrum... and from a scene-newcoming artist, no less!1
The quirky Chicken Race was created by an artist who goes by the art name of Maoto Naka (ナカマオト; Twitter), one whose correct spelling is also found on his own Instagram account's name handle... or what remains of it, seeing as it has been deactivated by now. This freelancer composer, while being a piano/keyboard player himself, has carved a name of his own online with a selection of original solo Vocaloid compositions -regularly posted on his own YouTube channel- and as the sound producer of the indie act Raindrops 4am (雨粒午前4時), joining the nicknamed female singer Eggplant (なす) and animator Inoue Kawazu (井上カワズ)
Geared with plenty of cluster combos at such a high base BPM, this instrumental speed demon is definitely nothing to slouch around! Even the most hardened drum-tested veterans have to kneel down to such a relentless barrage of notes, where the single-note/quick-speed handswitching trickery of Ura Swan Lake is taken to a commonplace extreme and intertwined with several pesky small clusters, easily equatable to a harder take on Game Music track Venomous's regular Oni.
It even holds another peculiar distinction on the customization flair side, currently sitting as the 2nd song overall with the highest number of stanzas on Oni, between !!!Chaos Time!!! (298 stanzas) and the Classic genre's Thunder and Lighting Polka (212 stanzas). How Chicken Race's second-to-hardest mode ended up in such a way is thanks to some expedients being staged in order to add a visually-disorienting layer to its challenge degree, from the beginning portion's barrage of scrolling shifts a-la Waraeru 2000 (aka the patent-nearing-expiration trippy barlines(TM)) to a devilish portion in the middle where 64 consecutive single notes all mark the beginning of a note stanza change with hard-white ticks. Eyestrains-riddled ones, beware!
Chicken Race (チキンレース) Maoto Naka| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | - | - | - | x10 (800/35) |
Taiko Switch 235 none ???Such a unique song with some challenging gameplay twists ups the ante since its debut with an extra Oni difficulty layer to it, the third one in Taiko history to mark a difficulty rise and an overall notecount drop from the regular Oni at the same time, following suit Yozakura Shanikusai (post-rerating) and crossed-over darling Garakuta Doll Play. It's also a rather fun play on the song itself's title, too!
The 'Chicken Race' expression is one way to call the game of chicken, one model of conflict in game theory for two players which explores the implications of a scenario where two users have to face a narrow obstacle at the same time. In the more commonly-shared version, the model of the Chicken Game (which also became this song's English title on localized Taiko releases) has two car drivers on the opposite sides of a really narrow bridge, trying to cross it at the same time; if either scenarios of the two drivers running straight (=crashing against each other) or swerving (=tied situation), one of the two would be losing by swerving at the last second and let the other to cross unscvathed, while being dubbed a chicken for saving your hide.
A really rough rendering of such a situation is ported in quite the unique way for the Chicken Race song's Ura Oni chart: in several portions of the song (generally repeated once every 8 note stanzas from the previous istance), a drumroll with a giant note following suite at a lower scrolling speed (x0.8) will determine whether the player gets to stay on the Master route of this forked-paths play or lower down to the Expert route, with drumroll and big note representing the narrow bridge and the opposing driver. Should you hit the note correctly (even a Good hit or one-handed Gread/Good hit will do), you'll win the confrontation and the Master route's relentless cluster combos await from behind with even more compound combos to tackle under the 235 BPM behemoth; should you completely miss it, you'll be branded as a chicken and mocked with a barrage of mini drumrolls, up until the next confrontation. If you're aiming for a clear, be careful not to be branded a chicken too often in order not to lack the requiring soul gauge hits!
Good Night, Bad Luck. t+pazolite/Groove Coaster 285For week 3 of our wish list and after having already mentioned t+pazolite songs twice for the regular feature, it's time to go for the trifecta and summon this musical Beetlejuice thanks to a request from FlameboyGD in the comment section. This won the coin flip out of two candidates submitted by the same blog reader, so let's see and decide for yourselves on whether this was good or back luck...
This song here was released on Taito's Groove Coaster arcade line as the crown jewel of an HARDCORE TANO*C-based online event, intended to be a legit continuation of his former boss song from the same series: Marry me, Nightmare. As told by the artist himself in a two-tweet story, the original boss track for the music-coaster series was created around the will of putting as much elements from the hardest (at the time) songs in the game as possible from the nicknamed E.G.G. (aka Hirokazu 'COSIO' Koshio), but in the end he "messed up and ended up making a song with a straight rhythm". With that in mind, Marry me, Nightmare's sequel song came to be with the pure idea of "making a Groove Coaster boss song with the t+pazolite style unleashed", but still retaining the spooky vibes from the original piece. A long version of Good Night, Bad Luck has been released for t+pazolite's Refactoring Travel (リファクタリング・トラベル) album, and later on the same artist uploaded it for his own Youtube channel (link).
Truth to be told, this one Wish List pick was actually supposed to come out last week, which I had to postpone to today due to some really recent music sharing development! This ending week, in fact, has saw the beginning of a second collaboration within Taito's ongoing music game series with Marvelous's WACCA, which also ended up getting Good Night, Bad Luck as a transplanted crossover track (link).
Life Is Like A Sky Dred Foxx ???When talking on this blog's features about a song origins, we generally start from the song itself up to see where it (or its artists) did branch out afterwards; thanks to a curiously-worde3d submission from blog reader BobRocks20, however, we're going the other way around for a change!
What I've been tasked for is to feature any given track from 1999's September 22nd album I Scream!, published under the SME Visual Works Ind. label and starring Lukan "Dred Foxx" Outdawzman. He's credited as John Simpson III, but what the more seasoned PlayStation players might better recall him for is his voicework in developer NanaOn-Sha's PaRappa the Rapper rhythm games, voicing the eponymous dog Parappa as well as his singing performances in the games. Each track from the I Scream! album, in turn, all happen to be rap pieces that branch outside the rapping dog's games, as these actually are all song remixes from another NanaOn-Sha rhythm game from the PlayStation: Um Jammer Lammy, originally released worldwide between March and September 1999, roughly 2 years after the original PaRappa game's debut in Japan and 2 years before the same game's sequel for PlayStation 2. All three games have their titular characters show off their musical talent with well-timed inputs to go along the other rap and music masters they meet along the way.
Life Is Like A Sky is the remixed version of Um Jammer Lammy's Stage 4 song Fright Flight!!, where guitar player Lammy is off to learn how to fly a plane in order not to be late to perform on her own concert. Like in the PaRappa games, a very accurate performance on top of some well-timed adlib might even lead to a harder portion where Lammy will perform solo instead of following a master's lead!
One Thing RWBY ???Wrapping things up for today is a song request from an unnamed blog commentator, drawing from the same web animation pool where the earwormingly-infamous Yawaraka Sensha was also fished out!
One Thing comes from the animed-styled American web animation series RWBY, created in 2013 for the Roster Teeth Productions company by the late Montyreak "Monty" Ohm. Set in the fantasy Remnant world, young people train themselves as warriors in order to repel the Grimm monsters that threaten the world's safety. Among the world's many hunters and huntresses, the series is focused on the 4-members team RWBY, named after the first letter of its members' names and respective color motif (Ruby/Red, Weiss/White, Blake/Black and Yang/Yellow). Despite the show creator's untimely passing during the production of the show's third season (or Volume 3), the project managed to pull it through to eitght Volumes up to November 2020, with a 9th one being currently in production, backed up by a generous span of related videogames and manga/light novel adaptations and spinoffs to keep itself sustained as a multimedia project.
Rooster Teeth regular Jeff Williams is behind the RWBY web animation series' music composition, often backed by other artists as singers... including his very daughter Casey Lee! The two relatives are also the main performers of the song One Thing, premiered in the Volume 6's fifth episode ('The Coming Storm') as an insert song and later on featured on the RWBY Volume 6 official soundtrack on June 28th, 2019.
