Worse Than Whack-A-Mole with a Headache and Two Left Feet

Music and rhythm video games are often some of the most popular and entertaining titles on the market, and only the most stoic and socially awkward people can fail to enjoy a round of Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero every so often. With this in mind—and my ears still ringing from playing too much Guitar Hero III—I really wanted to like Ontamarama, the latest music game to be released for the Nintendo DS.

But after about a half hour of playing, I quickly developed severe nasal congestion, a throbbing headache, and a crippling cough that ended up lasting over two weeks. While the causality of my illness cannot necessarily be assigned directly to Ontamarama, I can say with certainty that the game’s crappiness probably didn’t do much to aid my recovery. Put simply, Ontamarama is a poor game that is saddled with aggravating gameplay and a horrible soundtrack, and it’s absolutely not worth your time.

The gameplay in Ontamarama—a strange mix of Dance Dance Revolution and Whack-a-Mole—is, frankly, too difficult for its own good. The main action of the game takes place on the DS’s lower screen, which houses both a series of scrolling directional arrows and an empty space where weird little puff-ball creatures called “Ontama” pop up.

Your job as the unfortunate player of this game is to keep track of and coordinate these two separate areas. You have to tap the little creatures with the DS’s stylus as they pop up while at the same time pressing the directional buttons to match the scrolling directional icons. In other words, you have to do some serious multi-tasking.

Since most human beings can only focus on one thing at a time, a gameplay mechanism that forces the player to constantly switch back and forth between two separate areas of attention will undoubtedly be conducive to missing button presses, failing levels over and over again, and endless aggravation. Some (namely masochists) might find this trial-and-error gameplay entertaining, but the vast majority of people will likely give up in frustration.

And yet Ontamarama verges on evil in the way it lures you in, as the first few levels are almost too easy. But by the fifth or sixth—especially on the “normal” and “hard” difficulty settings—the flurry of literally dozens of simultaneously appearing arrows to push and Ontamas to tap makes the game so difficult that it seems to require a split consciousness.

To make matters worse, Ontamarama also falls flat on its face where rhythm games need to shine most—the music. In addition to the fact that its generic mix of synthesized pop, rap, and jazz is totally uninspired—not to mention that the audio quality sounds about as good as a tape-recording of a scratched record played through bootlegged Chinese headphones—the actual gameplay doesn’t synch up to the music at all.

Unlike other rhythm games, which time button-presses with the riffs and melody of the music, your taps on the touch screen in Ontamarama correlate in no way to the nuances of the songs playing in the background. The result is a rhythm game with almost no rhythm.

In the end, this game is about as fun as smashing your head against a wall. Let’s be honest: who wants to buy a music game that’s ridiculously hard, has a terrible soundtrack, and has gameplay that doesn’t actually have anything to do with the music? Ontamarama is only good if you want to give someone the proverbial middle finger and screw them over with a terrible birthday present. And while some may argue that it’s unfair to compare a handheld music game to something like Guitar Hero because the latter has the advantage of a special guitar controller, the fact of the matter is that a crappy game is a crappy game, no matter what system it’s on.