The soundtrack to Um Jammer Lammy rotated through my iPod yesterday and it got me thinking: why hasn’t there been an iPhone port or, um, homage? If you’ve never played it before (or the seminal PaRappa the Rapper), these games are arguably the granddaddies of the rhythm genre. They predated fancy guitar controllers and significant music licensing in video games. What you got instead was a hallucinogenic blend of Simon Says and Salvador Dali. Ninja onions and chainsaw beavers first give you a musical phrase (read: a rhythmic set of button presses) and you repeat it a moment later to make music. So the gameplay is basically an uncomplicated Guitar Hero and the story shares needles with Katamari Damacy.

You’d have to pare down the number of buttons for an iPhone port, but it’s easy to imagine how it would work. In fact, it might be one of the only button-style interfaces that would seriously work without tactile feedback. You’d hold your iPhone in its landscape orientation, but grip it a la Guitar Hero: On Tour. That is, the iPhone rests in your palm and your fingers curl around to touch four buttons along the top edge of the screen. The phrase bar scrolls along the play area below your fingers, and your grip keeps your fingers from accidentally wandering off the buttons. The accelerometer turns the effects (like distortion and reverb) on and off–it’d also be a pretty good way to spike your iPhone into the sidewalk, but what does that matter in the face of gestural controls? After that, it’s just you, your insecure lamb guitarist, and all the wacky you can handle.

You there, smirking in the back. You think you have a better idea?

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