Hideki Kubo’s Music Games

By: ithamore

On: April 11th, 2008

These are two acid techno music games by Hideki Kubo, which can be found on his Download page. In the first, vs Music, the main mode is Shooting[Play]. It pits the player against a single boss ship that has 3 lives, and the boss’s fire patterns are sequenced to the music. Movement of the ship is slower than I normally like, but the slowness also makes dodging that much more precise. Use C for continuous fire, X to clear the screen of shots with a bomb, and SPACE to get past the intro screen and to start a play mode.

Action Jockey, the second game, is a 2D, fixed screen jump-and-shmp. The available enemies and bosses are changed by adjusting mixer settings during the Acid Machine Phase. Of the 3 bosses, I’ve only been able to beat the Pong Paddle bosses so far, and it seems the game simply loops until you run out of hearts. You can fire with C and X can be used to jump, double jump, or slide (when your crouched).

More info on the other modes of vs Music and Action Jockey’s variations can be found below in the extended.

vs Music

Shooting[Loop]: an endurance mode similar to Shooting[Play] but with no time limit.

Music[Reco]: adjust the instruments and patterns for different parts of the ship’s firing using the arrow keys and C. When the counter gets to zero, your secession overwrites the replay.dat file. This is the data used for Shooting[Play], so you might want to backup the original.

Music[Loop]: you can experiment with the music with no time limit and exit with SPACE.

vs Battle: it’s described as a 2 player mode, but I don’t know what the 2nd player is suppose to be able to do.

Action Jockey:

In the Acid Machine Phase, pressing left or right long enough will change the first 2 music values respectively for the lead, and pressing up or down long enough will change the last 2 music values respectively for the drums. Also, Q will change the first value and W the last.

The last value seems to effect which boss you face. The easiest way to get to each of the 3 bosses (SPOILERS/TIPS after this parenthetical statement) is to set it to 00 for the Pong Paddles, which is the default after dieing;
01 for the Giant Doppleganger, which is the default for starting the game’s .exe; and 02 for the merciless Space Ship.

The other three values seem to effect which enemies the player will encounter. The 1st, 2nd, and 4th values can also be changed by moving too much or pressing Q or W, but it’s not quite clear if they have any more effect beyond changing the music during the Action Phase.