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Trombone Champ’s triumph is making failure fun in a rhythm gameAlso the farty trombone noises, those are a triumph too
Also the farty trombone noises, those are a triumph too
Everyone’s talking aboutTrombone Champ. Not since Untitled Goose Game have I heard this muchexcited chatabout a game from pals who don’t usually talk about games. This is because: 1) it’s a fun silly idea; 2) it’s very funny to miss a trombone note and squeal out a farty toot in the middle of Also Sprach Zarathustra. As I play Trombone Champ myself, I come to really appreciate that. It’s a rare rhythm game where playing badly doesn’t frustrate or berate me, because the worst-case scenario is making fart noises, and fart noises are funny.
Farting through Take Me Out to the Ball Game in Trombone ChampWatch on YouTube
Farting through Take Me Out to the Ball Game in Trombone Champ
Trombone Champ is a simple rhythm game. As notes scroll in along the timeline from the right, moving your mouse up and down changes the pitch of your trombone, and clicking or hitting a keyboard key blows it. So just try to do that well. The musical selection is mostly old public domain songs (including Skip To My Lou, O Canada, God Save The King, and a blast of Beethoven’s Fifth) with a few quirky fun original songs thrown in (one is named simply Baboons!, exclamation mark and all). It’s hard at first, and some songs stay hard, but that’s fine.
While Trombone Champ does take dexterity to master, especially on fast and complex songs, it broadly wants you to progress without becoming super frustrated. Even rubbish tooting scores pretty well because it is, at heart, a comedy game—and not just because of the farty noises). It opens with a cinematic cutscene parodyingDark Souls, and has a hidden story with secrets and mysteries and unlockables and baboons for you to discover. It awards your tooting with points to buy shiny trading cards of musicians and musical concepts (and a surprising number of hot dogs). Loading screens offer daft trombone facts. Daft animations play during songs. It wants you to discover silly things and laugh along the way.
Just tromboner stuff, don’t worry about it
In games likeGuitar Hero, fumbling a note can cause a wince-inducing stringslap or feedback shriek. Play badly and the crowd might boo, and if you play badly enough the game might end the song and kick you off stage. And many rhythm games are so focused on high scores, staggering challenges, or perfect play that small mistakes feel amplified. This is not the physical relationship I have with music, as a dancer so enthusiastic and reckless that I once broke my own nose dancing to Total Eclipse Of The Heart. So it’s great in Trombone Champ when I fumble a note then the game makes a silly noise and pushes me to tootle on without worry. I am delighted with the silly noise. The silly noise only makes me feel good.
It is, after all, very funny when something makes a fart noise.
I must warn that something about Trombone Champ feels completely wrong to my eyes, hands, and brain. Even after a lot of fiddling with mouse sensitivity and input latency in the settings menu, I can’t make timings feel right and my eyes start spinning within a few songs. Just like in life, I can only fart for so long before worrying something is really wrong. That’s certainly my excuse for the fart noises filling my office today.
