This seems like a pretty niche genre, but does anyone know of any 8/16 bit karaoke games? The one example I have already on my computer is a Taiwanese one for the Famicom that I happened to see when I was looking through Chinese rom sites. I made a video just now playing a few songs.
For comparison, here’s the original versions of the songs I played. (Edit: after posting these I discovered that when I try playing the embedded version I get a “Video unavailable” error (for copyright reasons?), so you’ll probably have to click on the video title in the top left corner to watch them on YouTube.)
The first one was 妳知道我在等妳嗎 (Do you Know I Am Waiting). It was maybe a bad choice for the first song to play, since the chiptune rendition was long and kind of boring, but I guess it doesn’t sound bad. I appreciate that the guitar solo was preserved! (In some form at least.)
The second was 春風吻上我的臉 (The spring wind kisses my face). I suspect that this was based on some 80s or 90s cover of the song that I can’t find on Youtube, since it sounds very different from the original, though the lyrics are clearly the same. (In case you’re confused, the lyrics in the following video are read from right to left.)
The last one was 其實我還是有些在乎 (Actually, I still care a little). I think the chiptune version sounds pretty good!
I like that each song has some tiny looping animation that has nothing to do with the music. From what I’ve seen, it looks like each animation is unique, there aren’t any repeats at all. Playing through this game makes me imagine an alternate universe where instead of YouTube, or even MTV, the only way to watch music videos of any kind is to go the store and buy a Famicom cartridge that has an 8-bit version of the songs you want on there with weird looping animations.
Anyway, there must be a whole bunch of these right? I imagine most of them aren’t on YouTube at all. If you know of any, it would be neat if you could record a few minutes and maybe try to find videos of the original songs.
