So I decided to submit a stage of my own. There were a lot of other IP I considered for submission, but ultimately, there was one in particular that I was more interested in submitting. I hope you like seeing me gush about weird SEGA ****, cause that's all I'll be doing with this one:
Job #72: Apartment #203 from Roommania #203
So you may be asking yourself "the **** is a Roommania?". I shall explain.
Roommania #203 is a weird sort of life simulation game released for the Dreamcast in 2000. In it, you - the player - are following the life of a man named Neji Taihei, a college student who....kinda lives a whatever life. He spends most of his days just lazing around in his apartment, smoking and watching TV. And it's up to
you to make his existence more meaningful! (The game's words, not mine.) How do you do this? The game gives you a first-person view of Neji's day-to-day habits from various camera angles, and you just throw balls at objects to get him to try to interact with them! For example, you can keep chucking balls at the computer to get him to go on his favorite curry-themed message board. The game has an in-game calendar that lets you check in on his room at different days and times of day. It also gives you "missions" of sorts that are started up by cutscenes that give you hints as to what to do - all in the name of getting him to live life! I myself would recommend you check out a playthrough of the game, as even I feel like I can't do 100% justice to how this game works. But overall:
weird **** happens, and it's fascinating to see the results of your Wacky Shenanigans unfold.
This game very much falls in line with a lot of other games in the Dreamcast era, where you could see that SEGA were getting hella experimental - what with your Space Channel 5s and Jet Set Radios and Shenmues and Rezes and Napple Tales and so on. This even shows with some of their arcade games of the time, like Crazy Taxi. Also worth noting is that this game was actually mainly the work of one Tomoko Sasaki, a composer at SEGA who's best known for her work on the NiGHTS series (fun fact: she did the Ashley's Song remix for Brawl!), and we'll get back to her involvement in the game later. I think she actually once cited internet webcams as an inspiration for this game's gameplay loop, and I guess you could see it that way. It's also been described as more of an "intervention simulator" rather than your usual life simulation game. While the original game was for the Dreamcast, thus making it eligible for this job, the series actually had its last hurrah on the PS2, with not only a port of the original game, but a full-on sequel, titled New Roommania: Porori Seishun. Throughout all this, however, the series has remained without any international releases. I don't even know if there are any fan translations out there, to be honest!
So what about the stage itself? Well,
you fight in Neji's room. There are times in the game where he's not home, and the player gets to snoop around and even mess with some of his stuff. And as such, the fights we'll partake in here end up making a total mess of his room. Wanna knock your opponent into a computer, destroying it in the process? Go ahead, you can do just that in this stage! However, it
is a bit of a cramped place, and as such, the fighters would get a slight downscale here. Not outright tiny, but smaller than the average proportions of a human relative to the room. I'd put them at about the height of the table in the above image: small enough that the room can work as a platform fighter stage, but big enough that the appeal of Football Manager ****ing up some random dude's apartment in an intense battle to the death is still there. Even so, this would still be on the smaller side of this game's stage roster, which would make it all the more chaotic. But that's not just due to the stage's smaller size and breakable objects, as in fact, this stage actually has a hazard:
The player.
Back to what I said about how the game worked: as I'd said, it partly consisted of the player chucking balls at things to get Neji to interact with them, or to interact with them yourself. Well, you're not the only ones snooping around on his apartment while he's away: the player is here too. And as such, sometimes, a small warning sign will show up on a certain part of the stage - and a buncha balls start coming in from the foreground, damaging anyone who gets in their way!
So overall, this stage can be described as absolute madness. And how do you make all that really come together? With a healthy dose of
late 90s J-pop.
I obviously won't be putting any cohesive tracklists together just yet, but I do believe it's worth mentioning that this stage actually would have some pretty good music potential. You see, around this time, the aforementioned Tomoko Sasaki was working on a project with some other members of Wave Master, SEGA's in-house record label. Said project was a fake singer, named
Serani Poji. They released a few albums under that name, and it's an interesting part of SEGA history. However, there are two important things to note here - A. Tomoko composed Serani Poji's music, and B. most of her discography was actually featured in this very game! Since then, the works of Serani Poji have come to be widely associated with Roommania, which in a weird roundabout way, also makes this game feel strongly tied to the early days of Wave Master, which is still going to this day. So not only does it overall make for a pretty cool piece of history.....it also provides this stage with some pretty good music potential. Just fill it up with Serani Poji music! And trust me, there's some pretty good **** in there too.
So overall, I think this would make for a pretty cool stage. SEGA have still celebrated this game in small ways from time to time - for a recent example, Neji actually got his own 60th anniversary pfp when they rolled these out - so it's a sensible deep cut to make, all things considered. Anyway yeah it'd be epic I think
