The aesthetic may be joyously flippant, but exacting tests of rhythm underpin the absurdities. In another, you must help whales swat an ambitious bunny rabbit to the moon ("an absurd dream") by swiping their slick tails in harmony. In one you must pluck hairs as they sprout from the chins of a succession of onions, each one painted with a face ("there's no crop like a well-groomed crop," says the farmer, on successful completion of the task.) In another you play as a slab of concrete, thrusting your belly upwards to create a little molehill whenever a basketball rolls over you, in an effort to fling the ball through a nearby basket. Rhythm Paradise Megamix's best jokes, however, are found within the microgames proper. There's comparatively little text in the game, but each new character you meet on your ascent is written with vivid wit (take, for example, Saffron, Saltwater and Paprika, druids who could have stepped from a deleted scene in The Princess Bride, arguing, as they do, about which has the best ominous patois). Nintendo's translators once again reveal themselves to be some of the finest and funniest working today. Clear each with a passable score, and you can move to the next tier of the tree, and edge Tibby back home.
Each of the tree's tiers of branches holds four microgames. You do this, at Tibby's suggestion, by climbing a massive tree. The story - and, as the game points out, with typical irreverence, it's not "one of these big serious stories" ("you won't be quizzed on it") - is that you must help Tibby, a bear with rosy cheeks and pink afro, back to heaven, from where he's fallen. This series, in which you play, not as Kurt Cobain or Paul McCartney but as a microscopic amoeba, swimming with friends in elegant unison, or as an English interpreter for a Martian octopus, marches on, fortissimo.
Rock Band, Guitar Hero and all the other rock-posturing others clutter under-stair cupboards and garages. It's an approach that has served Nintendo's designers well. Rhythm Paradise is a series that seeks to capture these joyous rhythmic oddities in microgames. There's the ticking of the clock, holding down an unwavering 60bpm till the end of time, or, at least, of batteries. There are the seasons - four beats of the bar that comprise each year. There's the plip-plipping of raindrops on a tin roof, the wobble and throb of a lorry engine idling in traffic, and the wash of timpani whenever a wave hurls itself onto pebbles, fatally. Listen carefully and you'll soon notice how existence is filled with rhythmic flourishes. Much more than a mere 'Best Of' compilation, Rhythm Heaven Megamix is a tour-de-force of microscopic, rhythmic ingenuity.
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