It's Thursday once again and this week we travel back to 2009, a time when the videogame world was on the verge of an entirely new genre – Future Tapping Games. 

The Wii was home to many quirky and never before seen types of games but none quite caught my attention and imagination like Yuji Naka's Let's Tap. After all, even penguins can play.

After years of hitting tennis balls in Wii Sports, swinging ghosts in Mario Galaxy and jerking in a suggestive manner to re-charge our beam sword in No More Heroes, it was almost certain the Wii Remote had been used in every way imaginable but it seems the best was yet to come. Wii Motion Plus was just around the corner but in true Yuji Naka style, he proved that SEGA do what Nintendon't by shunning the new Motion Plus hysteria and found an entirely new way to use the already established Wii Remote. Prope heralded a new way to play – in a future tapping way.

Concept

By placing the Wii Remote down on a cardboard box, your fingers are turned into the controller as the vibrations from your tap get translated into on-screen actions. It sounds ludicrously stupid and pretty rubbish but works really well and is used in a bunch of interesting ways.

First you'll be taught how to navigate the menus with your taps, with one tap moving the cursor onto another item and a double tap clicking it, like an invisible mouse – I was really impressed just at this menu screen but perhaps I'm just easily pleased... the fantastic tutorial music probably helped with my impressionable mind too.

Future Tapping Games

Let's Tap offers five different games but you'll be mainly interested in two – Tap Runner and Rhythm Tap. Tap Runner has you lightly tap in rhythm to make your on-screen character run, with each tap registering as a single leg movement, so slowly building up a steady rhythm of light taps really ramps up your characters speed, but as soon as you get out of that rhythm or change the strength of your taps too much, your character starts stumbling around like a drunk lady in stilettos. Whilst keeping your steady rhythm of light taps, hard taps will make your character jump but don't be fooled, keeping a good running rhythm along with timed jumps is harder than it sounds. Pitted against another three colourful racers, you're tasked with tap jumping your way to victory over loads of fun obstacle courses taking place in what looks like an 80's vision of the future.

Rhythm Tap is the second of the two main modes and my favourite by far, combining the new-found play style of Let's Tap with two of my most beloved Rhythm game series, Taiko No Tatsujin and Donkey Konga. Three different symbols scroll across the screen, light, medium and heavy taps, along with elongated versions of each symbol signifying a drum roll (or I guess, tap roll) to the beat of what I can genuinely call some of the best videogame music I've ever heard. If you're a fan of any of SEGA's other soundtracks then you have to give this a listen as it's up there with the likes of Sonic R and Space Channel 5 - and available on iTunes!

In a Throwback Thursday first and as a sign of my love for this game I've uploaded all the Rhythm songs on YouTube for you to check out... well, nearly all of them - You'll have to play a bit of Let's Catch to unearth some truly hidden gems.

Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

The other modes include a really awesome Balloon Trip style game which has a jet-pack laden man fly his way through an endless amount of obstacles in a bid to get the highest score, with a single tap giving him a burst upwards before he comes falling back down, a Jenga-type game where you're tasked with choosing a block to knock out of a giant tower by lightly tapping it out without causing the whole thing to topple over and finally, an interactive picture mode, possibly the least exciting of the bunch, which has your taps change whatever is on-screen, such as a water ripple in a pond of fish or launching a firework across a night sky.

Yuji Naka and Prope

For years Yuji Naka was top of his game at SEGA, creating some of their most iconic characters such as NiGHTS and the world-renowned Sonic The Hedgehog but Naka finally decided to leave the company to form his own small development studio, Prope, in order to have more creative freedom. Let's Tap was the first title to come out of Prope and was published by SEGA.

Tap and Beyond

I really love this team as every game has such a unique charm about it. Releasing at the same time as Let's Tap was Let's Catch, a game that simply required you to throw a ball back and forth to an on-screen character with your Wii Remote. Whilst the gameplay was simple, the true beauty of the game was the conversations you'd have with characters over your games of catch, slowly learning more about them and unravelling their life-story as time goes by.

Outside of the Nintendo bubble, Prope released Flick Pig for iOS which features a bunch of really cute, colourful pigs running down a track whilst you flick them on top of one another to catch items high in the sky. I remember reading about that game just before getting my first iPhone and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it, so much so that it was the first app I ever downloaded, before even Facebook or Twitter.

Finally, Prope released Rodea the Sky Soldier late last year, Yuji Naka's vision of what a 3D NiGHTS game could be like, and a couple of N-E staff members have their mitts on the Wii and Wii U versions of that so keep your eyes out for the final verdict around these parts soon.

Final Tap

Finding its way into bargain bins country-wide, Let's Tap was a misunderstood creature that didn't take the world of party games by storm quite like Yuji Naka had hoped, but for those that experienced it upon release, it still has a firm grip on our hearts to this day. 

If you're a fan of SEGA, especially in their most experimental Dreamcast era, then you owe it to yourself to discover just what a future tapping game really is, so let's end this nostalgic trip with a listen to one of the best theme songs ever created, Tap De Papapaya!