When Trombone Champ came out on Steam last September, it was met with immediate internet hooplah. It’s a rhythm game like Guitar Hero, only you’re playing an unforgiving, brassy trombone. If you can’t get the hang of the game, you will be met with a comically awful trombone rendition of classic songs like “Auld Lang Syne” or a Beethoven symphony.
Now, this rootin’, tootin’, horn blowin’ game is coming to Nintendo Switch on Thursday. According to the trailer shown on the Nintendo Direct livestream, players can use two different methods of joy-con motion controls to play the trombone, which will only lead to more hilarious failures. In one control mode, you can move your hand in conjunction with your joy-con like it’s the slide on your trombone that you’re pushing back and forth. Or, you can just move the joy-con up and down. It’s very reminiscent of motion-controlled Wii games, which were a bit difficult to master.
Not everyone is so awful at Trombone Champ, though. Some people have modded the game to input hilariously difficult songs like “Megalovania” from the cult classic Undertale (see: one of my favorite videos on the internet). As one YouTube commenter said: “Internet rule 100: if it exists, there’s a Megalovania of it.”
And some people genuinely do love the game — a reviewer from PC Gamer earnestly said it was a game of the year contender.
“It’s not often I paste a short video of me playing a game into the PC Gamer work Slack and other writers immediately buy it on Steam,” the review reads. Finally, those of us without PCs can get in on the action.
On Steam, Trombone Champ sells for $14.99, with an aptly named expansion pack for $3.99, called “Wow I Might Refer To This As Tooting: The Trombone Champ Soundtrack Collection Vol. 1,” a play on the “Wow Now That’s What I Call Music” series. The pricing is the same on the Switch, but the expansion pack is not currently available.
At last, it’s time to live our brassy dreams. It’s probably harder to mod Trombone Champ on the Switch than on PC, so we’ll have to make due with the 50-ish available songs.