This is a totally not April Fools and very serious submission of American Idol for the GBA. It was on the list of potential TAS ideas on this site so I feel it's justified. However, I decided to throw a wrinkle into it...

American Idol is, for some reason, a game. Due to the GBA not being able to use a microphone, you don't actually sing. You hit buttons in a rhythm game style. When you hit correct notes, the singing is awful. When you MISS a note, the singing becomes so bad that it often leads to hilarious results. It's not like Guitar Hero where it goes plunk, the pitch modulation actually changes. By hitting just enough notes to pass each song, we can strategically miss other notes that are funnier. All the while we're aiming for optimal time with perfect menuing and song choices.

Male singer was chosen because it saves a menu and his singing is worse than the female. I'm sorry/you're welcome in advance.

Samsara: i looked up a list of american idol winners to try and make a joke about one of them and the only thing i realized is that i'm probably more famous than some of these people, and also i am like 60% sure that the picture of taylor hicks they used is actually a picture of paul hollywood. are they twins??? is this American Identical???

Samsara: I feel like my primary judgement joke this year is going to be "OH MY GOD, WHY DID I CLAIM 40 RUNS AFTER FIGHTING TO MAKE SO MANY MORE THINGS ACCEPTABLE", and hopefully that's okay, because at the same time there are still going to be runs that completely slip through the crack of acceptability, or cracceptability as we call it in the biz (hawk).

Under the current rules as of April 24th, 2022, holy crap I've been sitting on these runs for 3 weeks, rhythm games are still something that we're not accepting. We do have Playground now, but one of the main points we want to stress with PG is that it should not be a replacement for Vault, i.e it should never be a "last resort" for games that wouldn't have made it onto the site otherwise, i.e it should never be the only place an entire game can be published. I absolutely love the approach to this run, it's a fantastic joke, but it is at most borderline at the moment, and given the current state of the site (we're STILL adjusting to the changes, focusing heavily on maintenance, and we're in need of new staff to help with the very crowded workbench) there isn't much time to discuss the potential of accepting rhythm games at the moment.

We do intend to continue overhauling the rules, of course, but that will take a community discussion and a lot of reminders to certain Samsaras that they're literally in charge of rules now and can definitely do some overhauling once they have more time to spare. For now, though, those certain Samsaras are still neck deep in AFD submissions and would at least like to get to waist deep before they pass out, and that's going to require a few sacrifices.

Keep an eye out for rule changes in the future, though!

also we really need to overhaul the lists of ideas holy h*ck in a h*ndbasket