Tetsuya Komuro: Gaball Screen

The name of "Tetsuya Komuro" may not ring any bells, but he's actually one of the most succesful pop music producers of the '90s. Albums he has worked on adds up to 70 millions sales in Japan alone, and he's often credited for introducing dance music in the Japanese mainstream, shaping post-2000 J-pop in the process. He's collaborated with countless artists, from Western boy bands and Japanese idols to such legends as Jean-Michel Jarre, Nile Rodgers or Ryuichi Sakamoto. He is part of different acts such as the electro-dance band globe, as well as the synthpop group TM Network and the trance trio Gaball. Quite a career indeed.
t also happens that he decided to produce a video game when he was at the peak of his success, in 1996. The title was developed by an obscure studio called System Sacom that disappeared two years later. It was published by a Sony-owned record label called Antinos Records,which had only published pop idols singles on the system so far. Yup, singles, not games, but considering the imminent halt these "non-games" would come to, it probably wasn't all that succesful. Don't worry, though - Gaball Screen clearly is a real game. Well, sort of.

The game opens on a cutscene featuring Komuro himself, composing with his large synthesizer in his awful '90s CG hi-tech living room. He then suddenly stops playing his keyboard and opens a present box whose content reveals itself to be a pair of sports shoes, and just puts them aside on his sofa. Okay? He then decides to get up and score a three-pointer with his baske ball because, yeah, he has a basketball backboard in his living room and he does whatever the hell he wants to. Eventually, he just takes his briefcase and leaves. And you won't see him again for the rest of the adventure! That's right - he's not even the hero of his own game. But let's get back to that present box we mentioned earlier. Just after the door closes behind Komuro, one of the two shoes starts glowing and finally comes to life, for some reason. That thing then starts fooling around with Komuro's synthesizer, and it obviously ends badly. There is a short circuit or something and the whole thing has CDs bursting out. The sheepish shoe thus decides to amend his wrongdoings by chasing these stray CDs and get them all back by travelling between the different virtual worlds inside the synthesizer.
So yeah, you control a shoe. But not just any shoe - a flying shoe. You start in Komuro's living room, but there's nothing to do here - apart from scoring a three-pointer like your master - and the only thing you have left to do is dash toward the synthesizer's screen like in the intro. Once inside the instrument, you get to a menu that is actually a playlist of tracks produced by Komuro, seven in total. Each of these tracks is connected to a set of specific universes, but you can freely choose the order in which you complete them and leave anytime you want to get back to the menu.
To conclude, Gaball Screen is strange...