| paleface [sys=PSP; cat=Action_Variety; reg=JPN] |
| | | Insane minigame collection built around the notion of working part time jobs for the "Beit Devil." "Beit," or "baito," apparently means "part time job" in Japanese. I see most people romanizing it as "baito," but the little English instruction slip included in the packaging has it "beit," so there you go. Apparently there was a predecessor to this collection, with some of the same games, for PS1, called "Denki Guru Guru Jigoku V," or, more popularly, "Groove Jigoku V."
So, when you start the game, you fill out a little employee profile, then check your email. I can't read any of the emails, really, and I'm not sure why they pop up at certain times, but it seems like I have a few "internet" friends or companies who keep emailing me wacky little messages.
Then you go see the Beit Devil. He gives you a random selection of four minigames, or rather part time jobs, to play--er, work. I think there are 40 in all, but most of them you have to unlock. All the games I've seen have very simple controls, ideal for the PSP's D-pad and buttons. Many of them are just one button. They all load quickly, have sharp 2D graphics, usually either in a spare geometric style, or using digitized images, and have clear button control diagrams. And they're all insane.
The jobs I have so far include the following:
- A baseball job where you work as a guy fielding balls at batting practice . The batter starts getting wilder and wilder as you keep stopping his balls. Let three get by you and you're out.
- A job in a pen factory, putting caps on pens that come along a conveyor belt. The score readout for this thing has enough digits to go up to googleplux or something. You cap pens one at a time, and some have to be rotated to face the right way first. I think you get one or two yen per pen. You just go until you have to stop.
- A job picking mushrooms from the middle of a busy multilane road.
- A job counting people walking down the sidewalk. They come from both directions, and you have to be careful not to count non-people, like dogs and aliens. You have a "Doom guy" head in the lower middle of the screen that breathes heavily when a lot of people are running by.
- A job chopping wood for an old woman. Sometimes she accidentally puts out a cute fuzzy animal, like a baby dolphin, and you have to NOT chop those, or it's game over (messily). Your character looks like a demented Mario, in what must be an intentional parody (in 2P, the other chopper looks like demented Luigi).
- A job sorting baby chickens. Normal peepers go in the middle crate, chicks with red bows go in the lower crate, and angelic blue chicks go in the top crate. Do this for ten minutes, then collect your pay.
- A Fire Prorestling parody, in which your wrestler gets pinned, and you have to kick out at the last possible moment. Do this three times, then you knock the guy out and collect your pay.
- A job as a student, stabbing a shiv down on the desk between your splayed-out fingers. Mess up and you stab yourself in extremely painful-looking and sounding fashion.
- A job taking people from buildings to the safe spot in the middle of the city, while avoiding thick enemy patrols.
For doing each job, you get a certain amount of Yen, generally varying depending on how well you did at the job, and how long you worked. You then take this money to a gumball-machine mode, where you plunk it into gumball machines of escalating price, hoping to they'll give you a plastic ball containing a new game. Usually, you get a little plastic doo-dad toy (these are stored on a collection page, and you can trade them via WiFi). Sometimes you'll get a game you already have. It will probably take me forever to get all the games.
Some of the games have 2P WiFi, but the ones I've played that way haven't been all that thrilling for two-players; for instance, in the wood-chopping one, you now just have two choppers instead of one. Maybe some of the later ones are better, who knows.
Oh! And there are a dozen or so "tools" you get, too. These are little utility programs of dubious value. For instance, "Light" just turns your screen a full, bright color. The manual shows someone holding it up to a plant in a dark room. Then there's one that puts up a pair of usually weird eyeballs on the screen, so you can hold your PSP in front of your eyes, screen-outward, and freak out your stupider friends. There are others I can't quite understand, I think one calculating tips, one counting something or other, some kind of love calculator, and so forth.
There's one where you answer some questions, and then get a vertical-screen video of a man or a woman in a bathing suit, talking to you in a flirtacious manner. The man is a buffed-out Japanese dude, and apparently his favorite thing is to flex his tanned and oiled-up pecks alternately while smiling right at the camera and saying "muscle muscle."
Insanity. But the "jobs" are maddening fun, and the earning/collecting aspect is addictive enough to keep you coming back. It's an ideal portable game, with a huge variety of short-term action games. One of the best games on the system. |
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| | | | Released as the rather tastelessly named "WTF: Work Time Fun" in the States. |
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