Work Time Fun (PSP)

While WTF had always intrigued me, I'd never set out to buy it.  All reports said it was Warioware but incredibly boring.  They were kind of right and kind of wrong.

It was originally released in Japan as Baito Hell 2000.  I believe the Japanese story is your in hell, and need to work off your eternal damnation by playing minigames.  Unlike Warioware you choose what game you play next, though only 4 at a time.  I ended up sending it back to Gamefly, because although I had "won" more minigames, in the next twenty minutes I didn't get a chance to play any of them.

One game has you putting pen tops on pens.  Sometimes you need to flip the pen to the correct direction before you put the pen on it.  There is no time limit.  There is a counter made of digits the entire length of the PSP screen.  The counter is easily past trillions (100,000,000,000,000) .  You keeping putting pens on caps for as long as you want.  I ended up completing about 300 pens and got 5 dollars for my efforts. 

Another is chopping wood.  This counter is thankfully only 3 digits.  However, your grandma sometimes switches out the wood for a cute animal (dolphin, puppy, kitty) which if you press a button is brutally sliced in half and accompanied by incense and the chants of monks.  I haven't proceeded beyond 20 logs, because the rhythm I get from chopping is so precise that my brain doesn't register don't touch anything when the cute bastard comes on screen.

Then there is a people counter.  You press square for every person passing by on screen.  Or every HUMAN.  There's also various vehicles, space aliens, animals, etc also crowding the screen.  This is a play on a very real job for homeless people in Japan.  They have about 5 different counters and click for each of the demographics that are passing by.  It's in invaluable marketing data for the foottraffic heavy Japanese cities.  It's also a thankless and low paying job because homeless guys are the ones usually doing it.  In game, it proceeds in rounds.  You are allowed to quit after each round of spotting the correct number of humans.  If you mis-count you don't get any money at all.

The concept of each minigame is usually boring, though the graphics and sound design for each is perfect.  The baseball one looks almost like a Famicom game (the player's avatar has 5 colors instead of 4 though.)  The wrestling game looks exactly like Fire Pro Wrestling and even has Japanese "these are our sponsors" before the match.  The people counter and lumber chopping games are hideous pixel illustrations.  Some of the games are Terry Gilliam.  Each of them has exquisite sound design.

WTF is monotonous though.  You are doing something simple over and over again for little to no reward.  I wouldn't call it boring though.  It's just distracting.  Distract from your boring life by playing this game about monotony.  I'd say it's definitely worth sitting down with for 30 minutes, and it's only 4.99  on the US Playstation Network.  Another reason I sent it back to Gamefly.  If  I was going to play it again, I should at least give the guys 5 dollars for the pleasure.

distracting.