I found this at CompUSA last week for $10. It's for PSP, was called Beit Hell 2000 in Japan, and D3 Publisher released it here. I swear this has to be a parody on the whole distinguished mentally-challenged minigame/unlockable masturbatory phenomenon. It gives you a bunch of intentionally bad minigames to play, which earn you some pocket change. You spend the pocket change on vending machines, which give you either
a) pointless trinkets just like what you get from D-grade vending machines in real life,
b) lame utilities or tools that you can access from a menu (like a restaurant bill splitter, or a handy light [actually turns the PSP's screen a pure white], or a ramen timer [displays several minutes' worth of footage of either a jiggling girl in a bikini or an oiled-up dude in a speedo, also jiggling),
or c) more minigames.
Some of the minigames are really dire. You've probably heard of the one where you put caps on pens one after the other, occasionally flipping the pen over if it's pointing the wrong way. There's a Simon clone, a game where you stab the gaps in between the fingers on a hand like in Aliens, one where you sort chicks (into male/female/dead bins), one where you field batted balls and toss them to first base (but is really goddamned hard), a wood-chopping game where you have to hold back on the axe when cute animals get put on the stump, and so on. Most of them are really stinking hard and don't give you any kind of decent reward for the amount of work you have to do, so the key is to figure out which games give the best reward for the time investment.
So far, the most rewarding games I've played these:
- Waitress minigame where you take down customers' spoken orders on a PDA. This will make you hate restaurant customers forever, with the way they're always mumbling and changing their minds, but it's pretty satisfying.
- Game where you're in a seedy bar and have to guess the last four digits of a woman's phone number. You guess some digits and she'll tell you how many digits you got correct and in the right position, and how many you got correct and in the wrong position. Good money here, too.
- Protest rally minigame! You play an instigator who has to walk past buildings and collect up people to join your rally. They follow you in a long trail, and you lead them to the park where the rally's supposed to take place. Squads of riot cops will break up your followers, and if they catch you, it's game over. It all takes place on an overhead view like the old C64 Ghostbusters game. This one is genuinely fun, and it pays well, too.
There's a twisted, wry sense of humor about the whole thing. The game knows it's horrible, and it knows that it's addictive and that you'll keep playing despite the badness. The art is mostly really sloppy and ugly, and in most cases it's made to look like pixelated retro games. And yeah, I'm addicted. I'm working on the second bank of vending machines now (the ones that cost $5 per go) and trying to score some more profitable minigames. This is depressing! Stop me before I hurt myself!
