Work Time Fun
WTF indeed, this game is... well, you'll just have to read our hands-on impressions to find that out.
Published: August 28, 2006
It's rare that we get a game -- for any platform -- that is so utterly bizarre it's almost insulting, yet somehow keeps us coming back for more. Work Time Fun is that game -- a simple set of menial tasks that earn you nothing more than chump change which you can then spend on... useless trinkets and more games. Seriously. That's it. Preview over.
We won't even go so far as to say there's more to it than that. There are more jobs, and we'll get into them in a second, but it really can't be overstated how simplistic the game really is, and in a way, it almost feels like the developers at Sony Computer Entertainment Japan just got drunk or high one night and decided to make something with bizarro appeal as some kind of massive in-joke.
Luckily, it seems like they succeeded in their inebriated goal. WTF not only lives up to the acronym beautifully, offering up mini-games that are completely random and at times as pointless as they are hilarious, but it surrounds things with a whacked out idea of what it must be like to be stuck in hell, toiling away for pennies just so you can trade them in for more mini-games -- or useless items. It sounds stupid, and in a way, it kind of is, but it's also relentlessly addictive in short bursts.
So here's the basic breakdown as we understood it. Jobs are taken from the Placement Office. On any given "work day," you're given a choice of four randomly selected mini-games, almost all of which use as few as a single button to actually play. Picking a game gives you an intro screen where you can get some basic instructions, back out, or head into the game. We chopped wood (and small, cute little woodland creatures, which ended the game in a hilarious, bloody mess), led a little guy across a busy multi-lane street while scooping up mushrooms, capped pens (yes, seriously, that was the entire game), played chicken in a cliff race, sorted chickens by sex (and, uh, whether they were alive or not), and so on.
In fact, that paragraph could have stretched on for about 3000 more words but we like to pretend like we practice proper writing technique around here, so we'll cut things off there. For all the jobs, you're paid a small amount of money -- usually a couple bucks at most, and often a few cents the first time you try something out as you learn how to play. This cash is spent in a handful of vending machines in varying price levels; $1, $5, $10 or $50. The prizes you'll get from the vending machines are entirely random, so it can be something as useless as a little trinket, or as helpful as another mini-game.
You can also "win" one of the game's other little quirky bonuses: real-world "tools" like a flashlight, a ramen timer, a world clock, a bill splitter, a pair of eyes that you can hold up to your face, and so on. None of them are terribly useful -- or at least weren't to any of us in the office -- but the fact that they were there was nice. And hey, the flashlight cycles through screens of solid color, so it actually helped us get our stuck pixels unstuck. They weren't dead after all, hooray!
As you play though the mini-games, you'll get random e-mails from characters in the world. These are usually fairly useless little bits of chuckle-worthy content, but there are rare occasions when you'll get a hint about what a particular game might throw at you. You'll also be notified via e-mail of any awards you've won in the game -- be they positive or negative. You'll be recognized for capping pens or catching balls or completing races, but by the same token you can be "rewarded" for screwing up enough times too.
The multi-player sections are handled really interestingly. Accessed from the Hell Cantina, it's here that Ad Hoc games can be played with friends, trinkets that can be traded (if that's your thing), or, in a fun little bit of profiteering, you can use game sharing to loan out some of the jobs to friends' PSPs, then collect tax on all the hard work they put into the game to help you pocket more money.
It remains to be seen how much fun the game will be in the long term, but the sheer quirkiness and absurdity of the jobs coupled with some nice creativity and incredibly varied (but strictly low-budget) visual design add up to a package that's hard to deny. We'll have a full review of the game when it hits soon, but hopefully we've given you a peek into exactly what WTF is -- even if we can't tell you the why.
We won't even go so far as to say there's more to it than that. There are more jobs, and we'll get into them in a second, but it really can't be overstated how simplistic the game really is, and in a way, it almost feels like the developers at Sony Computer Entertainment Japan just got drunk or high one night and decided to make something with bizarro appeal as some kind of massive in-joke.
Luckily, it seems like they succeeded in their inebriated goal. WTF not only lives up to the acronym beautifully, offering up mini-games that are completely random and at times as pointless as they are hilarious, but it surrounds things with a whacked out idea of what it must be like to be stuck in hell, toiling away for pennies just so you can trade them in for more mini-games -- or useless items. It sounds stupid, and in a way, it kind of is, but it's also relentlessly addictive in short bursts.
So here's the basic breakdown as we understood it. Jobs are taken from the Placement Office. On any given "work day," you're given a choice of four randomly selected mini-games, almost all of which use as few as a single button to actually play. Picking a game gives you an intro screen where you can get some basic instructions, back out, or head into the game. We chopped wood (and small, cute little woodland creatures, which ended the game in a hilarious, bloody mess), led a little guy across a busy multi-lane street while scooping up mushrooms, capped pens (yes, seriously, that was the entire game), played chicken in a cliff race, sorted chickens by sex (and, uh, whether they were alive or not), and so on.
In fact, that paragraph could have stretched on for about 3000 more words but we like to pretend like we practice proper writing technique around here, so we'll cut things off there. For all the jobs, you're paid a small amount of money -- usually a couple bucks at most, and often a few cents the first time you try something out as you learn how to play. This cash is spent in a handful of vending machines in varying price levels; $1, $5, $10 or $50. The prizes you'll get from the vending machines are entirely random, so it can be something as useless as a little trinket, or as helpful as another mini-game.
You can also "win" one of the game's other little quirky bonuses: real-world "tools" like a flashlight, a ramen timer, a world clock, a bill splitter, a pair of eyes that you can hold up to your face, and so on. None of them are terribly useful -- or at least weren't to any of us in the office -- but the fact that they were there was nice. And hey, the flashlight cycles through screens of solid color, so it actually helped us get our stuck pixels unstuck. They weren't dead after all, hooray!
As you play though the mini-games, you'll get random e-mails from characters in the world. These are usually fairly useless little bits of chuckle-worthy content, but there are rare occasions when you'll get a hint about what a particular game might throw at you. You'll also be notified via e-mail of any awards you've won in the game -- be they positive or negative. You'll be recognized for capping pens or catching balls or completing races, but by the same token you can be "rewarded" for screwing up enough times too.
The multi-player sections are handled really interestingly. Accessed from the Hell Cantina, it's here that Ad Hoc games can be played with friends, trinkets that can be traded (if that's your thing), or, in a fun little bit of profiteering, you can use game sharing to loan out some of the jobs to friends' PSPs, then collect tax on all the hard work they put into the game to help you pocket more money.
It remains to be seen how much fun the game will be in the long term, but the sheer quirkiness and absurdity of the jobs coupled with some nice creativity and incredibly varied (but strictly low-budget) visual design add up to a package that's hard to deny. We'll have a full review of the game when it hits soon, but hopefully we've given you a peek into exactly what WTF is -- even if we can't tell you the why.