 The betting stations are now officially closed. The insertcredit.com GAME OF THE YEAR is officially Nintendo's Common Sense Training for Adults for the Nintendo DS. It meets the criteria for a great many reasons. Here are just a few of them:
1. It isn't out yet (released October 26th, 2006, for 3,800 yen).
2. I haven't played it.
3. I'm probably not going to play it, either.
4. It's totally in Japanese.
5. It might change the world.
Allow me to go off on a tangent and elaborate why this game is so brilliant. See -- much like the Brain Training series of games, this game is by Nintendo and it plays like a multivitamin. A little bit each day. You answer ten questions a day, and then the game tells you if you're becoming a better person or a worse person or what. Only this game isn't testing your mathematics skills -- no, it's testing to see if you're a an inconsiderate moron, a jerk, a know-nothing jerk, or just a run-of-the-mill jackass.
The picture to your left is one of the game's 1,800 questions. The question reads: "When riding in a taxi with three other passengers, which seat do you offer to the most valuable passenger?"
Previous copy written on the game had said the game would "test players' common sense"; at the earliest stage, the game was set up as interesting. Then the "common sense" became "common knowledge", and I got kind of worried. The first screenshot showed a picture of a man in a wig and four clickable buttons. The question was "Which one of these compositions is by Mozart?" I thought, well, that's kind of clever. Still, though, I'd rather the game be a drill on common sense.
Well, today's orgy of screenshots on GAME Watch brings the hope back. This game is a world-breaker. I type this, excitedly, just six minutes before the Nintendo Wii announce-everything press conference here in Tokyo. It doesn't matter what they say there! Not to me!
I reckon that anyone who needs this game right here wouldn't have the common sense to buy it. And anyone who wants it has already admitted they're lacking in knowledge, which indicates a desire to improve. Therefore, this game is one that, upon being merely touched by the player, is completed, which makes it, quite abstractly, the greatest videogame ever created. To wit:
Dear You, that guy in my company who gets on the elevator at floor eleven and stands right in front of the doors: people push past you to get out. You notice them and apologize profusely, like your mother taught you, to all of them. I can forgive you for wanting to stand in front of the doors. You're eager to get back to your telephone and your old-school calculator, I imagine. However, I cannot forgive you for what you do when the elevator crosses floor five. You put your hands on your hips and swivel around and look everyone in the forehead. The elevator stops on floor four, which was the button you'd pressed when you got on, and you swivel around again and ask, politely as they come, "Is anyone getting off?" I look you right in the eye and maybe show a couple of teeth. You have to stop the doors from closing with your foot, and then you get off when they open again. I get off behind you.
I doubt you have the means to buy this game on your own. You probably work so late every night out of filial duty to the company (partaking of their overtime pay by pretending to be busy and/or constipated) that you can't remember what an electronics store looks like when it's open.
I notice (from your wedding ring) that you're married. May your wife have mercy, and buy you this game as a present. You'll look at the package, read the back of the box, and think, "Why and how did this game come into my hands? What have I done, or not done?" And you will be changed, and maybe I'll say hello to you in the elevator next time.
At any rate, the question presented here is a tricky one. Which seat do you offer to the most "valuable" person boarding a cab? Moreover, how do you answer "All men are created equal"? Do you leave the console plugged into the wall for 255 hours, at which point a solemn voice declares, "YES. I SUPPOSE YOU ARE CORRECT," and the game shuts down, and the cartridge explodes?
Readers of insertcredit.com, tell me -- which seat would you offer to the "most important" person? All participants will be publicly shamed as "wrong" or publicly lauded as "right" in the next post.
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