Super Happy Fun Time II

Party Magic

Another student production, this time from Taipei's University of Art & Mobile Entertainment. According to the accompanying brochure, Party Magic is an iPhone game for up to four players. According to the nice students who showed me how to play, it's great for breaking the ice at parties.

Each player selects a brightly coloured monster to be their character. Icons representing each one then appear on the screen at random, and everyone tries to tap their monster as many times as possible before the time runs out.

It was all very polite. The students seemed to hold back until I had tapped my monsters before going for theirs. The closest we got to underhand tactics was when one of them shielded the screen with his hand for a split-second, then apologised. Perhaps this is a cultural issue - if these were British students, they'd have spilled cider all over my shoes and tried to steal my pen. Or perhaps they were just being kind.

Implausibly, I won. This meant I got to spin a virtual wheel and make one of the students perform one of the acts on it, which ranged from things like "Make an animal noise" to "Buy everyone a bucket of KFC." Again, there may need to be some adjustments for the UK version - "Drink 15 shots of Sailor Jerry" or "Get off with the dog" would be more culturally appropriate. But Party Magic was one title I could see becoming a hit over here, providing they don't ask more than 59p.

The Last Escort

I think this is a dating sim. All the characters in the demo I played were tall, slim young men with dreamy eyes. Their hair was so over-styled and spiky it made the people in the Studio Line advert look like they'd just been out in the rain.

I spent eight minutes trying to work out what was going on. Whatever button I pressed just resulted in yet more endless reams of Kanji script scrolling across the screen. All the while, the men with the dreamy eyes gazed out at me intensely, half-smiles playing across their delicate lips. I walked away feeling like I'd just been groomed.

Blowing Racing

And you thought no one made GameCube games any more. Bet you thought no one made games which you play by blowing into a microphone attached to a set of Donkey Konga bongos, either. The PiCT CUBE production team from the Osaka Electro-Communication University is out to prove you wrong on both counts.

Blowing Racing is a side-scrolling platformer starring a poorly animated yellow blob who wears a sombrero and has a bikini top where his eyes should be. Other characters include a flying child, a blobby green cyclops and a crap robot.

To play the game, you blow into the microphone attached to the bongos. This makes the yellow blob run along the ground. To make him jump, you tap the bongos. There are platforms to leap between, gaps to avoid, stupid little red things to collect and so on.

The whole thing is completely exhausting. You have to blow into the mic constantly to get anywhere at all. You must hit the bongos with the force of a stampeding elephant to successfully pull off a jump. It probably doesn't help if you have a hangover and an empty stomach. Playing Blowing Racing nearly made me faint and gave me a headache.

However, the woman from the university did give me a free biro. And the main character wears a sombrero, and there are bongos involved. So despite the stupid premise, poor quality visuals, last-gen inanity and total impossibility of this game ever making it into the shops, I declare Blowing Racing to be Eurogamer's TGS 2009 game of the show.