Weird game wednesday - Rhythm Tengoku

"HEY BABY HOW'S IT GOING?" I had the twisted pleasure of showing these videos to a handful of collegues on Monday and the first collective reaction was disbelief: "is this a real game?!!" Believe it. I mean, CRANK UP YOUR SPEAKERS and squirm in confustion to the sheer ridiculousness that is Rhythm Tengoku, a GameBoy Advance/Mini/DS game so bizarre & delightful that it has even been critically acclaimed by Wired Bloggers. Here's an excerpt from their gameplay study, which can be summarized as Wario Ware meets Brain Age:

As objects are thrown at your karate fighter, you punch them to the beat of the music. Another early game is third from left -- the pitching machine tosses a baseball, and you swing the bat on rhythm to home-run it into outer space. But Rhythm Tengoku quickly begins messing with you. In some games, the camera angle starts changing, so you can't rely on the visual of the baseball moving around. Sometimes the lights go out and you have to rely on aural clues, not visual ones, to know when to react. And sometimes -- this is the hard part, and of course it happens a lot -- the sound goes out completely, and you've got to rely on your own rhythmic ability to count out the beats before you hit the button again.

The Karateka stage is shown in the video above. It quickly becomes more obscure from here folks... Rabbits leaping from whales into space, cats in pajamas launching pellets into the air for the oncoming catapulting pengiuns... wow. The Japanese Commercial. Could this look more unappealing? Gameplay videos: More of these are available on Maketakunai's YouTube page. The demand for the game is moderately low, but because its an import you'll have to resort to the usual foreign suspects or Ebay. And that's it for today's Weird Game Wednesday. Until next week, stay sane!