Baito Hell 2000 Import Hands-On

Baito Hell 2000 is one of those "off the beaten path" sort of games that has the potential to completely blow your mind. No, it doesn't do that by offering brain-busting graphics or face-melting sound effects. Baito Hell 2000 is a simple minigame collection, not entirely unlike Nintendo's WarioWare series. But rather than limit each game to five seconds before moving on, Baito Hell is bent on making you suffer as you press your way through 40 tasks, some of which are hilariously menial, as you attempt to earn money...so that you can unlock more jobs...so that you can earn more money...so that you can unlock more jobs. See where this is going?

When you first start, you'll have four of the 40 part-time jobs available to you. One has you counting up humans on a clicker as they walk across the screen, though this one is trickier than it sounds, since you'll have to separate the humans from the aliens, the trucks, and the other decidedly nonhuman traffic that also crosses the screen. Another has you placing the caps onto pens on a drab assembly line. There is no end here. You merely hit circle to place the cap on the pen and X to move the assembly line forward to the next pen. In some cases the pens come in upside down, so you'll have to press up or down on the D pad to flip them around. This one ends when you quit because you can't handle capping any more pens.

At the end of a job, your performance is translated into a paycheck. You can take your yen and go into another mode filled with capsule machines, where you can spend your money on capsules. Most of the capsules are filled with precisely the sort of junk that you'd expect to find in a capsule machine: tiny action figures, little cars, spinning tops, shuriken, that sort of thing. But you'll also unlock new jobs from time to time.

The wide variety of jobs is what really makes the game worthwhile, though you can't just get right into any of the jobs you've unlocked. Going to work sends you to some sort of hellacious temp agency, where you're offered four random jobs from your list of unlocked jobs. Once you take one on and finish it, you can keep retrying it to earn more and more money, or you can quit out and see four new jobs.

Some of the games reference classics, either by having very basic, 8-bit looks to them or by straight-up parodying existing games. There's a baseball game that opens with music that sounds suspiciously like the intro theme to the Namco-developed RBI Baseball. It's graphically similar, as well, though the task here is to play shortstop, shag 1,000 balls, and throw them to first base after you catch them. One game looks a lot like the diagonal rings and 2D sprites found in the Fire Pro Wrestling series, but here your goal is to let the other wrestler suplex you, and then hit the circle button to kick out as close to the three-count as possible without getting pinned.

Another game has you sorting baby chicks into three separate containers: male, female, and dead. One game has you chopping wood as it's placed in front of your character. But, you have to be careful not to chop any dolphins or other animals placed on your chopping block. This game comes in a multiplayer configuration that can be played via game sharing, too. When playing two-player, the wild-eyed woodchoppers wear funny costumes that reference Mario and Luigi. While the games only offer instructions in Japanese, most of them are fairly easy to figure out. Some of them, however, require an understanding of the Japanese language, both spoken and written. One game has you playing the role of a waitress, and you must listen to customers give an order, and then quickly ring it up on a handheld order-taking device. Since the speech and the text on the order device are all in Japanese, this one's impossible without knowledge of the language.

In addition to unlocking jobs, you'll also unlock a variety of tools. Well, maybe "tools" is the wrong word. Much like WarioWare, there are weird little non-game gizmos to unlock. There are 12 in all, and they include such hits as Light, which lights up the PSP screen in one of several colors...so you can see in the dark. Heck, yeah! Another puts eyes on the PSP screen. If you hold the PSP up to your eyes with the screen facing out, you'll look pretty crazy, and you can use the triggers to wink each eye individually and the analog stick to move the eyes around. There's also a bingo and lottery number selector. But the most interesting tool we uncovered is also the most useful of them all: the ramen timer.

We've all been in this situation before. You're trying to make a nice cup of ramen noodles, but you don't have any timepieces nearby. The water needs to sit in the cup of noodles for three minutes to cook the food properly! Ramen timer comes to your rescue with a series of choices, allowing you to time three, four, or five minutes. But you won't get a countdown clock or some other time-keeping device on your PSP screen. Instead, you're given video of a man or a woman, both in bikinis, hilariously prancing around while you wait for the ramen to finish. The guy's way funnier than the lady, as he's constantly flexing and shouting "muscle muscle!" This might be more or less funny if you can understand Japanese...we really don't know.

With its bad attitude and often-punishing tasks, Baito Hell 2000 doesn't feel like some sort of silly WarioWare knockoff. It has a wicked sense of humor and lots to unlock, which ends up making it awfully addictive. This isn't the sort of game you'd expect to get translated into English, and at the moment, there aren't any official plans to bring it out of Japan. But keep your fingers crossed and maybe some news of a North American release will spring up. And if it does, prepare to feel your mind turn to mush in short order.