While the rest of the known (European) gaming world is jumping over themselves about Sony's late night announcement, I'd like to redirect attentions to two games which are also making a healthy resurgence: the classic quiz game Your Don't Know Jack and the mildly disturbing (yet compelling and innovative and revolutionary) Seaman.
You Don't Know Jack was a multimedia take on the old quiz format. The in-your-face, Howard Stern-a-like who fronted it spouted loads of nonsense, insulted the crowd and generally challenged players to test their ignorance.
A web version of the game can be found here. Among the more enlightening things I've found out whilst playing are *there's a real patent for monkey tap shoes (call in the RSPCA) *"Yo, banana boy" is a palindrome* *Banana Mania is a Crayola crayon colour
Go! Proscrastinate! Prosper!
Seaman we have discussed before. It was, without a doubt, one of the more surreal offerings for the truly magnificent Sega Dreamcast (which I grow to love more and more every day). In a nutshell, a Seaman was a fish/man/foetus thing that swam around in a virtual tank and insulted you, its owner, if you didn't speak to it on a daily basis. By speak, I actually mean speak; Nintendo may have popularised the audio commands with its Nintendo DS, but The Dreamcast had the first microphone on a home console.
Think twisted tamagotchis. Think Seaman.
Well, the news on the street is that Seaman's got a more evolved brother who'll be released in March in Japan. Kotaku reports that there's some new content up on the site to pique people's interests (even if they can't understand Japanese).
Their description of the game is a good sum-up:
For those who have played the original game on the Dreamcast (or PC, PS2), Seaman 2 won't focus on the vivarium based, human faced sassmouth fish thing, but a tiny island bound apeman. He's made extra creepy by his still attached umbilical cord. Ick.
The new game will use a specialised voice controller, but, using the power of the guesstimate, the PlayStation 2 game also looks to make use of the EyeToy camera. Neat!
Who needs a PlayStation 3 with these games available? Eh?
*thanks TinRobot!
