TOKYO – Here's a game in which you fend off ninjas with a boxing glove at the end of a stick.
Wait, what?
Students at Nihon Kogakuin College have made a game called Don't Lose the Secrets that puts you in just such a situation. On the screen, your character is standing in a feudal Japanese palace while ninjas crawl across the ceiling. Jabbing your stick upwards at the right time will knock out an interloper, while a mistimed strike will send your stick flying out of your hands. This forces you to wait while your character prepares a new stick, but this penalty is meaningless as there is no way to fail. There are no points to score, no quotas to meet and no clock to race against. It's just you, a clan of colorful ninjas and a big stick.
This game, on display at last month's Tokyo Game Show, drew a steady crowd, despite competing with the attention-sucking giant Gundam head at the Bandai/Namco booth. Perhaps it had something to do with the girl dressed in a maid outfit giving a blow-by-blow commentary on each player's performance, but I believe it was all about the motion-sensitive controller. To play the game, you actually had to wield a pole with a boxing glove fitted onto the end. This isn't a button-tapping game that requires a simple steady hand: It has your entire upper body poised and ready to strike. This also means that anyone playing the game looks completely ridiculous.
How could I resist?
Considering that there is no way to lose this game, it's harder than it looks. The ninjas vary their speed and their movements to confuse you, and because you're physically holding this big stick you're naturally overeager to thrust away. I suppose having an audience didn't make things any easier, as there were an awful lot of people following my actions so I was under pressure not to screw up.
The controller had enough weight to make it feel right in my hands but it wasn't so heavy as to turn the game into a chore. In a country with a still-prosperous arcade scene, I could easily see this turning a few heads in a Japanese game center. It seems like the kind of game just silly enough to demand attention.
The game wouldn't work on any console for two reasons that I can see: The futility of trying to market a boxing glove on a stick to consumers and the inevitable chaos that would ensue from putting American Gladiator-style weapons into people's living rooms. That said, there are no plans for the game to be sold to anyone in any form. After I played the demo I asked the staff about a release and I was told the demo is just that – a demonstration of a student project. All we can do is hope that the kids who built it got a good grade for their efforts.
Photo: Daniel Feit/Wired.com
