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TGS 2005: Baito Hell 2000 Hands-On

Chop down trees and shag some fly balls in this crazy minigame collection from Sony.

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TOKYO--Baito Hell 2000 occupies two sides of its very own kiosk in Sony's PSP area at the Tokyo Game Show. Since it has one of the best names of any title on the show floor, we naturally moved to check it out. It's a game with a very definite WarioWare flavor to it--an apparent collection of minigames, each with its own style and all very basic in design, with a predilection for oddity. A few different systems were set up with their own separate minigame. The first game we tried was what seemed to be a pretty simple game of baseball. Well, simple if you reduce both teams to a shortstop, a first baseman, and only one person at bat. Oh, and the person at bat turns out to be a skeleton, who insists on hitting balls at you. As he hits them, they'll bounce slowly into the infield, and you need to move to intercept and catch them. Once you've done that, you then toss the ball to the first baseman for the out. The thing is that the skeleton figure at home plate never moves. He just continually hits balls into the infield (producing them from whatever undead pockets he may possess, since there isn't a pitcher) for you to catch. Perhaps it's some sort of baseball camp from the underworld. If you miss catching a ball and scoring the out, the skeleton scolds you in a deep voice; if you miss too many balls, the game is over.

Another minigame on display was also very simple. There's a crudely drawn old woman and a crudely drawn young man standing in an open field on either side of a stump. The young man has an axe poised over his head, and the woman is apparently in charge of placing logs upright on the stump for the boy to chop. All you need to do is press the button just as she puts down a log to neatly cut it in half and create some nice firewood. The trick to this game is that sometimes the old woman puts an object on the stump that's not a log. Like, say, a rabbit. Or a small dog. Or a dolphin. Hitting the chop button under these circumstances leads to a predictable sectioning of the unfortunate creature, a lot of fountaining blood, and an ended game. You'll want to pile up as much cruelty-free kindling as possible. Did we mention that the crude-looking characters are dressed kind of like Mario and Luigi? Yeah, pretty crazy.

We'll be bringing you more information on this strange puzzle game as it's released. It's unknown whether Baito Hell 2000 will ever make it out of Japan, but we'll let you know if there's any further news of bunny-chopping action crossing the ocean.

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