TGS 2005: Portable Resort Hands-On

TOKYO--Most of the games on the Tokyo Game Show floor have an immediately recognizable genre and appeal, from the wealth of role-playing games that dot the show floor, to the various action games, adventure games, and shooters. But there are a few games scattered here and there that are truly mysterious, and Portable Resort for the PSP is one of these. It's not a game you're likely to ever see outside of Japan, and it seems to occupy a niche all its own. Portable Resort is not so much a game as it is a relaxation tool.

We downloaded the demo on the show floor, and initially it's not clear what the game does. It shows a number of images of a man or a woman walking through what seem to be a number of vacation locales. There are large, empty beaches, foliage-dense forests, waterfalls, and such, and the characters appear to be there to enjoy the scenery and perhaps feed a few ring-tailed lemurs. While these images were flashing past, the PSP was emitting the soothing sounds of the ocean, with the occasional cry of a seabird accenting the rush of the waves. Apparently, you can choose from a variety of other restful soundtracks as well, like "insects chirping at night."

Another set of images showed the PSP itself resting on a bedside table and on a desk. Apparently this is so you can keep images and sounds of more soothing locales with you as you work and travel, which is...really weird. We admit to letting our PSP play the ocean sounds for quite some time, though.

Now, if the game were all noises and lemurs, that would be odd enough, but the other part of Portable Resort's appeal is that it's the handheld industry's first ukulele simulator. You flip the system over to hold the face-button area with your left hand, with your right poised over the PSP's analog stick, which is what you'll be using to play. Then it's just a matter of holding buttons with your left hand to choose a chord, and then you can strum the analog stick to produce the remarkably lifelike sound of playing the ukulele. If you move the stick just a little bit, you'll only hear the sound of a single string, but if you strum the stick all the way across, you'll hear all the strings on the instrument sing in unison. The downloaded demo provided a short tune that showed us which face buttons to press for the various notes, and we were all calmly strumming like pros in no time.

Portable Resort is virtually guaranteed to never leave the island nation of Japan, but it's one of those great little curiosities you can find tucked all over the Tokyo Game Show floor. Hopeful vacationers can track this gamespace to keep on top of resort news, and we'll continue to bring coverage of all manner of mysterious games as we ferret them out.