WTF

May 11,2007 - There are games that just sound boring when describing them to others and there are games that sound awesome right off the bat. Work Time Fun unfortunately falls into the former category. WTF revolves around taking “jobs” in the form of mini-games to earn money to spend at vending machines. As the acronym for Work Time Fun suggests, it requires a particular type of sense of humor that may be hit or miss for the average gamer to get. While WTF makes the game feel like a job, there’s enough fun and humor to be had in the mini-games that it’s not as much of a chore as it may seem.

If you’re expecting Wario Ware on the PSP here, you’re going to be disappointed. The forty mini-games in WTF are of varying quality and length, with some will be quick while others can last as long as you can take it. As with most any game based around mini-games, not every game here is a winner, but the majority work well enough to keep things fresh for the entire course of the game. Depending on how well you do in each mini-game, you get a paycheck afterwards as a reward. Some are rewarding enough to keep you coming back to make more money while others seem to be too hard to make a reasonable amount of money back. The humor of these jobs is really the big limitation to the WTF’s appeal, as the humor of finding out one of these jobs gives you the task of being a factory worker capping pens with a counter that can count more zeroes than anyone knows what to do with them. Even the emails that you receive while playing the game can be quite humorous as Ken tries to show off his skills while the other assortment of coworkers bring some outside commentary on the jobs you take like they were real people.

Once you acquire enough money in Work Time Fun, you can spend it at vending machines that require $1, $5, $10, or $50 to win new jobs, tools, or hundreds of trinkets that will spit out. Tools are essentially little tools that can provide some small amount of usefulness or humor, such as a ramen timer, a world clock, a restaurant bill splitter, or even a tool that turns your PSP into an expensive flashlight. They’re not going to turn your life around, but they’re cool little diversions. Along with these tools, WTF also offers its own achievements in the form of “titles,” that can be earned by accomplishing various goals in the mini-games, though you won’t know what these are without either blindly earning them or the help of the internet. Multiplayer is offered in the form of outsourcing, which is exactly as it sounds, along with the ability to play some of the jobs with friends or trade items with them.

Because there are so many different mini-games, Work Time Fun offers several different graphical styles that range from Atari 2600-quality graphics to the use of higher-quality 2D pixels and actual pictures that changes up the look of the game quite nicely. It’s not going to blow you away by any means, but that’s not the point of the game. Load times are decent enough, but once the job itself finishes loading, there’s little load time to worry about until you return to the job menu. Just like the graphical style of the game, Work Time Fun offers a variety of audio styles that tends to live up the graphical style that accompanies it. Regardless on its individual merits, the presentation as a whole really shows off the humor that the game exudes tenfold.

It’s not often that a game is just strange for the sake of being strange, but that’s what WTF brings to the table. The humor just oozes out of every orifice that the game has, which just has to be seen to be appreciated if you’re into this kind of stuff. Its technical merits aren’t mind-blowing, but it’s the personality of WTF that really count. If you can’t laugh at the ramen timer when you see it, there’s no hope for you to enjoy the game to the fullest.

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