Mister Mosquito

"I'm boiling with rage!!!"

For all the times you’ve heard the annoying whiny buzz of a mosquito in your ear, or suffered in itchy misery after being bitten by one of the little buggers, Mister Mosquito lets you turn the tables and actually dish out the suffering instead of receive it. You control a mosquito who has decided to take up residence in the home of the unlucky Yamada family for the Summer season. The needs of the mosquito are simple: suck as much blood as possible from the humans while steering clear of their righteous wrath.

In an industry that appears increasingly content to churn out Doom clones and mediocre games based on movie franchises, it’s certainly refreshing to see such an original concept make it to store shelves. There’s no question that Mister Mosquito gets huge points for originality, yet while it is fresh and innovative it is also hampered by some control and gameplay issues that make it frustrating at times.

The game is broken up into twelve stages that span various rooms of the house and give the mosquito different biting scenarios with one of the three Yamada family members. The Yamadas are an eccentric bunch, and the awkward English translation in the North American version of the game only reinforces this. Both mother and daughter have a penchant for martial arts: the girl practices her kicks and punches in her room shouting shrill “hi-YA”s at regular intervals. The mother likes to do her martial arts while cooking, an activity that apparently requires a lot of air-chopping and screaming. The father enjoys flower arranging and speaks with a comically exaggerated Japanese accent.

In each stage, the mosquito has to fill a certain number of blood meters by sucking it out of the humans from specific points on their bodies which are indicated by small red circles. The mosquito can’t simply suck wherever it wants; rather it is forced to target these red areas that happen to be on the most excruciating locations. Ankles, neck, hands, the top of Mr. Yamada’s bald head, and even the lip. All the places that will cause the most torment to the poor itchy victim. The game is a little sadistic in this regard.

Once a sucking point has been spotted, the mosquito hones in on it, lands, and begins sucking and filling the blood meter by the player rotating the analog stick. Once all the blood meters have been filled, the stage is cleared and the mosquito moves on to the next feed.

That’s the basic idea of the game; unfortunately, a mosquito’s life isn’t quite that easy. The humans can easily become agitated if the mosquito is sucking for too long in one spot, and will squish him flat with a decisive smack. The “annoyance meter” will also rise if the mosquito spends too much time buzzing around in close proximity to the humans. (We all know how annoying that high-pitched whiney buzz can be when it’s right in our ear.) Annoy the humans too much and they will become enraged, rampaging around the room trying to swat the mosquito or douse him with bug spray. They must then be calmed down by touching a “relax point” on their body – similar to a suck point, but blue instead of red.

This suck point system has its drawbacks. Sometimes the points will appear and disappear based on how the person moves. Each human is given a set pattern of movements that it simply cycles through endlessly. Thus, watching and waiting for the red spot to appear at a precise spot in the cycle makes up a large part of the game. Personally I would have preferred to have been able to just attack at will, which is far more realistic. Yet I suppose that I can’t say that Mister Mosquito was ever aiming for realism when a mosquito is able to calm down an enraged human by touching fictitious “relax points” on them.

In between stages, cutscenes depict the deterioration of the Yamada family as they become more and more frustrated with the mosquito and begin to snap and yell at each other and complain melodramatically about the itchiness of their bites. (Any family that gets so upset over the presence of a single mosquito in the house obviously hasn’t done much camping.)

Quirkiness abounds, but the extent to which it can all be enjoyed is sabotaged somewhat by the fact that the mosquito handles like a flying ice cream truck. He chugs along at a disappointingly slow pace and his turning radius is quite wide, meaning that maneuvrability can be a challenge, and honing in on a specific tiny red dot on someone’s body can be needlessly frustrating. But by far the most annoying feature of the controls is that the mosquito rebounds off anything he happens to touch with a huge recoil. Even brushing up against something accidentally will cause the mosquito to blow backwards a few inches. Obviously this makes getting into tight spaces challenging.

Graphically, Mr. Mosquito is respectable but nothing spectacular. What I did find downright disappointing was that the game’s environments didn’t offer a very high level of interaction. Objects and furniture were generally just painted into the backgrounds and inaccessible for the mosquito to explore, except for a few gimmicky possibilities like hitting the Play button of the daughter’s stereo to make it turn on by itself (things that are fun to do once but aren’t worth repeating.) The only other motivation to explore the scenery is to search for hidden extra blood tanks that, when filled, will fill up the mosquito’s blood reserves and allow him to live for another year.

In the end, I really wanted to love Mr. Mosquito for its concept alone. I ended up merely liking it; the more lukewarm emotion being mainly a result of its unfortunate control issues. It’s a fun game for those drawn to weirdness who are looking for something different. Different, it certainly is.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/06/03, Updated 07/06/03