"Be afraid....be very afraid"

Ahh yes RoomMania, this game may very possibility be the weirdest game out for DC, not half bad either for all you import freaks, with an open mind to new stuff.

Gameplay +6 Chances are when you play this game you will have no idea what's going on, but that's what I'm here for. You are assigned tasks to do within a certain number of days, you probably wonk know this because there is LOADS of Japanese text, but there is a cinema to show you what to do for each “Mission”.

You play the role of a god like creature that is monitoring this young man in his apartment, while he is home you can toss what looks like ping-pong balls at objects to get his attention, and make him go over there and mess with it. If its a mission object you will get a cinema, and would have completed that objective. But no its not that easy, you have to toss loads and loads of balls to get his attention, but if you toss too many too fast he’ll get depressed and he will cooperate with you even less.

And then there are the time when he isn’t home...this is the fun part, you get to move around stuff, his table, lock his door, turn on his PC, etc. sometimes you have to mess with stuff in order to complete a mission, then when the poor guy gets home, he is totally confused speaking his Japanese to himself, and looking around like he's gone mad. For an example: if you lock him out, when he gets home he pounds on the door for a while then finally decides to crawl through the back window, its amusing really.

Story +3 well you probably wont get much out of the story unless you have a good understanding of the Japanese language, which i don’t, but there is like 5 minute cut scenes, while he chats on his computer, about what who knows? I didn’t get much out of that part of the game to say the least.

Graphics +8 Great graphics especially for being as old as it is (well its not that old), the graphics are very clean, smooth animation, wonderful eye candy.

Audio +7 The sound is also great, the TV sounds like a real TV, same with the radio, which seems to play a lot of classic Sega tunes. When he's on his Computer you’d swear that he's in the room with you, it all just sounds authentic and real

but very few game go by with out, the annoying parts, and this comes in the form of the ping-pong balls every one you toss makes an annoying beeping sound....and there's many balls to be tossed around.

Replayability +5 there's tons of objectives to complete here, i still haven’t finished it, but there isn’t a whole bunch to keep you coming back to it, there are hidden things to find that will unlock a VMU game though, i guess it deserves an average score here.

Buy or Rent? Well i cant really recommend a game like this to many people, its definitely an acquired taste, but if this sounds like your thing then you’ll get some great fun out of it, so either buy it or just ignore this review :)

Final Score +8 You will love this game if your into freaky Japanese sims, i got plenty of fun out of it ^_^

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/29/01, Updated 03/29/01