160. Game Select 5 You (Yuki Enterprise, Playstation 2, 2001)

Game Select 5 You is a board game collection released in the first year of the Playstation 2's lifespan. In this case "you" is 洋 (pronounced "yo"), which Japanese for "western", as the game contains about 10 western card and board games, including chess, checkers, backgammon, and my favorite card game, 13 (or Tiến lên as it is formally known). Which I guess is a Vietnamese game, but that's still Wetsern to someone in Japan.

Instead of being content to give you a section of board games, Game Select 5 You incorporates a full graphical world and story where your character can move around an talk to other characters and creatures, most of whom will challenge you to various games. The presentation is bad in just about every way. The graphics look much worse than many Playstation 1 games, and when you are controlling your character the view is directly above them. I think they were trying to invoke top down games like Zelda or old RPGs, but it looks terrible, and you move with a bizarre speed and smoothness.

In terms of the actual games, the AI was pretty brutal. I'm not very good at chess, but the gargoyle who challenged me could have gone a little easier. 13 was a lot more fun because I'm at least compitent at the game, but it went on for 12 rounds and I still only got 2nd out of 4. The music was at least tolerable, but I don't really have any reason to touch this game again. I still don't know why it's called Game Select 5, because there are more than 5 games.

1/5, a weird lifeless PS1 RPG skin on top of a bunch of card and board games