WTF: Work Time Fun [PSP]

There are many games that feel like work to play, particularly MMOs that task you with running around in circles killing little critters to earn experience. However, very few games actually take the work concept and run with it. WTF does. This game of mini-games not only feels like work, but playing it actually is work that you get paid for. Somehow, though, it still manages to be fun most of the time.

The concept of WTF (which stands for Work Time Fun, not what you might have been thinking of) is that you're a temp worker hired to do all sorts of odd and (mostly) mundane tasks for what most surely be illegally low wages. You'll be putting the caps on pens, chopping wood, sorting baby chicks into appropriate bins, and catching baseballs in a total of 40 odd jobs.

But they're not all just menial work; each has some little bit of challenge that makes it difficult. The wood chopping one, for example, simply requires you to chop logs in half by tapping a button when the logs appear. Since you're paid by the log the temptation is to simply chop them as soon as they appear, making things go more quickly. But, every now and again instead of a log a little bunny rabbit or dolphin or the like will appear. Chop through that and it's game over. You still get to keep the money you earned before your bloody mistake, but it takes time to exit the game and start a new one again, and this is time that could be spent earning money!

And of course the question is: what do you do with the money? You effectively gamble with it, putting it into those little plastic egg machines you see in grocery stores and getting goodies out, sometimes useless plastic toys, sometimes new "jobs," and sometimes silly little tools that are occasionally useful. There's one that will calculate how to split a restaurant bill among friends, another that turns your PSP into a very expensive and under-powered flashlight (by displaying a white screen), and another that will let a group of friends secretly figure out who has a crush on who.

If you think about this game too much, then playing it can be disheartening, as it takes the feeling that you're completely wasting your time and really drives it home. However, some of the simple little mini-games are oddly addicting and it is entertaining to find and unlock new games, even if you usually have to work through dozens of plastic doo-dads to do so.