Otostaz (PS2)

I can't find any evidence of this besides on mention in a 17-year-old issue of Edge, and I don't know if any other games came out of it, but Otostaz was possibly the result of an initiative at Sony in the early days of the PS2 to put out some games with lower production budgets and shorter development times. Presumably, the aim of such an initiative is to create more interesting, unique games, that didn't necessarily need to sell lots of copies, since they had less to lose. That's the kind of thing I like to see in videogames, movies, and so on. Lower budgets, more imagination!

Anyway, it's a kind of solitaire Othello game, themed around making buildings grow. There's three kinds of tiles in the game: ground, tree, and water. If there's one piece of ground touching both a tree and a bit of water, then a level one house will grow there. If there's a bit of ground touching two level one houses, a level two house will grow there, and so on up to level six. Your job is to make as many high-level houses grow as you can before each stage ends, to score points. There's also a game over condition that I think happens when you don't have any houses in the leftmost column of spaces when the screen scroll past it. But you'll be playing a few hours before you get to the point where that happens.

There's a few more advanced techniques to learn too, but you'll pick them up along the way, plus not only is there a very through tutorial, but there's also an option to turn all the text into English, despite this being a Japan-only release, which is nice. It's generally a fun and satisfying game to play, too, once you've figured out how it all works: lots of squares constantly flipping over, and numberse going up, and all those little kind of kinaesthetic touches that let you know you're doing well.

The presentation's pretty nice, too, with the game seemingly being set in a world made of thick coloured paper, though the stock sound effects do make it feel slightly cheap. The only real problem with Otostaz is that there's not much to write about regarding it. It's a decent game, pretty unique, and if you see a copy going cheap, it definitely wouldn't hurt to pick it up. You'll definitely get a few hours of enjoyment out of it, even if the first hour is just learning how to play.