Osu! Tatakae! Awesome!

Rhythm action god king for the socially awkward

For those that don’t know, Ouendan (or Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents) is a series of three rhythm action games by Japan’s iNiS¹ and published by Nintendo for the DS.

They are, in a word, awesome, and the best rhythm action games ever, at least in part because stiff, ungainly, white dudes² can be really, really good at them since we spent our prime, marriageable, years playing reflex-intensive games instead of going out to clubs and learning how to break a leg without actually breaking a leg, thus leaving us crippled (physically, but mostly emotionally, *sob*) for the DDR, Just Dance, et al crowd.

(Plus, those games practically require playing with another person–preferably of the opposite sex–and that would involve social contact that doesn’t involve a microphone, headset and being called a “faggot” on Xbox Live…by a 12 year-old. A lot.³)

Anyway, so imagine my unfettered glee at accidentally stumbling upon this just minutes ago:

What you are witnessing is a fully-functional Ouendan ‘simulator’ with truckloads of user-generated content, from pop songs to tons (and tons) of video game tracks so we never have to leave the comfort zone of our couch and go ‘outside’ with the ‘sun’ and ‘people’ (w/e they are).

So download it! Play it! Love it! And tell your friends (those people you talk to on Live) because the only way I’m getting more content is if someone else does it for me.

---

1 They also created the wonderful Gitarooman on PS2/PSP and the less-wonderful Lips on 360.
2 Like me, for example, and most of the other people reading this blog. (CHI can be an honorary member of this club, but at least he can break steel girders in two, with his teeth, so he has that; The Sib is also pretty good at dancing, but he has to be due to his swiftly-decaying hair follicles, so he requires some form of compensation to be viable with the opposite sex. Plus, he doesn’t play games, at all, so he’s way ahead of the rest of us on that score.)
3 If you lined up all the racist/bigoted epithets hurled on an average night on Xbox Live by pre-teens (and teen-teens), end-to-end, you’d…really start to wonder if anybody actually watches their kids. Ever.