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Here I was sitting, pondering which version of Brain Training to put on my upcoming "games of the year" feature, when this title quite literally landed in my lap. It's from Japanese publisher Success, who you may remember jumped on the money (and gravy) train to produce Yoshinoya: The Videogame.

The title is "Yawahada Eigo Juku." This is a play on the name "Yawaraka Atama Juku." A "juku" is a kind of school where kids have information "crammed" into their brains in preparation for big exams. "Yawaraka" means "gentle." "Atama" means "head." Yawaraka Atama Juku is a brain-training game for DS that deals more in logic puzzles and riddles than Brain Training (which mostly has you counting objects, and feels either more or less like a videogame, depending on your taste in videogames).

Well, "Eigo" means "English," and "Hada" means "skin." "Yawahada" means "smooth skin." So, uh -- it's a smooth-skinned English-training school.

To tell you the truth, this thing isn't even a videogame. It's like one of those Japanese LD games of yore, where you switch chapters based on on-screen prompts, like a choose-your-own-adventure story. Yet -- yet -- the satirical title and the premise are quite amusing. See, this is a "game" where you basically learn how to speak conversational English from Japanese swimsuit models. They'll say things like "I'm so hunnnngry!" in Japanese, and then speak it in really awful English. "KUDO YUU TERU MII HAU TSU GETTO TSU ZA GUDDO RESUTORAN NIA HIA?!" (Engrish for "Could you tell me how to get to a good restaurant around here?") Meanwhile, severely misspelled subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen, highlighted like karaoke lyrics, as the girl holds her hand to her ear and grins. She smiles back at the camera: "Good job!!"

Sometimes the girls dance in their bikinis, and find reasons to speak English to one another while doing so. The context is, they're on a trip overseas, and are teaching you handy travel expressions while they sit by the pool or belly-roll on beach balls. The interface is riddled with menus -- to work your way through the game, you must master all the menus, and watch all the right sequences. This is tough work. I played it in the toilet, with headphones, and it works really well there. The girls were prompting me to repeat, though I didn't want to do that in the bathroom, else someone think I was a weirdo. The game, unlike TalkMan, which actually seriously tries to teach you foreign languages, does not support the PSP microphone, which means that your chances of actually learning English from this game are about equal to the chances these girls would ever smile at you in person.

In other words, it is a parody piece of software, bizarre in exeuction; if any kids buy it, when confronted by their mothers, they might say, "I'm studying English!" What would the mom do, then? Walk away confused? There's no nudity, there's no sex; there are, however, plenty of typos and dancing, dancing, dancing. In other words, forget PSP porn. This is better, and by better I mean "more confusing."

Yawahada Eigo Juku goes on sale December 8th, for 3,990 yen.