Sweet Sixteen

Tale in sixteen words
Can we rise up to do it?
We thought we would try:

Boy thinks of the words
Tries to express it in prose
This is what he wrote.

Preamble:
We got ourselves Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii: Osu! Tatakae! Oeundan 2 last Wednesday when we were told that it had hit Malaysian shelves. Briefly, it's a Nintendo DS game akin to the Dance Dance genre, except with Japanese music and instead of dancing one has to tap the screen. What makes this game much more fun is that the storyline: you lead a squad of cheerleaders to help out people in dire straits - whether it's a master sculptor in need of inspiration, or helping a choir club recruit members to keep the club alive, to saving the world from a dying sun.

Whether you do well or not, at points in each song you're treated to a cutscene (and a quick rest) dependant on your progress. If you did well, the cutscene shows the person(s) being cheered doing well. If not, it shows the poor sod(s) screwing up. The whole thing is done manga-style, with the touch of humour only the Japanese can achieve.



Anyways - we were just browsing about GameFAQs to look for translations for the game and we came across this fact: if you fail to finish the stage, not only you'll see a sort of Game Over cutscene (which features the person down all fours), but also a haiku. A haiku for each stage (save a couple of particular ones) if you fail! The effort INIS went to make this game.

Tangent:
Joyce the Fairy posted about Apostrophe, a site that people can submit 16-word stories. It's very interesting, especially what some people contributed. This ones we really like:

They drove up to Bidor. Upon reaching there, realised they had left their son at home. - Dina Zaman.

Vacancy. Condom tester. Wanted. Dream job for guys. Catch 22. Only for Australian. Heartbroken. - unknown.

There're some serious and sombre ones too. But we don't need more depressing material. Check out more at the website.

So, initially we thought of writing something about some guy getting phone calls from the dead (DiGi's One Rate, Anytime, Anywhere advert in our minds heh) but we didn't like what was produced. And so we just left it aside.

To Bring It All Together:
We've finally scribbled the haiku on top for submission (second stanza). Here's hoping. Ya lah, we know for a haiku it's not so deep and profound with layers of meaning, we're not a powerful Linguistic Lexicographer.

If only we had Ippongi Ryuuta and his team to help cheer us on now, heh :)