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By Kevin Chen on March 31st, 2008
Turn It Around is one of those quirky mini-game collections whose strengths are deceptive simplicity and bizarre unpredictability. The gimmick is simple: a wheel in the center of the screen that you rotate to either the left or right. The question comes expected: "What are you gonna make me do with this damned wheel?"
"Judged purely by the enjoyment one would get by playing these games, Turn It Around performs decently."
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The answer to that would be: "Lots of things." Sometimes you simply turn the wheel as quickly as possible (which gets repetitive). Sometimes you rotate the wheel quickly to one side and then quickly to the other side (like in the takoyaki game, which is a blast when you’re hungry). Sometimes you turn the wheel in different directions depending on what you need to do in the mini-game (possibly to keep your drunken manager from falling into a prostitute). And sometimes you just have to turn the wheel with a quick swipe to swing a bat or a golf club (you might complete the golf mini-game and have no idea how you did so).
Judged purely by the enjoyment one would get by playing these games, Turn It Around performs decently. Most mini-games are pleasantly surprising, both because they’re innovative and because they’re plain dumb fun. They’re essentially 30 seconds of eccentric entertainment; a few of the best "WTF?" mini-games are a game in which you turn a race course to collect bananas and avoid obstacles and a game in which you fly an umbrella to escape a giant robot.
"Turn It Around is one of those games that you’d run through once for a quick laugh and never play again."
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True, some mini-games can prove to be 30 wasted seconds of your life, but by and large the mini-games will have you chuckling to yourself by their completion. Then you’ll squeeze more amusement out of the game once you see your scores (which you can compare with friends on a high score board – which you probably won’t do, but still) and get a rank. Seriously, you’ll receive some extremely weird remarks attached to certain ranks. "Turn Master" gives you "Your turning power has made you master of the universe," "Rolling Hero" gives you "Rescue the world with that rolling power!!" and "Village Uncle" gives you "You can even change the traffic light!!" That’s a lot of quirk for one game, but Turn It Around isn’t a title that’s worth a purchase – it’s one of those games that you’d run through once for a quick laugh and never play again. That’s probably not a good thing considering you can finish all of the 24 mini-games in less than half an hour. But for what the game’s worth, there’s a lot of that famous Japanese weirdness that only weird Japanese games can provide – and that’s not bad for a game based heavily on gratuitous wheel-spinning.
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