Japanese mobile game satirises drunken finance minister
Who showed himself up at the G7 in Rome
Games as tools of satire have been in the blogosphere a lot lately after a flurry of shoe-throwing web games followed the much celebrated throwing of a shoe by an Iraqi journalist in the direction of George W. Bush.
Apple has been oddly reticent about these games, keeping any title in which a politician appears off the App Store. On mobile we’ve had Super Political Boxing, and in America there was Battle for the White House, but Japanese mobile gamers have just got what looks like the best of the lot.
It satirises Japan's Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa, who turned up for the G7 meeting in Rome drunk, much to the amusement of everybody in the world. After slurring his way through a press conference he visited the Vatican, touched the exhibits, and breached the velvet rope to sit on a statue as the alarms wailed.
The inevitable mobile game, from developer Liveware, invites players to prod Nakagawa-san with ‘5’ to make him respond to questions. His approval rating is displayed in a bar along the top of the screen, and if it reaches zero it's game over.
For the real Nakagawa-san it is, of course, very much game over.
The Telegraph [via Kotaku]