Sega gives new meaning to motion control by letting men play games as they urinate in Tokyo bathrooms.
Ok fellas, who of you hasn’t tried to knock off some mildew or “paint” the back of the urinal as you do your bidness in the bathroom? If you’re not raising your hand, I call you a liar, sir. Sega knows that we all have the temptation to make a game out of peeing, so they closed the gap by, well, making a game out of peeing. Right now, Sega is testing its Toylet console in select bathrooms across Tokyo, offering four different mini-games before running an advertisement. A pressure sensor on the back of the urinal detects the strength and location of your pee-pee stream and that information is transmitted to a screen above. You can even save your scores to a USB flash drive, you know, in case you were thinking of starting a competition with your officemates.
As there isn’t much a chance of offending the opposite sex, the four games on Sega’s Toylet all strongly cater to the male demographic. Manneken Pis is a straight-up measurement of how much liquid you project onto the sensor. Graffiti Eraser is a take on the old standby where your stream helps keep the bathroom clean by washing away unwanted scrawlings. Then there’s Milk from Nose in which your stream is measured against the last guy to use the Toylet to push a combatant out of a “ring.” It’s a little gross for the waste liquid that you project from your penis to be translated into milk coming from your avatar’s nose, but then again, this is Japan we’re talking about.
Which leads me to the last game: The North Wind and Her. This one has your pee power the wind blowing up a girl’s skirt to ostensibly glimpse the sweet nothings hiding beneath it. There’s many things that are just wrong about this game but I’ll start with the purely mechanical. If you’re presented with erotic images, it doesn’t necessarily make urinating any easier, does it?
The ethics/feasibility of North Wind notwithstanding, I actually think that the Toylet is a pretty smart idea. There’s not much to do in the 30 seconds or so that you stand at the urinal and, given how much coffee I consume and how many trips to the bathroom that entails, the time wasted on a daily basis really starts to add up. Would I be grateful to have a game to play in those five minutes of my life each day? Sure.
Would I start drinking as much water as I could to keep me going to the john to rack up that high score in Graffiti Eraser? Hells yeah, I would.
Source: Akihabara News
