Jinsei Game, Takara Tomy's take on the Milton Bradley board game The Game of Life, has returned to consoles for the first time in over a decade, and this new entry's apparently pretty good, as far as turn-your-brain-off board game adaptations go. More to the point, it clears the extremely low bar of having, like, boards with spaces on them and events that occasionally happen, which the last couple on Wii did not manage, for very silly reasons: put simply, the cut-down, barely-even-a-game-anymore version released at the launch of WiiWare sold extremely well based on name recognition alone, resulting in a barely-better WiiWare sequel that was then released at retail with virtually no changes aside from the 600% price hike, effectively killing the series on consoles until now.
This game caught my eye for two reasons: one, it was a co-production between Appci and Toybox, aka the studios that brought you Natsumon, which people seem very eager to point out online, as if professional contract studios don't ever work on more than one game at a time; and two, we're ~ 3 years and a sequel away from the hugely-successful Momotaro Dentetsu revival and while second-string series like these have come to play, Itadaki Street's nowhere to be seen... you'd think it'd be primed for a comeback, especially given that Square's maybe the most likely of all the big Japanese publishers to happily gamble on a smaller game like that one, but as far as I'm aware, they've not so much as hinted at a new one, on consoles or anywhere else. Maybe it's under the same no-way-we're-letting-you-fuck-this-up policies as Dragon Quest, iunno. (Then again, you'd imagine Portopia would be similarly safeguarded, but... yeah.)
