Jane's Hotel - PSP Minis

How weird are we as gamers? We get up, get dressed, go perform some menial labor and then come home and waste our time in front of a screen. But even crazier, some of us chose to escape into a world where you perform more back-breaking and unsatisfying work. Our time gets squandered by managing some or other profession in the virtual world, for which we get little in return but moving pictures. It takes all kinds.

Jane's Hotel on PSP is such a little game that revolves around a woman who is adamant about owning her own hotel and running it with little to no help. By slaving herself to bare bones, she hopes to improve her hotel more and more until, I don't know, she dies from exhaustion or something. That's what we working stiffs go for, right? In any case, her success story starts when she sees a small hotel up for sale and seizes opportunity with both hands. Time to run yourself ragged, girl!

As a PSP Minis title, the game has a straight forward and very simple presentation. In childish cartoon vision, you can dive straight into the action, after a comic panel giving you some background. Right off the bat, the game looks as one of those small, social media games, with just one setting and small interactivity scattered throughout. It's not surprising that the game is also available on Big Fish Games, as it seems to fit perfectly with its drawn visuals and small scope. The hotel lobby gives view to a few rooms and within your work area are objects and furniture scattered throughout where you'll need to go and serve customers.

There's no real gripe in the simple appearance and even the items getting warped in, as if from Star Trek, are rather comical. But what's more bothersome is that the game does animate rather peculiarly. It's not that characters move strangely or it doesn't add up, but it does feel off; certainly when bad clipping causes people to run through objects on a regular basis. And I'm quite sure that at some point the customers looked like they were constantly flipping me the bird. What an awkward way of thanking people for your hard work.

The 40 levels available are all the same: You get a small hotel and day by day, you bring in customers and tend to their needs, so the happy people give you money. The faster you complete tasks, the more tips they'll give you and that way, you need to set a goal in cash and popularity each day. After that, you can use that money to upgrade your place with appliances such as coffee machines, phones and other services your customers might like.

To aid you in your quest, you can also call on one maid to help you clean rooms, pick up dry cleaning or making golf appointments. I'm not sure what a maid's tasks are, but I thought the golf thing was rather strange. Even more so, why is each hotel run only by just 2 people? That's not Spartan, that's madness! In particular, in later levels you'll feel the pressure of completing the maid tasks in time, as most of those take up quite some time. Just hire someone else, Jane. Her work ethics are very admirable, but seriously, stop busting yourself up like this.

While the controls for taking coffees, champagne, linen and such to customers aren't optimal, the strong point from this game is that it does attempt to separate the workload properly. The button scheme is rather balanced on both sides, so calling your maid with the L button, going to reception with R and operating drinks with square is interchangeable at fluent speeds. This helps speed the process up a lot and makes multi-tasking in the cruel hotel business a load easier. It might be one of the only good things about the game, but it does make playing a lot more fun this way, as everything is more fun when it's efficient.

Horrible writing skills in the PSP Minis series Jane's Hotel

Unfortunately, apart from the core gameplay mechanics working well, everything else has cut corners written all over it. The animations, simple outlining and generic one-track sounds are all built as unclad fundamentals, but what kills the game are the frequent spelling and grammar errors in the small comic strip cutscenes. Especially since there's just very few of them and the texts in them aren't discourses, you can see that this game was pumped out on a bare basis; without even taking the time to proof read. Such a manner of programming is just lazy, comes off as amateur and immediately devalues the game in itself, which fortunately does work well.

Take it to heart or not, you can't deny Jane's Hotel is an unpolished manager game. It feels as if playing a rundown version of games such as Theme Hospital, where pressure and controlling your workload take over any aspect of the game. Luckily, this is done well, but everything else will make any serious gamer frown once or twice. This is the sort of game your little sister is going to go nuts over. She won't be a bitter old crony like you and start nitpicking at anything but what the game feels like to her. Plus, she might learn to service herself towards the world to no end, so there's no real losing situation there.

Daav Valentaten, NoobFeed.