After a month of development my Japanese educational game and reviewing tool is finally ready.
Nihongoup is quite a fun game, but on top of that it’s also a Japanese reviewing tool. On one hand, we—Homo sapiens—are lazy by nature and as such, in need of something to motivate us in our studies. On the other hand, we are a playful species, whether we are a child or an adult, and willingly waste our time on fun, entertaining activities mindlessly disregarding their actual usefulness. What I tried to do in this game is to take both of these characteristics and, pointing them in the right direction, create favorable conditions for the study of Japanese language.
The basic premise is that you “shoot down” balloons flying across the screen by typing the correct letter or number combinations on your keyboard. When it may sound boring, it’s actually quite fun and addictive. What’s more important, however, is the fact that at the same time you’ll be able to improve your Katakana and Hiragana typing/recognition speed and even review JLPT kanji, vocabulary and particles.
The game is shareware, but you can try it for free and, if you’ll like it, at the low price of $4.99 it won’t break your pocket either. For those of you running OSX or Linux there is also a great news that the game is built on the Adobe AIR platform and is thus compatible with all three major operating systems.
This is the first public version of Nihongoup and my first game in a long time and I really hope that you’ll like it! Feel free to try it out, and if you’ll have any ideas or find a bug please leave feedback at Get Satisfaction.
