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The only serious look at Miburi & Teburi, ever
Miburi & Teburi definitely offends in a number of ways -- the backgrounds, the premise, the use of blue-screened full-motion video, the full price -- but is it racist? We never even thought hard enough about the game to consider it, but Insert Credit's Brandon Sheffield did. He sees a particularly ugly style of casual racism in the big, dumb American characters. He may be on to something.The bearded, shirtless American guy (along with the other silly characters who perform charades in the game) is identified as a "hint-giving American" who says things like "I love Japan. I love Japanese people." in poor, broken Japanese. It's certainly a broad performance, and it would certainly be insulting to be compared to this guy. Sheffield said "I honestly think I'd have less of a problem with it if they were truly playing with American conventions and American Japanese fetishism - but they're just unconsciously making fun of a group of people. And I'm not sure anyone will tell Sega this isn't appropriate."What a serious issue to have show up in Miburi & Teburi!
Sega loves you enough to let you play Miburi and Teburi
Hold off a bit on ordering that Japanese Wii to play Miburi & Teburi. Sega has seen fit to grace the world with a demo version of their amazing charades game, so you can try it first! In case you forgot about Teburi (though we don't see how that's even possible), it's the game in which actors in costumes pantomime activities in front of some extremely nostalgic CG backgrounds, and you write (in katakana) the word for the activity they are acting out!So, yeah, in a sense this demo won't do much for you if you don't know Japanese. But as far as we're concerned, Miburi & Teburi is exactly the same amount of awesome whether you can actually write the answers or not.
