Major League Eating totally scares me. This hyped-up take on the old-timey county fair pie-eating contest made sense when it was just an annual Coney Island hot dog eating competition. I’d catch it on the 4th of July on ESPN2, or occasionally see the episode of Cheap Seats that made fun of it, and that would be that. One year I actually happened to be out at Coney Island on the 4th of July, and I caught a bit of the tournament’s aftermath first-hand. But now, it’s a full-on league with a roster of food combatants and a bit of marketing muscle to go with it. So hey, why not turn it into a video game? Mastiff, being just the sort of dogs crazy enough to try anything once, are doing exactly that.
This downloadable WiiWare game seems fairly simple, but it also feels like it’s taking all of the important factors of competitive eating into consideration. There’s a mechanic for shoving food into your mouth, which varies depending on what sort of food you’re eating. Once it’s in your trap, you need to carefully chew it, taking care to not bite your tongue. In addition, you need to watch the cutaway view of your eater’s stomach–if you eat too fast, you might suffer a reversal of fortune and puke all over the place. To avoid this, you can hold down a button and shake the Remote to do the crazy little twist-n-shake dance that some eaters do to get right again. To get a bit unreal with it, the game adds power-ups to the mix, like burps and farts that can impact your opponent’s stomach.
It’s probably an impending sign of the apocalypse, but hey, it also seems like harmless fun, complete with the option for online play so you can pretend to overeat from a distance. The game also has a roster of real-life eaters, including Tim “Eater X” Janus, Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, and, of course, Takeru Kobayashi, who apparently serves as the game’s final boss.
Dude, what? Is this really happening, or am I having some sort of fever dream where I started a new website about games and then we wrote about competitive eating on the Wii? Either way, I love it. This completely-insane-but-somehow-perfect downloadable game is nearly finished with development, and will likely be among the first downloads to hit the new WiiWare service.