The first dilemma that struck this particular reviewer when faced with writing about Talkman was this – how the hell does one review Talkman? It’s certainly not a game in the traditional sense – Sony’s latest attempt to breach the mass market is essentially an interactive PSP phrase book and translation tool. Except it’s not, it’s a bit different. There’s puzzles and … look, it’s happening already. Talkman is like no other piece of software, and as such, we’re going to have to break it down into little chunks to even have a hope of attributing a numerical score to it. Let’s see how it goes, shall we.

The main bulk of Talkman comes in the form of ‘Talk’ mode, whereby you interact with a blue bird named Max. First things first – Max is a moron. He’s a bird, so he shouldn’t think of himself as cool, but the fact he knows six languages makes him think he has the right to be a smug, irritating self-righteous virus. Seeing as Max is the focal point of everything in Talkman, it is something of a problem. Anyway, after the initial shock of being confronted by someone so immensely hateful passes, it becomes clear that Talkman is a tool for learning language and aiding conversations with foreigners.

You begin by selecting a scene from a list of typical holiday situations – you know the type, meeting people, going clubbing, going skiing… Then the game will ask you to say something into the microphone that will be relevant to that situation. For example in a nightclub, you might want to know what time it shuts, or when meeting people, how old they are. This is all well and good, until you realize that Talkman will only let you ask questions that it already has in its database, and that whatever you say will result in the game producing a list of the questions it wants to ask. Therefore you are limited to a (admittedly large) selection of queries, and they’re often in bizarre places. The whole thing is just a little too clumsy for its own good. Long loading times, a confusing interface and the horror that is Max do not make for a useful tool.

Imagine the situation: you’re strolling down a beautiful Venetian street when you happen upon a gorgeous, but innocent looking native girl (you know, the type that Jude likes). Desperate to talk to her but hopelessly inadequate with the language, you whip out your PSP. She looks intrigued, if a little scared. Flicking the power switch to ‘on’, you catch her eyeline in order to stop her from walking away. "Just a minute" you garble in a bizarre Italian accent. She reaches for something that suspiciously resembles mace, then the World’s Most Awkward Silence Ever takes place as you both wait uncomfortably for the PSP to load. By now she’s looking at the screen, half intrigued, half scared for her life. But at least she’s still here. "Oh good, it’s Max. He’ll break the tension" you think to yourself, "Oh no, he’s a cretin. Quick, Get into Talk mode" you mumble as she looks at you, terrified. Quickly you spout "What’s your name?" into the PSP. She replies "Francesca" before Max can even get to repeating the sentence in Italian. She begins to walk away, but you grab her arm in a last desperate attempt to engage her in Talkman conversation. You thrust the PSP into her grasp. She looks at the screen. Then she looks at you. Then she runs away. With your PSP. Two weeks later you find her in the corner of a dingy downtown bar, drunk as a skunk, playing LocoRoco. But that’s another story.

And therein lies the main problem with Talkman. Why the hell would you want to use it? Aside from the minigames – see “Yo hablo Espanol”, There’s no practical use for the thing, and it certainly isn’t fun. There’s no situation where you could practically use it, so it becomes a tool for training yourself in the basics of Spanish, Italian, Japanese or French – with long loading pauses and a phenomenally irritating host. But, and this is a crucial but, it works very well. The microphone recognises words and, somehow, pronunciation with unerring accuracy; there are thousands of useful phrases and it delivers on every single one of its promises. It just promises stupid things. Like being able to have pleasant conversations with angry foreigners who have absolutely no interest in getting to know English scum. And we don’t blame them.

So, the numerical score. If a game that performs its task adequately yet does nothing spectacular is considered average, then Talkman is the very definition of average. We wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but if you’re after a novel way of losing your PSP to a thieving tourist or cunning native, then you could do a hell of a lot worse than Talkman.

Jon Denton