The stock market is a fickle beast, with multiple groups of people often at odds with each other and all in pursuit of the almighty dollar. One of the new StreetPass Plaza games, Market Crashers, plays out the irrationality and insanity of the market with the help of the man on the street. There’s a better-than-average chance this game was free whether in the bundle of recent games or from the free game offer, and that’s probably a good thing as it’s one of the weaker entries in the recent set.

Market Crashers works on a simple loop. The Miis in the plaza serve as stock market analysts and you take the role of the most dangerous thing in the market: a day trader with limited information. As with the real market, the objective is to buy when the stock is low and sell when it’s high, since that’s how the money is made. After each trading day, the buyer can choose to keep their funds liquid, or buy various items from the public companies in order to save the funds. The objective is to reach ever-increasing personal value milestones and eventually become worth more than the game’s Warren Buffet stand-in. The Mii analysts will give advice during the short trading day, with their accuracy increasing as more Miis are available, but they can be wrong no matter what based on random events. If additional accuracy is required, analyst cats can be hired...for a price (2 Play Coins each).

Essentially, Market Crashers boils down to a thirty second game of chicken. Is this the bottom point for the stock? Buy like a madman. Did the new product launch spike the stock? SELLSELLSELL. The goal seems to be unreachable at first, though the more a stock is traded the more units can be traded in the future which helps the money pile grow a little faster. There are some neat references to other plaza games in this: one of the stocks is clearly the shop from Flower Town. Since the point of these new games is to get in and out in a short time, the short game loop is understandable, but it’s not immediately obvious that a buy-and-hold strategy is possible. After the first couple of stocks, there’s also a lot left up to the random number generator since the previews have large portions obscured by a “?” area.

There’s a baseline of graphical performance with the StreetPass games, and Market Crashers lives up to it pretty well – but at the end of the (trading) day, you’re still literally watching a chart form. The controls are basic, but require exact timing as each unit of stock requires a separate button press for the transaction which means those who have trouble with rapid fire will lose money in the long run. As someone who falls into this category, I wouldn’t mind if a “dump” or “buy max” option was available to instantly max out my position or sell the lot when the stock peaks or valleys.

For a company faced with irrational investors it’d be easy to put out something that’s a mockery of the market. Market Crashers isn’t that--it plays it straight. And it was hard to nail down – one minute it was up half a billion in soybeans, the next people’s kids weren’t going to college and I wanted to repossess a Bentley. In the end, it’s a steady performer, but not a blue chipper.