If you remember the oddball game Seaman on the late great Sega Dreamcast, the one where you raised a voice-activated man-fish mutant by talking to it through a microphone, you will more prepared -- marginally, at least -- for the weirdness that is Odama for the Nintendo Gamecube.

There's no completely sane-sounding way to say it: Odama is a hybrid pinball/feudal-Japan-military real-time strategy/action game. That you will yell at. Sometimes in context, often in frustration with the sort of language not typically associated with the feel-good image of Nintendo gaming. To recap, that's pinball, real-time strategy, action, yelling, and feudal Japan. One thing's for sure: You've never played any one single videogame quite like this before.

You play on a pinball table that is representative of a feudal Japan landscape. It's often bound by stone walls, bisected by flowing rivers, and dotted with obstacles and "bumpers" that take the form of buildings and other terrain features. You take the role of a commander committed to the virtuous Way of Ninten (a greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number philosophy -- "Ninten-Do," get it?), who must send his troops to clear the way for the advance of the Ninten Bell, a massive metal bell with powerful, resonant/destructive properties, born by a crew of men onto the battlefield. This is the bell you want to whang with yet another oversized object, the Odama -- essentially a massive pinball --, for fun and (military) profit.

Now, pay attention: It gets weirder.

So off you go, sending your little infantry and Bell-bearers into the field. The idea is to get your Bell to the north edge of the battleground. Enemy troops will advance, trying to stop you, of course, and that's where the Odama comes in. You fling it into the fray with giant flippers just as you would on your pinball table of choice, and, just like a pinball, it can strike "bumpers" (environmental objects) and even destroy structures, garnering power-ups for your soldiers. It can also flatten the enemy's troops -- and yours too, if you're not careful (or even if you are, for that matter; in Odama, you will definitely get your fratricide on).

Nail the Bell with the rolling Odama, and the resultant gonging shock-wave will take down surrounding enemy forces. Or, use the Odama to strike a large water-gate that can alternately divert the flowing water of a river -- "off" to get your guys across, and back "on" to thwart your advancing foes, like Moses, only less biblical, more surreal.

There are also collectable power-ups that can aid your forces by providing morale to your men, offering precious extra seconds to the timed missions, and even culling much-needed reinforcements from the enemy's own ranks.

Now it gets complicated: While you're doing all this, you're also yelling voice-commands at your own virtual guys through the clip-on microphone (bundled with the game) to rally at a particular point, advance, charge the enemy, move to take advantage of revealed power-ups, fall back, or just get the hell out of the way. If you can't multitask, this isn't the game for you.

Well, you don't strictly need to yell per se (or curse, for that matter -- although you may soon find yourself doing both in interesting, cathartic combinations); the microphone is reasonably sensitive, and the voice-recognition is decent.

Even so, Odama can get incredibly hard and frustrating. More distant objectives down the forced-perspective of the battlefield are naturally harder to see and/or accurately hit; expect lots of friendly-fire deaths at the hands of your own Odama. Plus, as in any real-world pinball game, there will be moments where a poorly-coordinated twitch of the flippers sends your own ball/Odama right down the old drain, immediately ending an otherwise-successful mission.

The game's biggest single downside -- beyond its sheer, general, hair-tearing difficulty -- may be the fact that, as if all the merciless multitasking weren't enough to contend with, you've got merciless time limits. Timed missions are the all-too-common bane of otherwise accommodating games, and if Odama's clock were just a little bit more forgiving from the outset, it would make the game twice as accessible.

Nevertheless, Odama has a great presentation (including subtitled Japanese voicework and balloon-dialogue quips from your hapless soldiers in the field), as well as that nigh-indefinable "just one more game" thing, that player compulsion factor for which designers the world over strive.

Ultimately, it's on the short side, but Odama is totally unique and, if nothing else, worth a gander just for that; a whacked-out, feudal-Japan, voice-assisted, pinball-warlord genre-hybridization experience like nothing videogaming has seen before.