Skipping the fishing to go straight to the catching part sounds potentially cheaper, but the virtual odds sound much too realistic to be a cost savings.

I don’t think you’ll want to leave your cell phone lying around; $10 for three casts approximates the cost of fly fishing, but the idea that your kid could pizzle away your entire paycheck, worse yet, could win two or three hundred pounds of fish should cause you to blanch.

The game — called “Ippon Zuri” (which means “pole-and-line fishing”) — was created by FIT, a Fukuoka-based system development company who teamed up with a local seafood wholesaler. Game play is simple: players use the phone keys to cast bait to promising-looking fish in the game’s virtual waters, which include sea bream, crab, and other seasonal fish. When a fish takes the bait, the player is sent to a slot machine screen where, if luck prevails and 3 numbers line up appropriately, the virtual fish is hooked and reeled in. A message is then relayed to the wholesaler, who picks up the real-world equivalent from the local seafood market and delivers it, whole and raw, to the player’s doorstep.

Hardened anglers will balk at the slot machine segment, decrying that fishing could ever compare with any game of chance. I’m not so sure that fading light and tiny naturals isn’t exactly that – chancy at best to pick the correct fly and even less of seeing it to set the hook.

They tried the live action version on those Internet deer hunting sites, I’m guessing the webcam flavor can’t be far behind.