Noby Noby Boy (PS3)
The new game from the creator of Katamari Damacy will stretch your patience to its limits.
2/25/2009 7:47 PM | 9 Comments | Page 1 of 2
User Ratings (1 total)
0% Buy | 0% Try | 100% Fry
My Rating
What's Hot: A bizarre design sensibility with colorful shapes and sounds; Pretty effin' weird
What's Not: Seems to be very little "game" here; Pretty effin' weird
That's Girl, with Earth way off in the background. She really gets around.
Three years ago, someone who worked at the Montreal development studio of a major games publisher asked me where I thought
Katamari Damacy came from. I answered that the weird, sticky ball-rolling PlayStation 2 classic probably dawned on Keita Takahashi after too much chemical indulgence. The tripped-out story of the Prince and the King of the Cosmos probably came first, and the adhesive collision tech followed. The person I was speaking to disagreed, saying that the Katamari games smacked of something that was cooked up first while fooling around in a white box, with loopiness added after.
That's what
Noby Noby Boy, Takahashi's newest game available for download on the PlayStation Store, feels like.
Noby Noby Boy plops players down into a coloring-book universe where two quadruped humanoids named Boy and Girl share an odd symbiotic relationship.
Boy needs to learn to respect the rules of the road.
Boy wanders around a 3-D map, stretching as far as players can manage. Stretching's accomplished by controlling the front and back legs of Boy's body independently, using the left and right analog sticks respectively. Holding down L2 or R2 makes either set of legs anchor onto something, and tapping the triggers makes Boy's front or back jump up. You can essentially levitate past the stratosphere, stretching without limit. Every centimeter players stretch their Boys gets submitted online to Girl, which helps her stretch to new planets and connect people across the whole galaxy.
Noby Noby Boy is funny and whimsical, but not directed. Each player's efforts to stretch Boy add to the progress Girl makes in reaching new planets. There's an interactive leaderboard with cartoony avatars that charts how far players have stretched their Boys, and it's clear that Takahashi wants to create a sense of collaborative, noncompetitive community. What's not so easy to figure out is why anybody would come back once the initial giggles wear off. (Boy can eat things, too, and poop them out -- but I never found any gameplay purpose for this ability.)
You can eat that cat, that ball or those people, and projectile-poop them out, no worse for the wear. Like corn.
There are giggles aplenty, especially as Takahashi delivers more of the gently weird designs and concepts for which he's known. But for all that,
Noby Noby Boy may as well be a box of crayons. It's like finger-painting, Etch A Sketch and distributed computing all had an orgy on top of a pile of Sanrio model sheets and boxes of vinyl Kubrick toys, with
Noby Noby Boy as the offspring. There's a ton of whimsy here -- odd-looking people and noisy animals jump on Boy -- but no structure. You'll get Trophies for stretching certain distances or spinning the top of Boy House, the game's save hub. "Make of it what you will" seems to be the edict, and at five bucks, it's not too steep an investment.
