Noby Noby Boy (PS3) – Review
For more on Noby Noby Boy, you can check out my First Impression article here.
Noby Noby Boy is the tale of BOY, a thing lives in the middle of the earth and stretches and eats things so he can stretch more. BOY can then visit the sun –which is actually a lion sitting on top of the earth– and report how much he has stretched to GIRL. GIRL is like BOY, but bigger. And longer. GIRL and BOY’s story is ever-evolving. For example, GIRL recently reached the moon, and now is slowly on her way to Mars. In the real world that you and I live in, each of us control our own BOY, but we all contribute to the one and only GIRL. It sounds dirty, but it’s really all in good fun. So remember, if you have played Noby Noby Boy, you and I have cooperated towards a common goal; it’s like Folding@Home, but pointless.
Anyhow, after stretching BOY roughly 120,000 meters and making my way up in rankings to 355 out of approximately 36,000 players, Noby Noby Boy has yet to lose its charm or diminish in value for me. It is not a game, and because of that most people will not have the patience to play with it for more than an hour at a time (and honestly, that would be, ahem, stretching it), but for five measly dollars, PS3 owners get a whole new type of toy that can offer up a criminally entertaining diversion from your normally scheduled video game. At the very least worth, it’s totally worth skipping your girlie latte for a day to buy this thing with the hope that more developers will be encouraged by Noby Noby Boy’s sales to develop their own weird-ass stuff and make it available for download through places like the Xbox Live Marketplace, PlayStation Store, and Wii Shop Channel.
Now, there are some issues that can’t be ignored. The camera is cumbersome even after mastering the controls, both because the SIXAXIS doesn’t always seem to register how you are holding the controller, and because it almost always centers on BOY’s mid-section instead of his head. When you’ve stretched him out to the point that he’s longer than the “world” you are on, you can no longer easily consume objects without having to bunch your entire body up in one confined area.
Also, the YouTube integration can be frustratingly inconsistent in its ability to successfully upload your video to their servers. In my personal experience, four out of five uploads would fail. While pretty bad, this would not be unforgivably terrible, except for the fact that you only get one shot at uploading the video to YouTube. The video will remain accessible on your PS3’s hard drive for as long as you like, but there is no way to go back and re-upload them. If you caught some amazing moment and hope to share it with the world, cross your fingers because the chances of people seeing it are slim. Having the ability to record is perplexing as it is despite the technical issues. The exciting things that are worth sharing on YouTube are generally unexpected and not easily repeatable. You cannot edit the clips for length to highlight the one cool 20 second thing that happened in your ten minute video, so unless you plan on spamming the feature and putting your poor hard drive to work, you’ll likely end up with a lot of boring footage that you’ll need to go and delete after exiting the game.
Your willingness to create your own fun will ultimately be the determining factor in how much you get out of Noby Noby Boy. If you need your interactive entertainment to serve up objectives and goals to keep you engrossed, you may find this game to be a entirely empty experience. If exploring the limits of a toy’s physics, seeing just how big you can stretch and finding out if you can eat that whole house sounds like a lot of fun, then Noby Noby Boy may be right up your alley.
