Noby Noby Boy (PS3) – Review
For more on Noby Noby Boy, you can check out my First Impression article here.
Brace yourself. You’re going to read some words momentarily, and you may get the sensation that you’ve been unknowingly slipped some acid. Don’t worry though. You haven’t been dosed. You’re reading about Noby Noby Boy for the PlayStation Network.
Noby Noby Boy features BOY, a caterpillar-esque creature that lives in the middle of a planet-shaped object which bears more than a slight resemblance to Earth. BOY stretches and can eat a large variety of people, plants, animals, structures, and machine parts so he can stretch even more. After each satisfying stretching session, BOY can visit the planet’s sun–which is actually a lion sitting on top of the planet, peering down into the center–and report how much he has stretched to GIRL. GIRL is like BOY, but galactic-scale. In the real world that you and I live in, each of us control our own BOY, but we all contribute to the stretching of the one perpetual GIRL. GIRL recently reached the Moon, and now is slowly on her way to Mars. If that doesn’t blow your mind, chew on this: once you have played Noby Noby Boy and reported to GIRL, you and I will have cooperated in beautiful harmony towards a common goal and are almost certainly legal best friends forever in some part of the world. Playing Noby Noby Boy is like participating in the Folding@Home project, but with 99% less potential lives saved and 100% more pooping.
Though from the mind of Keita Takahashi, creator of the excellent Katamari Damacy series, Noby Noby Boy should be considered more toy than game. Aside from a clever controls tutorial that greets you the first time you start the game, there is no story to progress or goals to meet. Because of the lack of structure, most people will probably not have the patience to play with Noby Noby Boy for more than an hour at a time (and honestly, that would be . . . stretching it). For five measly dollars though, PS3 owners can experience a wholly-unique sandbox that offers up an 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 abstract software and make it available through the various digital game distribution services.
In addition to Noby Noby Boy’s limited value, there’s some problems with the controls and camera system that bummed me out. The camera is cumbersome to operate even after mastering the controls. The SIXAXIS doesn’t always seem to register the pitch that the controller is being held at and the camera always centers on BOY’s mid-section instead of his head, so when you’ve stretched him out to the point that he’s longer than the “world’s” surface, you can no longer consume objects without bunching BOY’s entire body up in a confined area and wrangling the camera into place. If you’re a professional contortionist, this might be a desirable feature. Me, I can’t say I’m a fan.
Also, the YouTube integration is frustratingly inconsistent in its ability to successfully upload your video to YouTube’s servers. In my personal experience, four out of five uploads would fail. While pretty bad, this would not be unforgivably terrible, but you only get one shot at uploading the video to YouTube. While the video will remain accessible on your PS3′s hard drive for as long as you like, 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. Even having the ability to record is perplexing despite the technical issues. The exciting things that would be 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 BOY and finding out if he can eat that whole house sounds like a good time, then Noby Noby Boy may be right up your alley.
