The creator of Katamari tries for brilliance and comes up short
Katamari was a slice of pure, distilled insanity, but on some vague level it still made a strange sort of sense to roll around in a giant, planet-purging ball like those rollers for removing cat hair. It may have had madness slathered all over with an over-enthusiastic trowel and it may have been a glorified way of getting you to do the hoovering, but at least there was method to Katamari’s madness. And if Noby Noby Boy is anything to go by, method is increasingly the last thing on Keita Takahashi’s mind.
To call this thing a mess would be doing it a kindness; absolutely nothing about it makes sense on any level. The titular Boy is a small pink phallus who lives in a dimension-warping house that spurts out bubbles, and spends his days eating bicycles and shitting them off cliffs. The left stick moves your ass (figuratively), the right stick also moves your ass (literally) and a combination of the two lets you part buttocks from brain cells and stretch to enormous lengths. The face buttons see almost no use, while the shoulder buttons are used for everything and often require you to perform both actions and camera control at the exact same time. If that sounds unnecessarily complicated then you’re in possession of a few marbles more than the dev team.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Takahashi had no clue what he was doing with Noby Noby Boy for the entire length of its development, and it shows. Camera control involves so many different combinations of buttons and analogue movement that the chances of you even vaguely aligning the camera as you want it are almost nil, not least during those moments when the camera decides to leave you running about off-screen before finally deigning to swing round in your general direction. Menus are even worse; scoffing at the ridiculous notion of having everything laid out in neat sections, Noby Noby Boy forces you to control a 2D version of yourself who runs rampant through the text, barging letters out the way and occasionally eating them for good measure. The fact that you can drop him behind the text where he can’t do any damage is a blessing that soon fades as you realise that a game with nothing to do has hundreds of lines of text to wade through in a long and pointless list in order to tell you about it. And that’s assuming you’ve had the patience to sit through the first loading screen, which must surely last longer than that of Fallout 3, a game one thousand times the size and with a thousand times the detail of Noby Noby Boy, as well as approximately the same load times; it doesn't take a startling measure of intelligence to see that there is something desperately wrong here.
There’s not even a thing to do once you hit the game proper. People sit on your body for shits and giggles, then run away the next minute as you chow down on their friends and watch them collect in lumps at the base of your body. Then you fire them out your backside, and they go about their day. That’s it, mission accomplished; go to the next level and repeat until a vegetative state kicks in. Maps generally feature at least one or two potential points of interest, such as UFOs with claws hanging underneath and giant springs with balls balanced on top, but you can’t do anything with them. They just sit there as a mocking reminder of what happens when you let a genius squander two years on something that should have been knocked up in half a year by a penniless indie team.
Noby Noby Boy has one saving grace in the name of longevity, and that is its genuinely intriguing method of progress. By jumping repeatedly, both Boy and his buttocks can fly up through the cold, empty sky to meet the Sun, who lets him give up whatever body length he has achieved and add it to the length of Girl, another penis-shaped monstrosity who grows like Pinocchio’s nose (among other things) through space. With her overall length being contributed to by every player, Girl is already getting pretty sizable at several hundred million metres, and just recently made it to the Moon! Congratulations to everyone involved! Takahashi claims that by reaching new planets there will be new content unlocked, but since the Moon levels offer nothing that the original levels didn’t I highly doubt that such a thing as ‘content’ will ever grace Noby Noby Boy.
It’s hard to know what else to say; the game is simply a mess at every step. The controls are horrendous, the menus confusing, the load times ridiculous, and the content non-existent. Artistic vision gets so badly in the way that the whole thing suffers at ground-level. Even the most meandering and pointless game ultimately has something to work for, a point which Noby Noby Boy illustrates with aplomb by ensuring that the new levels opened up by Girl’s trip to the Moon offer absolutely nothing new. It has a unique and quirky charm that’ll keep you smiling for whole minutes at a time, but once you’ve eaten a few chickens and waddled off the level edge a couple of times you‘ve seen the lot.
People are already throwing excuses at it: ‘it’s not meant to have a point, it’s just throwaway fun’, and ‘it’s quirky and cute, that’s all that matters’. And that’s all they are: excuses. Noby Noby Boy has been in development since at least mid-2007, and the result of this endeavour is a lurching monstrosity of an engine that can’t load a tiny, textureless patch of land faster than Fallout’s immense, post-apocalyptic landscape, a terrible control set with barely a grain of thought behind its layout and an experience ripe for interesting quirks that tantalises but never lets you touch.
At £3.19 it’s unlikely to make you feel desperately robbed of your cash, and it at least admits its incomprehensibility right off the bat, even if it’s less willing to acknowledge its many technical issues and design faults. If scooting your ass away from your body and farting out bicycles sounds like the greatest use of your time since discovering the pin number for the locked channels on Sky, then by all means spend your money and be entertained. Just don’t expect the fun to last long, or for the global progression to bring anything new to the table.
Verdict
Big on charm but small on everything else. At a miniscule price point you might as well give it a whirl if the fancy takes you, but hopping on Youtube will tell you everything you need to know within a minute. As much as it wishes to rank itself amongst the elite of quirky gaming, it misses the point entirely by not even having one. With no substance behind the style, it is a missed opportunity.
Katamari was a slice of pure, distilled insanity, but on some vague level it still made a strange sort of sense to roll around in a giant, planet-purging ball like those rollers for removing cat hair. It may have had madness slathered all over with an over-enthusiastic trowel and it may have been a glorified way of getting you to do the hoovering, but at least there was method to Katamari’s madness. And if Noby Noby Boy is anything to go by, method is increasingly the last thing on Keita Takahashi’s mind.
To call this thing a mess would be doing it a kindness; absolutely nothing about it makes sense on any level. The titular Boy is a small pink phallus who lives in a dimension-warping house that spurts out bubbles, and spends his days eating bicycles and shitting them off cliffs. The left stick moves your ass (figuratively), the right stick also moves your ass (literally) and a combination of the two lets you part buttocks from brain cells and stretch to enormous lengths. The face buttons see almost no use, while the shoulder buttons are used for everything and often require you to perform both actions and camera control at the exact same time. If that sounds unnecessarily complicated then you’re in possession of a few marbles more than the dev team.You could be forgiven for thinking that Takahashi had no clue what he was doing with Noby Noby Boy for the entire length of its development, and it shows. Camera control involves so many different combinations of buttons and analogue movement that the chances of you even vaguely aligning the camera as you want it are almost nil, not least during those moments when the camera decides to leave you running about off-screen before finally deigning to swing round in your general direction. Menus are even worse; scoffing at the ridiculous notion of having everything laid out in neat sections, Noby Noby Boy forces you to control a 2D version of yourself who runs rampant through the text, barging letters out the way and occasionally eating them for good measure. The fact that you can drop him behind the text where he can’t do any damage is a blessing that soon fades as you realise that a game with nothing to do has hundreds of lines of text to wade through in a long and pointless list in order to tell you about it. And that’s assuming you’ve had the patience to sit through the first loading screen, which must surely last longer than that of Fallout 3, a game one thousand times the size and with a thousand times the detail of Noby Noby Boy, as well as approximately the same load times; it doesn't take a startling measure of intelligence to see that there is something desperately wrong here.
There’s not even a thing to do once you hit the game proper. People sit on your body for shits and giggles, then run away the next minute as you chow down on their friends and watch them collect in lumps at the base of your body. Then you fire them out your backside, and they go about their day. That’s it, mission accomplished; go to the next level and repeat until a vegetative state kicks in. Maps generally feature at least one or two potential points of interest, such as UFOs with claws hanging underneath and giant springs with balls balanced on top, but you can’t do anything with them. They just sit there as a mocking reminder of what happens when you let a genius squander two years on something that should have been knocked up in half a year by a penniless indie team.
Noby Noby Boy has one saving grace in the name of longevity, and that is its genuinely intriguing method of progress. By jumping repeatedly, both Boy and his buttocks can fly up through the cold, empty sky to meet the Sun, who lets him give up whatever body length he has achieved and add it to the length of Girl, another penis-shaped monstrosity who grows like Pinocchio’s nose (among other things) through space. With her overall length being contributed to by every player, Girl is already getting pretty sizable at several hundred million metres, and just recently made it to the Moon! Congratulations to everyone involved! Takahashi claims that by reaching new planets there will be new content unlocked, but since the Moon levels offer nothing that the original levels didn’t I highly doubt that such a thing as ‘content’ will ever grace Noby Noby Boy.
It’s hard to know what else to say; the game is simply a mess at every step. The controls are horrendous, the menus confusing, the load times ridiculous, and the content non-existent. Artistic vision gets so badly in the way that the whole thing suffers at ground-level. Even the most meandering and pointless game ultimately has something to work for, a point which Noby Noby Boy illustrates with aplomb by ensuring that the new levels opened up by Girl’s trip to the Moon offer absolutely nothing new. It has a unique and quirky charm that’ll keep you smiling for whole minutes at a time, but once you’ve eaten a few chickens and waddled off the level edge a couple of times you‘ve seen the lot.
People are already throwing excuses at it: ‘it’s not meant to have a point, it’s just throwaway fun’, and ‘it’s quirky and cute, that’s all that matters’. And that’s all they are: excuses. Noby Noby Boy has been in development since at least mid-2007, and the result of this endeavour is a lurching monstrosity of an engine that can’t load a tiny, textureless patch of land faster than Fallout’s immense, post-apocalyptic landscape, a terrible control set with barely a grain of thought behind its layout and an experience ripe for interesting quirks that tantalises but never lets you touch.
At £3.19 it’s unlikely to make you feel desperately robbed of your cash, and it at least admits its incomprehensibility right off the bat, even if it’s less willing to acknowledge its many technical issues and design faults. If scooting your ass away from your body and farting out bicycles sounds like the greatest use of your time since discovering the pin number for the locked channels on Sky, then by all means spend your money and be entertained. Just don’t expect the fun to last long, or for the global progression to bring anything new to the table.
Verdict
Big on charm but small on everything else. At a miniscule price point you might as well give it a whirl if the fancy takes you, but hopping on Youtube will tell you everything you need to know within a minute. As much as it wishes to rank itself amongst the elite of quirky gaming, it misses the point entirely by not even having one. With no substance behind the style, it is a missed opportunity.
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