The Mana Knight
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1Up just posted a preview on this game. I've been keeping an eye on this since it was revealed back in 2007:
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3171839
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3171839
Take a look at the images at 1UP. The game looks really cool and comes from the original Katamari creator. It will be coming to PSN early 2009. I can't wait.That's the question I heard from four separate co-workers yesterday when they peeked into my office to see what I was playing. It's a valid question. Noby Noby Boy has stages, characters, and objects to interact with, but it's up to the player to decide how to have fun with them, resulting in something closer to a literal "sandbox" than the kind of game that word usually describes.
It's a hard game to explain without sounding silly. Picture a physics playground. You control a pink worm with feet named BOY, and move, eat objects to stretch your stomach, jump to any height you choose, and stretch lengthwise by pulling yourself in opposite directions, without any specific objectives. Then after you stretch BOY for a while, you can "report" how many meters you stretched to GIRL, causing her to stretch as well. But while BOY is a reasonably-sized character with an elastic torso, GIRL is a giant who starts life in Earth's orbit in space, and as everyone playing on PlayStation Network cumulatively reports stretching scores, GIRL grows bit by bit, eventually stretching herself from Earth to The Moon, Mars, Jupiter, etc. (and in the process unlocking these settings for all players).
Don't worry -- I'd think you were lying if you tried to explain it to me, too. But it's that level of weirdness that makes it fun. Noby Noby Boy isn't failing at trying to be normal; it's reveling in being different, much like the previous game from its creator Keita Takahashi, Katamari Damacy. Which puts it in comfortable territory as a downloadable PSN game.
The Way Things Work
As the game begins (this would be after the twitchy parrot shows up in the corner of the screen to signify whether you are online, and before you've stretched long enough to tie yourself into a knot), a yellow fairy that looks like a peanut introduces itself and asks you a series of questions. This quiz serves as the game's tutorial -- each question is about the controls, and you guess each answer by pressing buttons, tilting the camera, etc.
The first time I played, it was at about this point that I realized it was fun to simply move around, which is something I don't tend to notice about games that aren't Super Mario Galaxy or Mirror's Edge. As you may have guessed by looking at the character design, you move the left analog stick to control BOY's head and the right to bring up his rear, and before you stretch yourself out too far, this setup works extremely well -- move the two sticks in the same direction to walk quickly, move them in opposite directions to stretch like chewing gum, and snap the sticks back together to flip around and perform ad hoc stunts.
But if you looked at the screenshots, you probably also noticed that many of them show BOY with what looks like a long multicolored sock in place of his torso. As you pull his two ends away from each other, you can stretch his belly into different lengths, eventually making him so long that his body is more that two times the length of the map itself. This makes him difficult to control since you still just have control over his two ends, and the giant rope in the middle just follows the laws of physics. If you get too long, you can even snap into two parts. It's like Will Wright's metaphor for greed in The Sims -- the more ambitious you get, the harder the game becomes to control.
Fortunately, the game realizes this, so if at any point you fall off the edge or want to reset yourself, you can hold down a button and reappear out of the chimney of a house near the middle of the map. This house also serves as part of the game's interface -- if you want to move to a new map or quit, you enter the front door and select your option from there. Each world -- Earth, The Moon, etc. -- features a variety of map types, with different objects and creatures in them, and they are all randomly generated within these various themes, so on Earth you may come across a dog level, a dice level, or a sports level.
The other unique part of the game's interface is that -- using the game's camera controls -- you can zoom out your view so far that you get a view of the entire planet and GIRL out in the galaxy looking down on you as you play. From there you can see how close GIRL is to reaching the rest of the solar system, and check up on statistics like how much you personally have contributed to her progress, who contributes the most each day, and your rank amongst other players (shown in a marching line with an avatar representing every player in the order of how much they've contributed).
That same camera system also poses a few issues in the preview build I've been playing -- because the game uses the right analog stick for movement, the camera controls are split between button presses that move your view up/down or left/right, and options where you hold down buttons and tilt the PS3 controller in different directions. You end up with all the options you need, but it takes a while to acclimate yourself to all the intricacies. This is less of a problem than it would be if the game featured enemies or challenges you could fail at, and is something that may be improved before release, but it's currently less than ideal.
Finding the Fun
To return to the comment from the beginning of this story, the most common criticism of Noby Noby Boy around the office is that the game doesn't set enough goals for players -- it's less of a game, and more of a playground. Katamari was an unusual mechanic wrapped inside traditional objectives and time limits, while Noby Noby Boy is an unusual mechanic without any of those trappings. But I've been playing the game almost nonstop for the past few days, and have been trying to figure out why I keep playing. And I think it comes down to a feeling that there's always something new to discover.
This isn't a game that tells you everything about itself up front. It gives you a short quiz and then lets you loose. If you want to trip the guy riding his bicycle, or make BOY super long and thread him through buildings or the donut-shaped clouds in the sky, that's up to you. I've had fun seeing how large I could stretch (current record is just over 500 meters) and trying to tie myself into a knot. I've eaten my way through the epilepsy warning, spotted cameos from Mappy and the Prince from Katamari, written messages on the side of BOY, befriended characters so they surf on my back, and recorded video clips (the game has an option so you can send them to YouTube).
That's not to say I wouldn't prefer a few objectives here and there, or perhaps more frequent rewards for messing around and stretching to certain lengths -- and maybe I'll get some of those, since the game is still in development -- but I find the game holding my attention without all of that. I'm not alone either. I haven't figured out if it's despite the structure or because of it, but I've never had as many coworkers stop by to check out what I'm playing as I have with this game.
And that's probably a good sign for Namco Bandai, since they are relying on the community to make this concept work. They're planning a simultaneous worldwide release for early 2009, with the estimate that it will take the group of PSN players 1-2 weeks to stretch GIRL enough to reach The Moon. So those who buy the game the first day it's available will be able to participate in a gradual discovery of the solar system, planet by planet. And those who feel like letting others do the heavy lifting for them can buy it a year down the line and have everything unlocked for them right from the start.
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I love how sending an in game message is a feature. 