PSN Review - Noby Noby Boy - PlayStation LifeStyle

Noby Noby Boy isn’t for everyone. The quirkiness and the sandbox style of the game, not everyone will understand and/or like. With that being said Noby Noby Boy really isn’t that bad of a timewaster. If you had a stressful day at school or work, just start Noby Noby Boy and play for 5 minutes. Seeing all of the wild and crazy results of the randomized maps in the game will calm you down pretty fast. Once you have seen sumo wrestlers riding on the backs of pigs as if they were bull riders riding bulls, you will know what I mean. That scenario is only one of the many, many results that are available to witness.

There are many ways to experiment in Noby Noby Boy, as you can stretch Boy up to about three hundred to four hundred meters at a time. You can play with the physics while stretching and align yourself against two trees, and turn yourself into a makeshift slingshot. You can eat all objects and inhabitants of any map, you can fly, you can make half of your body shrink while the other half grows. Those are just several of the possibilities that you can experiment with and combine to create some very interesting hijinks. Noby Noby Boy also sports a few Easter eggs inside the game. For example, pressing Select will bring up the in-game manual. A snake-like Noby Noby Boy appears and you can make him eat any of the letters or decorations in the manual for mindless fun. If you also press right on the analog stick, then press Select, you are able to play a mini game with a Noby Noby Boy theme song playing while you navigate the same snake-like Noby Noby Boy through a tunnel.

Accompanying the single player aspect of Noby Noby Boy is an online interaction feature. In the game there is a Noby Noby Girl, and she serves 2 different purposes in the game. She is your online leaderboard, to which you can compare how far you have stretched your Noby Noby Boy compared to others. She also takes everyone’s stretch amounts, combines them, and grows each time a length is submitted. You can submit your stretch length at any time, so long as you have any length to submit. As she continues to constantly grow from the combined amounts, she is going to reach the Moon. After all of our lengths get her to the moon, we will be able to have access to another planet. What the moon opens up, no-one knows. One can only assume it’ll open up all sorts of new kinds of map possibilities. It doesn’t stop at the Moon either. She will continue to grow and grow and reach Mars and other subsequent planets. So there is quite a lot of replayability included in Noby Noby Boy.

Noby Noby Boy has some notable problems, though. One thing that isn’t all that great is the camera. In order for you to control the camera, or to even zoom in and out, you have to press L1 and R1 buttons in combination while using the analog sticks and motion controls. It’s not user friendly in the slightest bit. Another facet that you’d think wouldn’t be a problem with this new technology are the loading times. There’s just too many of them. After almost everything you do, besides traversing the map, requires loading. It gets tiresome since all you want to do is play the actual game. The music and sound effects are quirky and fit in well with the vibe that the game offers. The music is light-hearted and bubbly and the sound effects made me think of the classic looney tunes cartoons, with all of the over exaggerated hits and plops and whatnot.

So is Noby Noby Boy worth your five dollars? Well yes and no, If you are a busy person that only has a limited amount of time to play your PS3, then no. There are more involving and important games for you to be playing than a five dollar time waster. But Noby Noby Boy is a simple and fun way to pass the time and to relieve stress, so long as you go into it knowing that this is nothing more than a simple time waster and enjoy it for what it is. After all, I can think of several things you could spend your five dollars on elsewhere.