When Keita Takahashi’s Noby Noby Boy hit the Playstation3 last year, it immediately warmed my heart with just how much it encouraged the user to play, a word that most game developers seem to have forgotten. While most critics and gamers wrote it off as a failed experiment, I named Noby Noby Boy my fourth favorite game of 2009. Now it’s on the iPhone… sort of. I can hardly emphasize enough how COMPLETELY different the experience is. The portable version of Noby Noby Boy is less of a game and more of an alternate interface for the iPhone, with camera, mail, web browser, map, music player et cetera included, just with goofy characters floating around. The features of the app are somewhat brilliantly portrayed here in this series of videos from the Noby office wherein puppets, dolls, and toys have a board meeting to discuss what their app should do:
First and foremost, yes, Noby Noby Boy should be on the iPhone and iPod Touch, and similar to the PS3 version, the main focus should be on stretching and shrinking a worm-like creature called BOY…
And of course BOY needs things to interact with, so simply press this button to randomly summon toys and objects for BOY to stretch, swing, and spin around…
Use the camera or import photos from your library directly onto the toys to populate BOY’s world in a personal way.
Got an idea you don’t want to forget? An important appointment? Need to buy apology flowers? Write a memo directly on BOY’s body! That way, you’ll be reminded every time you play with BOY (and you can save multiple memos).
Aaaaand there’s a clock. Really not much to say about this one. It’s a clock.
The in-app music player is a cartoon robot, with album art for a torso and controls on its hands and feet. Really useful considering how annoying it can be to back out of an application to change what music the iPod is playing, then go back into the application all over again. Plus that robot is pretty darn cute.
The in-app web browser has several tabs, each of which is bookmarked to some of the most popular sites on the ‘net like twitter, facebook and flickr, but you can browse any site you want (that the iPhone would read anyway). Again, this is more like skinning Noby Noby Boy assets over the existing Safari browser, but hey, still fun and still great that you don’t need to leave the app.
Syncing your location via GPS allows BOY to stretch as far as you have travelled in real-time as seen via Google Maps. This could actually be a lot of fun for jetsetters and world-travellers, not so much for people who hardly ever leave the same neighborhood.
The augmented reality feature basically allows you to play with BOY and his toys over live-streaming video from the iPhone’s camera, making it that much easier to throw robots at your friends’ heads without them knowing.
The mail feature allows you to take a screenshot of all the madness happening on screen at the moment and send it as an email attachment. Again, this is just tacking onto the iPhone’s built in Mail application, so you can send other messages too and it has you address book saved for easy sending.
And of course, all that stretching is for a reason: to feed your love to GIRL to help her stretch! This turns into more of a Hungry Hungry Hippos explosion here on the iPhone, and the stuffed GIRL in the video sounds, perhaps, a bit too excited at the prospect of eating all those hearts.
And the world map marks where you are everytime you feed your love to GIRL and also lets you see all the other users in the world wherever they are and how much they have shared their love with GIRL. It’s cartography of worldwide polyamory!
So basically this new version of Noby Noby Boy is an easy way to have a bit of extra fun while doing the things you’re already doing on your Apple iDevice. The only problem now is, well, getting it to work. There have been a lot of complaints since its release last year about crashing on all varieties of iPhones and iPod Touches. The screenshot at right is from the one time in the past five days I’ve gotten it to run on my 2nd generation 32gig iPod Touch (yes, that’s BOY hanging out in the tall grass outside my front door). Seeing BOY on a Google Map over my friend’s house was decidedly nice, and the world map was illuminated showing that it seems to be rather popular worldwide (mostly in Japan and California, of course). With appropriate updates so it will work on all iDevices without running out of memory (and seriously, there’s no reason for this to be more of a resource hog than Space Invaders Infinity Gene), Noby Noby Boy might just become the favored way to waste time on an iPhone worldwide.
More than anything, though, those promo videos above just make me want Noby Noby Boy dolls. THEY ARE SO CUTE!
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