I just don't know.

User Rating: 8 | Noby Noby Boy PS3
I have no idea what's going on.

Now I'm not trying to be cute or funny here; I really don't understand what is happening in front of me. Noby Noby Boy is a game with no real goals, no real characters, and no real purpose. Oddly enough, it is this sense of pointlessness that makes the game so endearing. Playing Noby Noby Boy is akin to playing on a playground as a child; all of the devices to create a fun game are present, and it's up to you to piece them together into an entertaining whole.

The one stated goal of Noby Noby Boy is to stretch Boy out really far. This is accomplished by pushing the two analouge sticks in opposite directions, as each stick controls half of Boy's body. Once Boy has been stretched out like an overused rubber band, you must report his length to a gigantic lion who is sitting on top of the Earth. As Boy grows longer, Girl grows happier, and will eventually elongate until her body reaches from the Earth to the Moon. So yes, the "plot" is just an awkward euphemism for having sex... with a lion watching? Suffice it to say, this game is really strange.

Boy has a number of strange talents; take, for example, his abilities to fly, to eat, and to excrete the objects he has eaten with tremendous force. As the game says, these abilities don't really serve any purpose. If you want to go around eating turtles and crapping them off cliffs, go right ahead. If not, that's cool too. It's the loose structure of Noby Noby Boy that makes it entertaining, as having fun with the game really is up to you. There are also a few ancillary features that some players might not even discover without venturing into the menus. The most notable of these is the ability to record real time gameplay and upload it to Youtube. Given the free form gameplay, this feature seems like an odd choice because there is never anything really exciting happening onscreen. This feature is probably better suited to competitive or player-generated games like Resistance or Littlebigplanet. Still, it makes for a nice bullet point despite the fact that it takes such a long time to upload a video.

Noby Noby Boy's graphical presentation is nice for a five dollar download, but it's hardly gorgeous. The pastel-hued color pallete is fun to look at, and the art direction is really weird and thus interesting. The soundtrack is mostly soft and catchy acoustic guitar melodies, which suits the game well.

And that is that. I have described Noby Noby Boy to the best of my ability, but I know that it truly is impossible to convey the strange sense of fun that this game creates. Why is it so entertaining? Maybe it's because the pretty colors and free-form gameplay bring out the kid in me again, or maybe it's just because the whole package is so darn bizarre. Whatever the reason, Noby Noby Boy is worth the download.