Games of the Year: Noby Noby Boy

By Fraser McMillan

Through all the big-name, big-budget titles of the past 12 months, it’s primarily a heap of indie games that Fraser remembers most fondly from 2009. And so, in our week of reminiscing, he sits down to explain why a £3 PSN sandbox is the finest the medium had to offer this year.

We knew it was going to come to this: Noby Noby Boy has emerged as my game of the year in pretty unambigous terms. Demon’s Souls came along and so nearly stole BOY’s thunder, but that such a fantastic retail release couldn’t quite trump the £3 PlayStation Network title is testament to the unhinged brilliance of my pick.

Keita Takahashi’s most ingenious creation yet has had me captivated for countless hours since its release in February. Its sheer goofiness is what strikes you first. A big long snake thing with a dumb grin, flailing around and crapping out clowns with chicken heads riding pogo sticks. It’s had me roaring with laughter for minutes on end because the situation produced by my play was so utterly bizarre that it merited no other reaction. If someone sees it, they want to try it out, to discover the madness for themselves. Its appeal lies in an inherent, unpredictable insanity. No two people will have the same experience.

It’s a simple enough concept. It may be the simplest concept in gaming: mess around. The controls are deliberately counter-intuitive to begin with. Play for thirty minutes and they begin to feel more natural and tactile than almost any other system. As you slime around, gobbling and floating and spinning and twanging and tying and flopping and farting and digesting and stretching, each action’s purpose makes itself clearer. For something that uses so few buttons, it has a remerkably long list of functions.

If art is meant to provoke and inflame, there are few games that have so starkly divided opinion. To pan it as a mildly-interesting distraction or quirky but ultimately worthless curio is to miss the point entirely. Noby Noby Boy takes the rule book, eats it, and then shits it into space. It’s part of a trend I’ve taken to, which is to place in the player’s hands a set of tools with which to drive their own experience and express themselves within a game’s designed constraints. Far Cry 2, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Trine and to an extent LittleBigPlanet are, intentionally or not, part of a loosely defined movement alongside Namco-Bandai’s freeform wonder.

There are people out there who are uncomfortable with it, who dislike this lack of direction and prefer more rigidly traditional experiences. But you know what? They’re boring. Failure to appreciate Noby Noby Boy is evidence of an inability to get creative, to dive into the sandpit head-first with a bucket of paint and some baloons and goof around. It is, almost uniquely, a game that both passes and fails the Ebert test, sticking a big middle finger up to his definition of art in the process. Takahashi’s greasy fingerprints are all over it, but it is nothing without interaction. If that isn’t playing up to the strengths of the medium, I don’t know what is.

Maybe it requires a bit of work to appreciate, but if you’re willing to give it that time, to let it open up your cynical, jaded old self and funnel your artistic juices into something unique, then not only will it help you rediscover your inner child, it’ll tap into what you loved about games in the first place – in the most unorthodox and unlikely way.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

//Demon’s Souls (Import – not yet reviewed)
“Pipped to the post” doesn’t come close. Demon’s Souls was, for a few days at the start of this very month, going to be my game of the year. It just misses out, but that this came within a heartbeat of a game that has attracted so much of my 2009 hyperbole is not to be sniffed at. It’s a fantastically dark experience, both literally and figuratively, but the one aspect that defines it most is its concillatory nature. That’s in no way a negative – From Software and Sony have masterfully fused Werstern and Japanese design philosophies, visual cultures and narrative structure. It hits several other sweet spots between old-school and modern, traditional and progressive, challenge and candid playability, co-operation and competition, reserved atmosphere and unhinged insanity, and so much more. It’s the kind of game everyone can get behind.

//Glum Buster (Coverage)
Glum Buster is a towering achievement, the product of one very talented man’s vision and hard work. Justin Leingang has shaped an experience unlike any other. It’s one underscored by a brutal sense of melancholy, and each element works in tandem to perpetuate this crushing tone for its full two or three hours. It may be short, but it’s a deep, meditative piece with a spectacular sense of pacing. Indeed, the experience evokes Portal’s philosophy, keeping things as tight and concise as possible in order to craft a work composed solely of memorable moments and entirely free of filler. A deserving runner-up, and if you haven’t already, play it and donate to a good cause.

//Street Fighter IV (Review – 9/10)
For those of us with memories of Street Fighter II, IV is comfortably familiar. The roster, the combos, the stages and the slick versus play all either directly ape or evoke those of their grandfather, allowing us to slip straight into Arcade Mode like Saved By the Bell is still on TV. The low-level back-and-forth easily surpasses all other fighting games as it almost always has, but it’s the subtle touches that make Street Fighter IV the genre’s crown jewel. Focus attacks and Ultra combos, the biggest new mechanical additions, fit surprisingly well, adding another dimension to the combat and allowing for some more multifaceted battles. With the right opponent the fighting truly comes into its own, and Capcom’s assured display of balance shines brightest. Beautiful, stunning, and very nearly perfectly suited to all challengers. Also, that theme tune. That theme tune!