Noby Noby Boy

That image? That's all you really need to know.

Noby Noby Boy is the next crazy vision from the director of Katamari Damacy, a PS2 game that I was surprised by the reaction to but was really pretty fun to play. Boy has a similar sort of feel but amps up the insanity quite a bit. Very basically, you control boy by moving the two control sticks to walk around with his head and butt. You eat things with the head and can poop them out with the butt. Eating lets you gain mass and stretch out farther, and you can fly around, wrap yourself around objects, give people and animals rides or even stretch yourself too far and rip in half, forcing yourself to eat your own rear to become whole again. The only goal in the game is to stretch Boy as much as possible and report your length to Girl.

The interaction with Girl is what makes the game really interesting, because it involves the online functionality and the meta-game behind everything. Girl's length is the combination of all the length reported by every player around the world, and together people were able to stretch to the moon a short time after the game came out, which unlocked a whole new area to play around in (Levels seem to be somewhat randomly generated, but the moon has a bunch of new stuff). The next goal is Mars, although it's still quite a distance away and there's some speculation that it's not actually there. The combined efforts to stretch as far as possible make it a mix of cooperation and competition, as we're all going for the same goal but can also compare who's done the most work. Along with some Youtube functionality to automatically create and upload levels, and it changes from a pretty interesting toy to a cool digital experiment. It's a lot of silly fun just to mess around with Boy for an hour or so, and along with the online stuff and the promise of multiplayer coming soon, it was well worth the five bucks.