Sadly, I do not find either variant of Noby Noby Boy to be one of the most wonderful games of all time. I found the PS3 version strangely soothing, but I haven’t felt any pull to return to it. And the iPhone version didn’t manage that: you have a small screen with bad controls to stretch things (though the controls did improve once I discovered tapping to stick things), and with the addition of badly-done music library listening and clock watching modes. Some of the items that you can play with were worth a minute of fiddling; some weren’t.

On to Game Dev Story.

At least making and accomplishing the goals wasn’t. The process of trying to accomplish them was more satisfying, however, in its own way. Even when you’re trying to accomplish something in Noby Noby Boy, you’re not really doing much: you’re holding the two thumbsticks in opposite directions while stretching, or you’re waiting for people to jump on your back, or you’re eating with one end and, optionally, pooping out the other end. And it turns out that this rather soothing: I’d realize that I’d spent the last ten minutes doing almost nothing, but in a way that made me feel better rather than worse.

A peculiar toy. And, with it, I have now finished (or “finished”) two games for the PS3, for which I spent a grant total of fifteen dollars. Just another 46 games to go, and I’ll have spent as much on games as I spent on the PS3 itself! (Actually, I have bought a couple of on-disc games because of VGHVI multiplayer nights, but never mind that…)

Not too many blog posts written about the game, but there’s a rather interesting Experience Points podcast on the topic.