I'm not going to say it beats Braid, which was one of my favorite games last year (and will probably be the best downloadable game for a long time) but this game is amazing, and as out-of-the-box-disarming as Braid. It's funnier than Katamari, with pretty much every button you can press resulting in some kind of hilarity, and the randomly generated levels you play manage to be funny random, not aimless random. The tutorial is a quiz in which you try to guess what the controls are, poking some fun at the sometimes endless tutorials in games nowadays.
Nobi Nobi Boy is also an interestingly minimalistic version of a sandbox game -- the point of the game can't really be stated more clearly than "to play the game" because things like the timer in katamari have been taken out -- but the online leaderboards make it so that you are both cooperating and competing with everyone else in the world who is playing the game (right now Japan is kicking some serious A$$, but they got the game first so whatever). So in a sense, the challenge/reward system which all video games have is still there, it's just hidden away into one corner of the game, rather than offered up as your prime directive.
I watched my girlfriend play the game for a bit over an hour last night, and then (once she finally left the room!) played for about two or three hours myself. I can definitely see why the creator wanted to make this game after making a bunch of Katamaris -- because really, what was more fun in Katamari, mastering the timed levels, or getting so huge you could suck giant squids up from the ocean and pluck whole cities up like flower patches?
I had my doubts about this game, but people who repeated the mantra "it's by the Katamari guy" were right. That must have been some good shit.
