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Chibi Robo Shows His True Colors (and They're Green)

chibirobo.JPG

I bet you thought Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol was just a fun adaptation of a carefree Gamecube franchise: WRONG! In fact the DS game that hit Wal-Mart stores today is the "one of the first games based on the growing environmental movement."

In the game players use the mini, fruit-fucker-esque robot to plant flowers, build park equipment and defeat toxic enemies... sadly he doesn't deflower any fruit. To celebrate the green game's release Nintendo is going to give away 500 tree seedlings to a random selection of people who register on the FruitFuckerChibi-Robo site by Nov. 9

Nintendo also points out that as a company they currently recycle paper company-wide, limit the use of colored paper and purchase recycled paper towels, report covers, message pads and writing pads. They also recycle more than 70 percent of the "waste" generated at its headquarters... hmm, I wonder if that includes all of those copies of Pokemon Dash.

5:00 PM on Tue Oct 2 2007
By Brian Crecente
1,181 views
15 comments

Comments

  • "fruit-fucker-esque robot"

    that puts so many wrong images in my head all at once.

  • Welcome to the new world religion, environmentalism.
    Never mind fruit fucker, I say fuck the planet and all this enviro-conscious bullshit.

  • @Cruithne: Might I suggest this enviro-friendly flame shield?

  • the robot is powered by crude oil

  • Chibi Robo may be great and all, but as an environmental avenger, I think we all know he's a poor man's Awesome Possum.

  • i like how five years ago rebellion was "fuck corporations, they're destroying the planet."

    now that corporations have decided that maybe five-years-ago could be right, rebellion is "fuck the planet."

    i look forward to 2025, when rebellion is reduced to simply "fuck."

  • What ever happened to the good old days where you fucked male or female homo sapiens? Why must we fuck fruit, corporations and the environment. Penny arcade has contributed many great things to the world, but I'm afraid that FF'er was not one of them.

  • I've seen that game, and it looks bad.
    And I've played that in my gasoline powered DS.

  • love the fruit fucker. LOVE IT.

  • Reviews of the jap version thats been out for a bit have not been kind. Supposedly quite a step backwards from the original cube game.

  • I'm 42 years old, my days of rebellion are far behind me in the halcyon days of British punk rock.
    But, I know bullshit when I small it, and this whole slap an environmental theme on it and sell it to the gullible public theme really pisses me off.
    Much as I love Hayao Miyazaki and his movies, I hate the subtext, just the same subtext you find in so many Japanese films and RPGs.

    If I want preached to, I'll go to church, not Gamestop.

  • Well I ordered it from Walmart, yay for having Walmart written on the box art.

    Yeah, when I saw fruit fucker I just started laughing, nice one. I wonder what children will ask their parents when they run across this stuff. "Mommy, whats a fruit fucker?" xDD

  • @Cruithne: I agree this kind of corporate greenwashing is pretty much bullshit. Nintendo probably aren't particularly bad environmental offenders in the grand scheme of things, but if they really want to make a difference they should check the pollution records of those factories in China, demand improvements in the energy-efficiency of their (mainly outsourced, I'd assume) worldwide operations - shipping, warehousing, etc - and reduce packaging. Not give away a handful of saplings and make a game about picking up litter.

    The Miyazaki films are a little better, I think.

    That said it is easy and lazy thinking to decide that because everybody is going on about environmental issues (or that because some of the effects are exaggerated in some sources) it must be somehow untrue or a 'new religion'; in fact, it's fairly old science that has taken decades to be accepted only because it offers a challenge to current money-only thinking. And 'I'm going to do whatever is most convenient and/or cheap for me personally at the present time without changing my behaviour in any way' is not so much an impressive rebellion as lazy business-as-usual.

    If companies wish to make games about environmental issues, it would be impressive to see rather more challenging themes. Let's see a game where you play an investigator who finds information about environmental damage caused by companies who produce nice cuddly video games about parks, for instance... :)

  • @MidnightScott17: yay for having Walmart written on the box art.

    You can get your non-Wal-Mart cover here: [www.thecoverproject.net]

  • Yeah. Environmentalism and Wal-Mart go together like peas and DDT.

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