The video below shows Boy discovering the Bespin-y qualities of this new environment, unlocked thanks to the collective efforts of Noby Noby players reporting their scores back to Namco. Crushing atmospheric pressure and poisonous clouds of ammonia seem not to be much of a problem here.

For those keeping score, Girl reached the Moon on Feb. 23, four days after the game's release. Mars was next on May 23, and now Jupiter on Nov. 20. At this rate, I'd say ETA to Saturn is late 2010.

Jupiter Here We Are! [PSN Stores]

Talking with game site Develop, Takahashi explains, "I had this idea for an FPS where the player's character grows in size, gets bigger and bigger as the game progresses. But as you get bigger some weapons are too small to use, so you have to improvise; maybe throw airplanes at the enemies. That sort of stuff.
So I have this idea of making a fun and unique FPS, with the right team it would be a good FPS."

Even if it wasn't a very good FPS, it would sure be something.

Interview: Keita Takahashi [Develop] [Pic]

It's not a movie, and as far as we know it will probably never be one. But, what if it was. What if! Would it be as lighthearted as the game? Or would it be scary as all hell. Let's fantasy. Let's.

Thanks Jesse for the tip!

According to a report from Impress Game Watch, the iPhone spin-off of Noby Noby Boy is about 60% complete. That may help you determine a loose release date, because Takahashi doesn't offer one. But hey, if he can actually offer the thing for "like free" as he teased at this year's GDC, who cares when it comes?

For another look at Noby Noby Boy as held by Boy himself, read on.

Takahashi implied that that iPhone/iPod Touch version of Noby Noby Boy may interact with the PlayStation Network version, adding to the length of Girl. At GDC Takahashi lamented that he may never see Girl reach the end of the solar system during his lifetime, something the iPhone version might contribute to.

Hell, if it's free or even "like free," consider my pledge to the lengthening of Girl, well, pledged.

Thanks to Olias for the heads up.

European PlayStation forum user Pudgeeagogo post instructions on how to make your own catnip-filled BOY, with yarn color recommendations, in case you or someone you know is skilled enough to make this work. Just - oh noes! - overlook the fact that's a Wiimote in the pic posted to PlayStation.com

FYI, this cat looks strangely like mine. And hell yes I babytalk my cat.

Pudgeeagogo's Noby Noby Boy DIY Amigurumi Boy Cat Toy [Community.EU.PlayStation, thanks Spastic Kewpie]

Turns out that sometimes they do.

While efforts like Sony's Folding@Home project, which uses the collective processing power of unplayed Playstation 3's to research and better understand disease, have been around for years, it wasn't until recently that console games have started playing around with this idea of collective gaming.

Earlier this month, Battlefield 1943 stormed onto the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. In the first-person shooter, gamers go online to fight it out in World War II's Pacific. While the game's premise of World War II battle offered little unique to the genre, there was a twist.

The game shipped with an area locked away from players' reach. To get to this hidden map, gamers had to collectively kill one another 43 million times. Once the kill count was reached, the map and new game mode becomes available to everyone, for free.

It took just five days on the Xbox 360.

"We were tracking all global kills per a console," said DICE's Gordon Van Dyke, the game's producer. "Every time a kill was made the server would report it."

Van Dyke used an Excel spread sheet and his knowledge of such games to track how long he thought it would take. He came up with three weeks, not five days.

Van Dyke thinks that the Playstation 3 version of the new map, which has to be unlocked separately, will likely hit early next week.

By all accounts the experiment, dubbed a community challenge, was a success. A success not just in terms of tracking the popularity of their game, but in helping to define and build a community among those gamers.

"I'm a big advocate of the community," he said. "I think (ideas like this) could blur the definition of massively multiplayer online games in particular areas, and build up that community relationship In games like this."

And the success of this communal achievement has Van Dyke, at least, thinking about including these sort of group efforts in future games.

"I will be working on (upcoming shooter) Bad Company 2, so it's definitely something we would consider in that game," he said. "But we are not going to shove it into something else because it was successful for 1943, we want to use it diligently."

Battlefield isn't the only, or the first console game to tap into communal efforts.

The Playstaton 3's Noby Noby Boy, released earlier this year, tracked all players' efforts in the game, reporting them to a database. The worldwide points were then used to unlock new areas in the game for everyone. It took players months to unlock just two of the game's extra levels.

Eric Lempel, director of Playstation Network operations and strategic planning, says these sorts of community-driven efforts and rewards are the natural evolution of this generation of consoles. An evolution anchored in online play and masses of gamers.

Lempel points to the PS3's virtual world of Home as an example of how community and building community has become an increasingly important part of console gaming.

"One of the biggest goals for us is bringing the community together," he said. "Bringing another level of entertainment to the community."

Home was recently host to a form of alternative reality game, something that wasn't fully explained to gamers, but expected them to figure out the clues, the mystery, themselves. By the time the game wrapped up this month, 3.2 million people had visited it and it had 460,000 players.

While the creators of games will likely always be the driving force behind gaming, they're quickly becoming not the only ones with an important impact on what they make.

Giving a gamer control of the environment in which they play, allowing them to unlock secrets, explore spaces, create new ideas, will inevitably change the nature of this form of entertainment. Perhaps eventually turning the concept of the artist and the audience on its head.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

With player numbers dropping only a month ago, it seemed as though this feat would never be accomplished. And really, it shouldn't have been. Not this quickly, anyway. Creator Keita Takehashi - or at least the game's community manager - obviously tinkered with the calculations, boosting everyone's contribution to GIRL's progress and unlocking the new world to run around on and...do...stuff.

Not that we're complaining! Ink-blasting alien octopuses lend a certain carnival fun-fair element to proceedings.

What makes this cookie extra-special is not the fact that baked treats are always extra-special. No, what makes it extra-extra-special is that it's not the work of some bored/obsessed fan. It's up over on the game's official site, as part of creator Keita Takehashi and his dev team's series of instructional animations, detailing their attempts at recreating in-game characters and items in the real world.

WEB WEB BOY DIY 3 [Namco, via Offworld]

Version 1.1 of Noby Noby Boy adds four-Boy offline multiplayer to the mix, in addition to the brassy Fart Boy, as well as lower key updates like "variations for your Boy House hair styles" and new thinking poses for the game's birds. Since when do patches have to makes sense? Obviously, with the addition of the newest Boy comes new "powered up" sound and new sound effects.

Of course, the Noby Noby Boy update begs the question, "What will become of Onara Boy when another Boy eats his butt?" The answer to that fascinating riddle will soon be solved.

Noby Noby Boy Gets Gassy [AndriaSang]

Apparently what each player eats has a different effect on how the game goes down. For example, Takehashi says that if player 1's head eats player 2's butt, you'll end up with a single Noby Noby Boy that's controlled by two people. One moving the head, the other, its rear.

Here's an example. Cruisey.

See, it relies on lots of players playing lots of Noby Noby Boy for those cumulative figures to get her anywhere. And while first-week sales saw the player base reach around 60,000, which got her from Earth to the moon in only four days, there's now only around 1000-2000 people playing the game.

Which means that, at the current rate, it'll take her over 2000 days just to reach Mars. We could extrapolate that and work out how long it'd take her to reach, say, Uranus, but that would be both childish and depressing.

If creator Keita Takahashi built this feature into the game to guilt us into playing it more, well...congratulations, Keita, you sick bastard, it's working.

Days Until Mars [Noby Noby Stats, via VG247]

On the shoe you can see that Noby Noby boy has stretched himself through the eyelets of the shoe. Pretty amazing.

But as much as I love shoes, and shoes featuring games, I don't think I could ever wear these. I'd be too paranoid that that errant shoelace would eventually start working up my ankle in search of the moon.

The man behind Noby Noby Boy and Katamari Damacy delivered one of GDC's most fascinating sessions this week, full of behind-the-scenes insights into the creation of the PlayStation Network game and off-message rants.

Let's take a look at some of the most enjoyable quotes that will likely have Takahashi meeting with his more buttoned down superiors at Namco Bandai when he returns to Japan.

On his early concepts for Noby Noby Boy: "I showed one programmer [my drawings], and he said ‘Yes, I've been thinking about these kinds of things as well.' He showed his wife, and she said ‘You should work on this as though your life depended on it.' We have a collection of crazy people working on it."

On Noby Noby Boy's design: "I wanted to show an ironic point of view about our consumption-based society. But I wanted to make more objects. If [the game] were empty, I would feel empty or lonely. When I made Katamari Damacy and objects were rolled up into a ball, they were gone. I felt empty. I feel this way about our disposable society."

On disappointment with games having rules: "Katamari Damacy had rules, meaning you wanted to have a huge katamari. So there was a size goal and a time limitation as well. I didn't want that. The stages increased in size [as the game went on], something I didn't like."

On unforeseen Noby Noby Boy development: "I wanted to create a game where even the developers couldn't see what was coming. Of course I wasn't thinking about debugging at this point. The people who did the debugging asked me what was a bug. I couldn't answer that."

On players on a train: "In Japan, everyone on the train is playing a Nintendo DS or PSP. They're always looking down at their consoles, bleeping and blooping. Of course, that's good for the people who make games, because we make money from it. But is this how we want people to look?"

On users versus players: "Hiyao Miyazaki, the film director, says that children today are not playing, they're consumers. I think that's true. In Japan, people who play games are called 'users.' I think games should be played. Perhaps it's minute, but that bothered me. We just throw around the term users and that bothers me."

On workplace violence: "People who come to the company call them users and I that makes me so mad I want to bonk them! Sometimes I think they should die."

On sales: "Maybe I should make sure that Noby Noby Boy should only be available on PlayStation 3 and only available by download. That way, maybe it won't sell that much. It's only been available for a month or so, but I was right! It's not selling that much. That's probably not a good thing."

On Noby Noby Boy's homegrown physics engine: "I was going to use Havok physics, but I if you use it, you have to show their logo. I didn't want to do that. I thought it would be awful to have to put a logo on the game every time. We used physics from SCE instead. But I still had to put the Namco Bandai logo [on it]."

On the game's long development cycle: "People higher up were really mad at me. Some of them really glared at me if they saw me in the hall."

On goals in Noby Noby Boy: "Despite the fact that I said there are problems with having definite goals, Noby Noby Boy has a definite goal as well. That goal is to take this character, this space Girl, this huge character and make her longer by communicating to her the size of the Boy. The goal is to connect the solar system. Why did I create a goal like this? Because it's such a huge goal, I thought it might be hard to reach."

Takahashi showed off an early prototype of the title, way before it was bound for release via the PlayStation Network. While crude, it showed off many of Noby Noby Boy's gameplay mechanics. But there was a problem, forcing the game to change platforms.

Takahashi says that, because the Xbox 360 was selling so slowly in Japan at the time, you might think that it was a political decision. But the switch from the Xbox 360 to PS3 was due to one thing: the horizontal layout of the PlayStation 3's DualShock/Sixaxis.

The Xbox 360 controller's diagonal analog stick layout was simply no good.

Besides, Takahashi says that one of his hopes for Noby Noby Boy was that it wouldn't sell very well. More on that later.

The version we saw appeared to be touchscreen controlled, apparently from a top-down perspective and, frankly, not very clear, as the speaker showed the iPhone game via his laptop's built-in camera. Takahashi had earlier lamented in his talk that to fully connect the solar system in Noby Noby Boy, at the current rate, would take, well, it would take centuries.

"On average, the Girl is growing 40 million meters a day on average. If we go at this rate, in order to connect the entire solar system, it will take 820 years," Takahashi explained. "This is a problem. I'm going to be dead by then."

Takahashi hinted that he would like to add the growth of both the PlayStation 3 version of the game and the iPhone version, but it was unclear if this was possible. Takahashi did not provide specifics on a release date, saying it had only been in development for a week or so, but said it could potentially be free.

I don't know if it's the random gasping noises or the fact that the multiple boys pop out of that little house like intestines unraveling from a particularly nasty torso wound, but something about the teaser trailer below just isn't right. Even Takahashi seems to agree in his post on the official PlayStation blog, saying "Too many boys… uh…gross, aren't they?" Took the words right out of our mouths. Ew.

Noby Noby Boy Multiplayer Teaser [PlayStation.blog]

"In the hopes that more people can enjoy the game, we are currently working on an update.

A featured addition to the update is going to be offline multiplayer. Some may say, "Offline!?" But it'll still be fun. Please check it out.

Well, it's going to be quite a long journey to Mars. Please be patient."

Namco Bandai's Keita Takahashi also talks about how happy he was to see that Girl reached the moon.

"I was filled with emotion when that happened because I was wondering if a lot of people were playing the game. And I am truly grateful for all those who have. Thank you all very much. Some of our own staff was also touched more than they had expected. With that said, the next goal, Mars, is still far away. It would take all the current players a while to reach Mars, so more people have to join in on the fun."

Mars? Really? Yikes.

Noby Noby Boy Update Coming

There are 8 shirts available, and Panic tell us they'll be ready to ship in around three weeks (though you can order them now if you like).

Each shirt is $24.95, and you can check out the full range at Panic's store.

Noby Noby Boy [Panic, thanks Cabel!]

It's a unique title for the PlayStation Network from a unique game developer. Takahashi is largely indifferent about video games, saying, "There aren't really any I like." Rather than drawing up from other games, he was inspired by game trailer. In this case, the trailer for racing game DiRT, a game Takahashi hasn't played, was a source of stimulus.

According to the Katamari developer, "We consulted the opening camera work in a trailer for DiRT, a racing game, for Noby Noby Boy."

For someone who shirks video games, Takahashi clearly explains why Noby Noby Boy is a PS3 exclusive. The thumbsticks for Sony's home console are symmetrical — perfect for Noby Noby Boy's gameplay. What's more, Takahashi explains, "Going multiplatform for a vague, off-beat, new title is risky."

Katamari Creator Gets Weird, Wormy With Noby Noby Boy [Wired]