Noby Noby Boy (iPhone)

Not a conversion of the PS3 game. Not even a game, actually. Noby Noby Boy on iPhone is a collection of weird mini apps featuring BOY and GIRL.

You can play around with BOY with tilt and touch, stretching him, splitting him, having him grab random objects and listening to a bouncy soundtrack. It may not look like much in screenshots, but something about the animation and the tactile interface makes it come alive as you play. (And that’s “play” as in toy, not game.)

There are hundreds of random objects that appear, maybe more.

Of course, if the included music gets too much, you can summon a robot to play songs from your iPod. Obviously.

He always seems to want to listen to Jacket Hangs by The Blue Aeroplanes.

You can write on BOY and then email pictures to people from within the app. They suggest using it to tell your Boss you’re late for work, though I’m not sure that’s wise.

Just in case you didn't know which web site you were reading.

You can choose a photo from your library and see what the game makes of it. In this case, it put my face on a BOY. Nice.

I had a banana.

You can use Noby Noby Boy as a clock. There seem to be a ton of different analogue clocks included, I’ve no idea how many.

My clock is a mine. Your argument is invalid.

You can use your GPS to find your location and then watch as BOY stretches as you drive to work.

After a ten-minute drive to work I'd stretched BOY a long way and had been driven completely mad by the soundtrack.

You can report your length to GIRL and then, using Facebook connectivity, see who else has been uploading length on the world map.

It's Google Buzz, but it's a bit weird seeing really people pop up like this. Sorry, Charlotte Fabb.

There’s even a built-in web browser.

You can change the preset bookmarks using the Settings app.

And that’s not everything, oh no. (Though it’s most of it, to be fair.) I’ll let you discover the rest… or just blog about it later. It’s all very bizarre, but has an air of madness – and even desperation – about it that I find very appealing. They just seem to have made a little Noby Noby Boy app and then realised it wasn’t nearly enough and so threw every iPhone function they could think of into the mix.

Will I use the web browser instead of Safari? I doubt it very much. Will I use the clock as my bedside clock? Probably not. Will I start Noby Noby Boy instead of the iPod app when I want to listen to music? Well, I’d be surprised if I did.

But will I use those functions when I’m playing about with BOY? Yes, I rather think I will.