Look at your ridiculous, shit-ridden face. You didn’t buy Chibi-Robo, did you?

Chibi-Robo was a wonderful game that stood at the polar opposite of the Xbox mentality. It wasn’t about guns and cocaine and doing wees in people’s mouths, it was about being a tiny robot that runs about talking to toys, and cleaning up after the dog with a toothbrush.

There’s nothing manly about this game, it is the antithesis to Master Chief. Xylophone notes indicate your footsteps, like in 40s cartoons, and you go about solving problems and making people feel happy, as opposed to shooting them in the face and making quips about how you’re going to have sex with their mum. There’re loads of toys to make happy, but the overarching story involves sorting out the problems of the family you belong to. While looking incredibly cute and childish, the whole broken family thing is quite well done in context, when you look at it.

Jenny (the daughter) always wears a frog hat and speaks in ribbits due to some past trauma which you have to discover, the dad is unemployed but wastes money on toys (like Chibi-Robo, for instance) and his wife is well pissed off about it all, quite the unfortunate situation.

If you have a cleanliness OCD the game will either drive you utterly insane or continuously fulfil your desperate, soul crushing need to make everything look sparkly. Things always get dirty in the Chibi house, and because the resident mum is on strike due to the dad being something of a pillock, you have to clean stuff up to help smooth things over and keep the house looking all nice like.

The plot twists and turns quite interestingly and there’s plenty of mystery to uncover about how things got this bad, there’s even a sepia section where you experience some of this business first hand, which is lovely. Toy characters vary from irritating egg shaped army men, to funky dancing flowers, to excellent wooden pirates that fly about in their ship and generally just kick a lot of arse.

Everyone speaks “gobbledigook” (or however it’s spelled) with subtitles so real people can understand, this can grate on the ears at times, but essentially it’s all very charming, and so very different to the stubble encrusted, square jawed meat-heads we are continually subjected to in western games.

To clarify, I’m not against that whole western thing we do here, I enjoy pretending I have huge muscles as much as the next guy, I just think there aren’t enough alternatives to manly man games aimed at gamers anymore. I do not see Catz 2 or Cooking Mama as alternatives.

Moving about in Chibi-Robo requires electrical energy, and you have to keep charging your battery at outlets found about the house. As you progress you can increase your battery capacity and stay moving for longer, but this coupled with a game clock keeps a sense of urgency to the proceedings.

It’s not all cleaning and kissing people better, there are some nasties called Spydorz (nice) to shoot! Even a game about making people happy has shooting in it, pleasantly. Later on you get to dress up your Robo, and I think at one point you fly a plane or spaceship or something. I can’t remember.

While not for everyone, Chibi-Robo is certainly a unique and interesting game worthy of celebration. If you have a Gamecube lying about, or a fancy new Wii, it’s well worth a go, or if you wait a while there’ll be a new Play Control version released later this year! Hopefully the Wii version won’t fade into obscurity as the Cube version did.

Buy it, you ponce.

You bollock.

You didn’t buy God Hand, did you?

I’ve only ever played one game in my life that I thought could never be bettered in its genre, a game that takes principles developed decades ago and sharpens them to absolute perfection, a game that feels brand new yet completely nostalgic at the same time, and that game is God Hand.

If, like me, you grew up playing Konami’s scrolling beat ‘em ups in the arcade, Streets of Rage at home, and hitting everyone with lead pipes in the street (not really), you’ll have fond memories of a wonderful genre that has all but died. The closest you tend to get these days are kid’s games with button mashing “brawling” gameplay.

Fuck that.

God Hand is an example of a developer (Clover, in this case) learning from every good game in the genre’s past, and sticking it together into a perfect package. The core of this game, the gameplay, the timing of each punch, the response to your button press, is absolutely flawless. You are always in control of your guy (Gene), and if he dies, you messed it up.

This game is rock solid, if you get good, the difficulty level ramps up. It’s a challenge all the way through, and every stage feels like an achievement. It’s an old school design idea that’s missing from so many games today. Most games are too intent on you seeing the story all the way through that they forget you actually want to do something between cutscenes.

God Hand takes the piss out of itself, games in general, beat ‘em ups, everything. If you’ve been wasting your life in the digital domain for decades, you’ll find it hilarious. You get to beat up the Power Rangers 3 times, that’s how good this is.

It’s stupidly manly, but not in an “Oh dear” Gears of War way. There’s nothing quite as manly as kicking a gorilla into space, not even guns that are also chainsaws.

People complain about it not looking particularly polished, and that the camera is bad (it really isn’t, I don’t know what camera you bastards wanted), or that it’s too hard. These people are either too young to remember gaming’s infancy, or are completely missing the point. Or cocks.

What I love most about God Hand is that it knows it’s a game. It doesn’t pretend to be anything grand, the story is stupid, the gameplay is everything, and it’s not afraid to kick you in the balls. It feels like picking up a game 15 years ago, before all that new stuff like BBFC ratings, deep dialogue and online multiplayer came along.

If you’re a gamer that longs to feel like you did when you picked up Streets of Rage for the first time when you were 7, God Hand is exactly what you’ve been waiting for, and it will never happen again.

We sexy folks at endoflevelboss.com (why did we pick such a long bleeding name?!) are starting a new feature entitled: Games that you didn’t buy… but you fucking should have!

On a semi-regular basis (we may get into a rhythm once we get moving), we will be highlighting a game from some point in the past and telling you why you should probably have bought it instead of the latest cocking Final Fantasy game.

There’ll be stuff you’re sick of hearing about, and stuff you’ve never heard about, and stuff that you think looks like crap, but hopefully it will all be interesting, or at least entertaining.

If you read any of the features on these games and are not interested or entertained, please remember to fuck off.

Cheers,

- Matt