Nintendo is pushing the boundaries with wonderful non-game-like games. (Check out my post on Mad Professor about Electroplankton for the DS.) After logging about eight hours on Chibi-Robo in the last four days, my eight-year-old daughter has decreed it to be the best title ever for the Nintendo GameCube.
Chibi-Robo is a four-inch-tall domestic cleaning robot, a gift to a young girl from her father, an out of work roboticist. Besides attending to tasks like scrubbing up muddy dog prints off the floor with a toothbrush (and accumulating "Happy Points" for doing so), Chibi-Robo explores the house, learning snippets of a meta-story involving a no-good robotics company out to harm the family. My daughter is fascinated by the unfolding meta-story, as am I.
Both the music, which is lighthearted, and the set design, which is seen from the ground-level perspective of Chibi-Robo, add greatly to the charm of this non-competitive title.
Link
