March 3, 2015

Chibi-Robo! Photo Finder


Five years ago (wow!), I reviewed a quirky little GameCube game called Chibi-Robo, in which you play a pint-sized robotic domestic servant with horrible battery life. Here's a half-assed downloadable spin-off title that takes the same robot and asks him, "hey, how would you like to perform a bunch of arbitrary tasks and take a lot of arbitrary pictures?" The concept here is cute enough; it's the far off future, perhaps, and Chibi-Robo has been asked by a museum curator to go collect some "nostaljunk." How does Chibi-Robo do this? By taking pictures of the world around him with his shitty 3DS camera, of course! Or at least that's what the player does. The game essentially boils down to taking photographs of specific things - soda cans, books, electrical outlets, and more - at various angles. Line it up just right and you'll score a passing grade on the picture and be allowed to, shit, I dunno, get more opportunities to take pictures? Making things less monotonous but far more tedious, you engage in little mini-games between photo sessions in order to procure enough "happy points" to buy more film to take more pictures. These mini-games consist of tasks like "guess the distance!" and "grab some pork from the refrigerator, would ya?" Snoozers all around, folks! I spent no real money (thanks Club Nintendo) and maybe an hour and a half (thanks, games with murky "beaten" requirements) on this turd, and still it felt like way too much. Oh, have I mentioned yet that the pictures you take with the 3DS camera come out grainy and horrible even under good lighting conditions? Well, now I have. And there's really nothing left to say about this one. Good night!

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