Fantastic news for current backers and also the yet-unconvinced: not only has Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward thrown his weight behind the frequently-featured Kickstarter for LA Game Space — the would-be local/online cultural center and residency space for pushing the medium of games — with the amazingly earnest animated appeal above, you guys, but…

Noby Noby Boy and Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi has also just announced that his first game since leaving Namco — a PC/Mac/Linux downloadable he’s currently calling simply My Silly Game — will initially be available exclusively through the Kickstarter campaign.

In turn, the LA Game Space folk have opened up a new entry-level $5 tier if you only want Takahashi’s contribution, and have also added it to all upper levels, including the now (including Silly) 31-game pack for $15, alongside games like the previously featured Inputting.

It seems like probably now you should just go ahead and kick in to the campaign.

Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi was recently invited to Australia’s Games For Change conference to deliver a speech he called “The Power Of Play: Reasons Why I Like Video Games“.

He used the opportunity to reprise a fantastic speech he gave back in 2006 for GDC’s Game Design Challenge — the theme that year was designing a game that could win the Nobel Peace Prize (which went on to be won by Dishonored designer Harvey Smith, as I covered in this interview with Smith, back in a former life) — but then moved on to cover a wide variety of topics, all revolving around the central idea of spreading peace & love through videogames.

Below the fold you’ll find the entirety of Takahashi’s talk, including musings on the aesthetics of the controller & re-framing the environment around us with play (and with Kokoromi co-founder & designer Heather Kelley‘s glasses), presented here on Venus Patrol with high hopes that it’ll inspire a little more peace and love from designers and players alike.

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A fast public service announcement to note that Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi has worked tirelessly over the past couple weeks to finish off his previously-featured set of Noby wallpapers for your iPhone.

In addition to the new iPhone 5-compatible ‘battery’ paper above (my old favorite lock-screen image), he’s slightly redesigned the new Noby GIRL image, and made an iPhone 4/4S version of that particular paper available for the first time. You can find all of the wallpapers via his uvula.jp blog, or archived here, below the fold.

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[UPDATE: both of these wallpapers have been updated further to fit properly on the iPhone 5 — click here for the newer versions and one additional wallpaper!]

As if I didn’t have enough latent guilt about impulse-upgrading to an iPhone 5 I didn’t necessarily really need, the first thing I realized on activation was that the extra row of icons had unceremoniously broken my favorite part of the phone: my original Noby Noby Boy wallpaper, which saw BOY playfully looped around each of your icons, and surprises hidden under each which only revealed themselves as you opened an adjacent folder.

And so, I registered my complaint with Katamari Damacy & Noby creator Keita Takahashi, who, even though he hadn’t yet upgraded himself, offered to alleviate the situation by creating an newer, longer version, and even threw in a brand new GIRL version for our troubles.

And so, presented below the fold, both of the wallpapers to adorn your own device, in wistful memory of the game that very shortly will be leaving the mortal coil of the App Store itself. If you’re still working the iPhone 4/4S, you can find the original BOY version here, with the shortened GIRL version promised to appear in the near future.

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Maybe the fastest turnaround between awesome and awful news: Katamari Damacy & Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi has just announced the thing we all feared the most (or is it just my own recurring nightmare?), that Namco Bandai will be removing and no longer supporting the Noby Noby Boy iPhone & iPad apps from the App Store next Tuesday, October 9th.

What exactly this means for the service at large is still undetermined: for months now, submitted meters wouldn’t actually be subtracted from the app’s running total, and the Facebook counterpart where you earned badges based on the size of your submission had long since fallen into disrepair as well, but there’s no word yet on whether the servers will continue to run and the PS3 game, at least, will further GIRL’s goal of stretching toward the edge of the solar system.

For now, then, a reminder to grab the app if you haven’t already, which Keita admits is “a totally silly app, but I’m enjoying it sometimes, even now”, signing off simply by saying, “Thank you for playing this silly app.”

TOUCH BOY: NAMCO REVEALS WIP SCREENSHOT OF IPHONE NOBY NOBY BOY

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9.11.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Noby Noby BOY creator Keita Takahashi first revealed his intentions to create an iPhone version of the PS3 downloadable at this year’s Game Developers Conference, which is intended, he said, to help GIRL progress through the universe more rapidly, as both the console and handheld version work in tandem to add players’ various stretches to her overall length.

Namco’s just delivered the shot at top to Japan’s Game Watch news site, without much further detail than the concept has passed internal approval at the studio, and that, adds Takahashi, it’s somewhere around 60 percent complete.

See the video above for my shakycam footage of Takahashi’s original reveal, which shows what’s clearly not intended to be a full 3D port of the PS3 version, but will likely end up at least a similarly goal-less toy-like diversion.

BOY, ‘NIP’D: HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN NOBY NOBY BOY CAT TOY

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8.9.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Presumably this’ll work just as well as a toy for your favorite non-feline as well, but over on the official PlayStation Europe messageboard, forum member pudgeeagogo has posted full instructions to knit up your own catnip-drenched Noby Noby BOY, if you can stomach the horror of seeing his innocent little •.• face getting mercilessly torn at by your pet’s razor-toothed maw.

The instructions are embedded under the jump, as well, only because I’m terrified the thread will one day disappear and all this hard-won knowledge will go with it. [via Gus]

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ONE SHOT: NOBY’S ESSENCE, IN NINE WORDS

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7.22.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Liam Campbell’s illustrated review of Noby Noby Boy is perfect haiku-like succinct.

I consider it a Very Lucky Day when I wake up to an email from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, who this time wrote to remind me that Noby‘s GIRL had finally made the last push to Mars.

And just when I was reaching for the reply button to remind him that I’d actually already done my tribute post to the occasion, I realized just what his enclosed above video actually was. Embarrassing admission: it kind of gave me goosebumps.

o–o [Namco]

LIFE ON MARS: NOBY NOBY GIRL CONTINUES HER GALACTIC CRAWL

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5.26.2009

Brandon Boyer

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I did my damndest to capture Noby Noby GIRL’s triumphant march to Mars via in-game video (you only get the one chance to see the victory-wrap), but my attempts were stymied by the video capability not going live until you actually exit your house.

Accept, then, this commemorative photo above as proof of Noby‘s ongoing popularity, even if Takahashi and co. are pulling out every trick in the book to lessen the dead time between planets, from the upcoming iPhone version, to the SynchroBOY trick which lets single players control multiple boys at a time, to the recent Lucky Week promotion, which saw submitted lengths randomly given various multipliers, which happened to be the final straw that pushed GIRL to her goal.

So what’s life actually like on the red planet? Much the same, so far, though with the addition of new martian inhabitants, obviously, and, more intriguingly, the super-sized royalty unlocked when we reached the moon now making the rounds (on my back, as above).

I wolfram’d (are we allowed to say that yet?) the distance from Mars to Jupiter, GIRL’s next step, which gave me an AU distance over double that from Earth to Mars, meaning, I suppose, that we should expect — barring more of Namco’s divine intervention — at least another 6-7 months before we see the Jovian giant even starting to come into view.

o–o [Namco]