This past week I completed Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol. I’m not sure how you can really finish a game that’s centers around the endless fight against pollution, but I managed to do it.

Funny thing: this was actually a good game. The core mechanics were great. You play as a robot dude who runs around this barren park. You use your squirt gun to water buds, which turn into flowers, which give off more buds. When a bud turns into a flower, you get “happy points,” which are turned into watts. You can use watts to either recharge Chibi-Robo or take small actions to improve the park, like tilling the soil… which would allow you to plant more flowers. It’s an endless cycle. And all the while these smog monsters are killing your flowers and trying to get up in your face. It may not sound like much, but if you’re the type of person who loves that sort of reward system (where the next goal is always so close) it might as well be a socially acceptable form of crack (I can use it on the bus!).

I blew through Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol in, like, two weeks. For me, that’s crazy. Who knew that gardening simulations could be so addictive? Oh no… do you think this is what Viva Piñata is like? I’ve resisted it’s call for so long… maybe the time has come. But I have so much I still want to do in life! I have goals, dreams. Am I ready to trade that all for a future that consists of nothing but tweaking foliage to attract anthropomorphic Mexican oddities?

Side Note: I actually really like the Viva Piñata cartoon that’s on Saturday mornings. This could be because I am a goddamn child. Seriously, the fact that I even have an opinion about a Saturday morning cartoon should tell you a lot about my personality. I watch cartoons, play video games, drink beer, look at boobs on the internet and… um, write lots of papers analyzing the role of Gesamtkunstwerk in contemporary media. Basically, everything my eight-year-old self fantasized about doing when he grew up.

There are some failings to Chibi-Robo, though. Mainly because it’s a bit too wishy-washy for the subject matter. There should have been some sort of clarification as to where energy comes from for the sake of our younglings. Like, how it’s actually comes from large power plants that are often causing the pollution Chibi-Robo does battle against. I imagine that may have come up in the planning stages and the developers opted to go for something a little less hopeless. And call it “happy points.” It also may have been important to illustrate that pollution isn’t a cute creature that frolics in your vegetable garden, let alone a tangible thing you can conquer with a squirt gun. Our children are sheltered enough without this sort of candy veneer being thrown over something they should be worried about. But, then again, when I was a kid I thought that the manhole in front of my house was a gateway to a magical world of talking turtles with extraordinary martial arts abilities, so who am I to judge?

Just once I’d like to see a game that taught children about failure, or at least the Sisyphean struggle associated with certain ideals. It would have been great if Chibi-Robo had woken up every morning, gone out to his park to find it a mess, then spent the day cleaning it up only to have to do it all over again the next day. Then again, I’m not sure if that would have been a good game. Something like September 12th, which is sublime in the way it handles it’s subject matter, lacks that aspect of fun that most people expect from a game.

Now that I’m thinking about it: have you ever heard of Wall Street Kid? It was surprisingly good (for a NES-era life simulator). You play as a certain Mr. Benedict, the biggest WASP to ever be portrayed in an 8-bit game. The premise is that Mr. Benedict’s uncle has died and left him with a nice chunk of inheritance, but under one condition: the player has a short period of time to take some minor seed money and become a success playing the stock market. You spend most of your time staring at a screen like this:

Yapple Computers for $74 a share? Dude, buy that shit! Trust me, just hold on to it until Steve Yobs comes back on as CEO. Also, grab up some Yoogle as soon as the IPO hits… it’s never going to come down!

The entire game is spent trading stocks, trying to build your assets, then blowing them on unnecessary objects in the trappings of typical American excess… which is, sadly, the gameplay mechanic that hooks me on these titles. All the while you have to balance this greed with courting ladies, going to the gym, and trying to score reservations at Dorsia.

The nice part about Wall Street Kid is that, unlike Chibi-Robo’s battle against pollution, this situation is practically impossible to win. Not because the gameplay itself is difficult, but because it’s accurately modeled after the ridiculous standards of success the modern world has come to accept.

• Acquire a house worth at least a million dollars.
• Purchase a massive yacht.
• Get married.
• Keep your wife happy with meaningless but expensive gifts.
• Buy a ridiculously pricey ancient castle that was owned by your Aryan ancestors.

Just like real life! And, just like real life, it’s completely impossible (at least without abusing the password system). Seriously, I remember sinking a fair number of hours into this title and never even coming close to winning. My friends were mostly confused by the whole concept and never wanted to try it, so maybe I just suck at stock market simulators. I did have to take economics twice in high school, and even then I only passed because I was stuck with the remedial group due to a scheduling error. Those kids thought I was the coolest.

When you fail at one of the game’s ridiculous goals (like coming up with a million dollars for your house payment by March 1st), that’s it. Your character loses everything and you’re forced to restart (or reenter your last password). There are no continues and no extra lives. It’s refreshing to see a game not sugarcoat things and just tell them like they are in real life. It’s not like some fairy tale where the government grabs seven-hundred-billion dollars from the average taxpayer because Mr. Bigwig on Wall Street has to make payments on his frickin’ castle. It doesn’t work that way in the real world, and I applaud Wall Street Kid for not having any such ludicrous deus ex machina.

You’ve got to think about what it’s teaching the children, after all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Observed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.