Publisher: NintendoGenres: ActionPrice: $29.99Multimedia: Chibi Robo: Park PatrolPlatforms: Nintendo DSNumber of players: 1ESRB rating: EveryoneDeveloper: SkipUS release date: 2007-10-02Nintendo's innovative new game Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol is an environmentally themed strategy game that teaches conservation concepts using the mechanics of the game itself. As a precursor to this review, it should be said that most of the comments in reviews by other websites such as IGN are fairly accurate. It's a great park simulator with a tendency to require too much dialogue clicking. There is little to contribute that has not already been said in this area, so this review will instead focus on the curious insights into environmentalism that the game mechanic creates.You, a 4-inch robot, are in charge of rejuvenating a desolate park. To do this you must interact with several commodities that require not just management but balancing from the player.
The two primary goods in the game are Happy Points and Watts. You generate Happy Points by dancing with flowers, selling them, or upgrading your park to attract more visitors. These, in turn, are converted into Watts. Watts are used to pay for upgrades to you and your park, and to power your day-to-day operations.The complexity begins to arise when you become aware that merely growing flowers in the few nearby beds will not generate enough Happy points to pay the Wattage Bills. Although you'll be able to break even on the cost of just running around outside, paying for upgrades and expanding the park requires that you start selling flowers. This would be fine, except that flowers are what you use to get grass to grow and to improve the overall rank of the park.
Raising flowers is the main task in the game and can become repetitive. The Verdict: Though occasionally repetitive, Chibi Robo: Park Patrol.
Take too many flowers and you destroy your rank; take too few and you grow too slowly.What makes this game design so interesting is that it remarkably addresses the chief problem in explaining environmental issues to other people. Simply put, people have trouble thinking big. Stalin's often-quoted comment that if you kill a person it's a tragedy, kill a thousand and it's a statistic, is not just a standard for genocide. Explaining to a person that they need to recycle by showing them enormous landfills may be emotionally stirring, but actually getting a person to act on that is not necessarily a question of their morals. Rather, it's a question of their capacity to connect the small act (throwing away a plastic bottle) with the greater one (1,000,000 people throwing away plastic bottles). In application to Chibi-Robo, the game is presenting a unique method to instill the elements of conservation through game design. You can't just run around your park cutting down flowers and selling them to buy upgrades.
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If you do, the park's beauty drops and you lose on the main objective. The player must develop the land, take a precise harvest to make more Happy Points, and balance these activities with the overall goal of making the park a better place.The impact that this gameplay creates does not just confine itself to land development. A ten-year-old could grasp that harvesting an entire forest is not as good as harvesting it in sections by simply comparing it to Chibi-Robo's carefully balanced flower economy. This can be expanded to a huge variety of conservation concepts once the initial hurdle of teaching someone the incentive of balancing costs with production. This is why you shouldn't strip mine.
This is why alternative energy costs so much. This is why we need a broad energy economy that responds to the needs of individual regions. Maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch, but you might as well start young. It's a truly remarkable game design with the context of resource conservation as the ultimate goal.
It takes the problem of thinking big and turns it into a smaller and easier to understand game. Water those flowers, Chibi-Robo!Compare this simple idea to other games' whose design involves resources. In Warcraft III, you strip-mine the gold, chop down the forest, and do so as rapidly as you can in an enormous 'Tragedy of the Commons' scenario with Orcs. Aside from the exception of the Night-Elves, there is never a moment in that game or most other real-time strategy games where conservation is even a viable option. Blizzard's RTS masterpiece becomes a commentary in and of itself on the way people behave around finite resources, with Chibi-Robo standing up in stark contrast.Which brings us to the chief complaint I have with this game: the villain.
It's not that his goal is destroying your park, it's that he's doing it because he hates flowers and happiness. It's almost as bad as the days of 'Captain Planet' where the chief problem facing the Planeteers was a sex offender who loved putting toxic waste in people's yards. That's not really an accurate depiction of how resources get abused, nor does it do a good job of depicting people who consume them accurately. Why not make something a bit more realistic? What if the chief adversary was simply kids plucking your flowers? Or dogs crapping on the grass?
Why not show the flower shop owner harvesting all the flowers in your park so he can make a living? The problem with the villain is that he undermines the great ethic of conservation that the game otherwise instills. No one chops down a forest because they hate trees. People don't blow up mountains for coal because they hate mountains. Dynamons world hacked game. There are reasons for doing this, although not always good ones, and denying those people's humanity does a disservice to the goal of conservation itself: preserving the land for everyone.There are other complaints worth airing. As noted earlier, the constant clicking through the same dialogue over and over gets old. Part of this comes from the fact that the game is designed to be played in quick five to ten minute bursts, an ideal setup for gaming on the go, but one that breaks down if you're not on the train.
A better balance between these two conditions of playing could've been struck by just breaking up converting points, saving, and hearing the total tally of flowers into separate actions. The stylus is used brilliantly and the sound stayed unmuted for most of my playing. The eventual introduction of the multi-colored flower ends up generating too many Happy Points, such that it unbalances most resource issues in the later stages.Despite these qualms, this is a pretty good game overall. It's not just good because it's fun or pretty, it's not just good because you keep playing it for that next upgrade, but rather because at the end of the day you feel like you're doing something more than just playing a game. You're solving a little problem that helps to deal with a bigger one.
(www.plasticpals.com) Having thoroughly enjoyed the highly original and inventive Chibi-Robo! On the Gamecube, I decided to pick up the DS sequel, Chibi-Robo! Having read some reviews that said it was only passable or mediocre, I wasn't expecting much. As it turns out it's a very different sort of game, but a decent time waster nonetheless. Park Patrol puts the player in the role of Chibi-Robo once again, but this time his job is to restore a barren yard to a beautiful green park. By tilling the soil, planting flowers, and adding items of your choosing (trees, water fountains, benches, and play structures), you can return the park to its former glory. As in the original game, there is a time limit of about 10 to 15 minutes per day.
At the end of each day, you are automatically returned to the Chibi-House (your base of operations), to recharge and tally your score. Chibi-Robo himself also has a limited battery life, and will need to recharge should he run out of juice. The park itself is a square grid divided into 7×7 large tiles. You can freely arrange the walking paths, streams, and landscaping to your liking. For example, you can add hills or valleys that push the terrain up or down, or run a path over a stream (which makes a small bridge). All of this hard work is actually done by Chibi's friends from town, whom he enlists, that don't come cheap.
Every job requires electricity, which is the game's currency. In order to make electricity, you'll need to make people happy. Happy Points can then be transferred into power, which is then stock-piled for later use. At first Chibi-Robo's battery life is very short, but you'll buy upgrades and eventually you'll have an infinite supply. Just outside the park there is a flower shop (you earn major Happy Points for delivering flowers from the park), a Monkey Burger fast-food joint, and a back alley. These areas are easily accessible and are home to a number of toys that will need electricity to be revived.
Once revived, the toys will go to work for you in the park. Like in the original Chibi-Robo, the toys in Park Patrol have unique problems and a favourite food. By collecting chocolate bars, candy canes, bubblegum, and more from the trash left near the park, you can boost your plastic pals' friendship rating. The better friends you are with each character, the cheaper their labour becomes. Helping out the citizens and renovating the park would be entirely too easy (not to mention boring) if it weren't for something standing in your way. And that's where Sargent Smoggler comes in. The stock villain of the piece, Smoggler attacks from time to time by sending smoglings and smog-globs into the park to ruin your flowers or damage your structures.
You can easily dispatch any smoglings before they do much damage, and for the most part the game even warns you when a smogling attack is about to occur. As such, they're really just paper tigers, but they do a good job of mixing things up before you get bored, sort of like the natural disasters in Sim City. Chibi-Robo Park Patrol may not be as good as the original, but it's hard to compare them since they are such different games. Park Patrol does make excellent use of its setting, allowing you a great deal of customization of the park. Though it is simple, the game does have its share of intricacies which I don't have time to go into. Unlike most DS games, the controls in Chibi-Robo (aside from walking) use the touch screen in some way, and become second-nature in no time. The controls are set up so that a lefty can play as well, using the A, B, X and Y buttons as the directional pad.
The best addition to the Chibi-Robo universe are the many vehicles he can ride (and again, the touch screen controls are fun for those as well). I've enjoyed Chibi-Robo Park Patrol, though not as much as the original game. This is a game to keep on your back burner while playing a more involved game, 15 to 30 minutes here and there. The total play time is roughly 8-12 hours. Having said that, a new Chibi-Robo game is coming out on the DS that looks like it will provide a more well-rounded experience.