Imagining Party Babyz

Who are these fabled Party Babyz? We imagine.

By Andrew Hsieh. Posted 07/08/2011 10:00 2 Comments     ShareThis

This is not what Imagine: Party Babyz is actually about. We are, however, Imagining Party Babyz. Please bear with us.

The first question we have to ask ourselves is: just what kind of babies are we talking about? For that matter, what kind of parties are we talking about? We already know that it’s Imagine Party Babyz, which signifies a particularly jovial sort of infant– one who indulges himself or herself with especially elegant play, perhaps that involving slings and stones rather than mud and stool. We speak of a baby whose manner is a little more forméd than that of other babies, one who can partake in both party and partyz, in groups both babylike and babyzlike. This, fellow Nintendojoites, is the Alpha Baby. We expect Alpha Baby to be fought over as a character of choice almost as much as Street Fighter II newbies fight over Ryu and Ken, and to have the most merchandising opportunities. Possible Alpha Babyz: Professor Layton; Cmd. Adam Malkovich; Princess Peach.

But maybe this extra z symbolizes not being jovial, but being radical and rebellious. Instead of playing with pots and pans, these babyz might make infantile warfare– much like having skillz with Solid Snake in Super Smash Bros. Brawl lets you make a personal pinball machine of death. And instead of painting the more lucid dreams of a straitjacketed mental patient, these babyz use their fingerpaints for anarchic vandalism, throwing up the horns as they rock out to strains of Raffi and Barry Louis Polisar. “If I was a flower growing wild and free,” they’d scream, denying their own human existences in favor of vegetative states, “all I’d want is you to be my sweet honey bee.” Oh, the rebellion. This particular member of the Babyz is the Rocker Baby. Like Final Fantasy IV‘s Kain, we’ll build Rocker Baby from the ground up to appeal to those tortured souls in our audience– the antihero to the heroic Alpha Baby. He’ll have action figures made of him, but that’s probably about it. Possible Rocker Babyz: Baby Bowser; Nabooru; Captain Falcon.


Rocker Baby will eat you and your Babyz alive if you let him.

And of course, there’s always the Nerd Baby, who puts the zzz in Babyz. Instead of partying with kegs of Juicy Juice and a couple nonalcoholic JELL-O shots, Nerd Baby makes bad words out of alphabet cubes and tests the durability of his rattle by scientifically biting it. Nerd Baby puts on false spectacles (after scientifically testing their worth, with his teeth) and learns to walk half a year before all other Babyz. Only problem is, after he learns to walk, he tries to run, at which point he will inevitably trip into a Slurpee or something, in the first of many Nerdy slip-ups. (We won’t discuss the cause of the Slurpee– probably Nerd Baby’s archnemesis, the Jock Baby.) (He wears a strap instead of a diaper.) At this point, we realize that the only party Nerd Baby will ever partake in is the RPG kind. And while Nerd Baby will likely have, like Bowser and Wario, the best possible job prospects, Nerd Baby will trip up again and again and again on his way there, probably throwing huge tantrums that put many lives in danger. Possible Nerd Babyz: Kamek; Professor Elm; Captain Olimar.

But all of these Babyz are nothing without the guiding light of the Glue Baby, whose tenacity in wielding the Power of Friendship make even the toughest-hearted Falco Lombardi all giddy inside. When all else fails, and the Villanous Toddler is about to prevail, the Glue Baby (who has been hitherto the weakest member of the Party) stands up and waves his jiggly baby fat, summoning an absolutely Captain Planet-esque amount of happy vibes. It’s the Glue Baby that keeps the Babyz alive; the Glue Baby that makes the game. It’s like that old logic game, where you have to get a wolf, a goat and a cabbage over a river– you could leave any one of them behind, but you really want all of them together. (Is it like that? We don’t know. We weren’t Nerd Babyz.) Or like Fire Emblem, where we refuse to have any member die and reset the console every time something like that happens. The Glue Baby, it turns out, is in all of us. We just don’t want to admit it. Possible Glue Babyz: Ash Ketchum; Fox McCloud; Ness.

What about the game? We don’t really know, actually. Isn’t it a fighting game? All we know is Nerd Baby would totally beat Rocker Baby in a fight. As long as Rocker Baby didn’t eat his eyeballs first.

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