That's a bold statement, and I don't want you to make any great leaps of comparison here, so I'll spell it out.

It's not that Chibi Robo is destined to be as successful or as deep or as groundbreaking or as genre-defining as GTA. I'm talking about gameplay. Chibi Robo is Nintendo's happy, family-friendly sandbox game. Wind Waker and Mario Sunshine have similar GTA parallels (among others, I'm sure), but their emphasis on linear levels (Zelda's dungeons and Mario's platformer worlds) breaks the pattern. Chibi Robo seems to be the closest Nintendo-exclusive, non-violent GTA-clone I've yet played.

• You explore a big environment at your own pace, with almost the entire map open to you within the first hour of play.
• There's user-selectable missions, handed out by NPCs that change and develop as the plotline progresses.
• There's a fair amount of sidebar tasks, mini-games and collectibles.
• There's definite day and night cycles with different events in each.
• And you can spend untold hours just screwing around, not doing much of anything.

That last one is the one that gets me. I've sat down to play and burned an hour just goofing off, and not accomplished much of anything to advance the plot.

Which, I've come to learn, is something I really enjoy in my video games. Just livin' in the world.

Of course, that's not exactly what I want to be doing right now - because I have Metal Gear Subsistence and Kingdom Hearts II ready to go, not to mention Odama shipping this week - but it's still a nice, relaxing place to be.

If only you could speed up the dialogue. That's the one fault, all the slow slow chatter to read.

By the way, I considered getting the new Tomb Raider game, until I played the PS2 demo. It looks great - she looks great - but the control is floaty and touchy. I'm all for those jerks making a good Tomb Raider game again, because I really liked the first two (maybe even the third one, I forget). But this one, Tomb Raider Legend, isn't there yet. It seems to me that they should decide whether it's a fast-action shooter or a slow-action exploration game, because the controls are split between the two yet serve neither adequately.