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Katamari Damacy and Gamespy Wireless on the DS
Hit quirky game Katamari Damacy will be coming to the Nintendo DS sometime in the near future, according to Joystiq. From the article: "The game is listed under Namco's planned DS titles. Squint hard at the top of the image, and you'll see it. Get that stylus ready. You're going to be pushing around a world of crap with it, soon enough." At the same time, GamesAreFun.com has information about the DS Wireless Service, which is going to be hosted partially by Gamespy.
Three of the levels have "Eternal" modes. If you get your katamari up to a certain size, you unlock "Eternal mode" where you can play the level for as long as you like.
I forget the exact figures needed to unlock Eternal modes, but it's something like 600m on Make the Moon. Once you've rolled up EVERYTHING, there's a theoretical maximum size of about 900m on that level.
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The Xbox and the GameCube can push more polygons than the PS2, which shows exactly how mech you know about video game systems.
Obviously NAMCO thinks the DS can handle it, and they have more experience with programming the DS than you or I.
Can they? The Xbox and GameCube GPUs are relatively fixed-function compared to the PS2's, which are more like generic DSP units. Yes, the Xbox and GameCube can render a more complex scene than the PS2 at the same framerate, under certain common constraints, but the PS2 offers much greater flexibility. So, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the PS2 could push more flat-shaded polygons than either the Xbox or GC (which was Corngood's point).
As for the question of whether the DS can handle Katamari Damacy, obviously the answer is yes, if it's simplified enough. The real question is whether the game simplified to that level is going to retain the value of the original game. I'm not seeing it... but you're quite welcome to surprise me, MANCO.
You are kidding, right?
Katamari Damacy didn't exactly make the PS2 cry and beg for mercy. You're talking about a field of objects and vision that while it could be cluttered it didn't exceed the amount of pushable polys by a long shot. Certainly it didn't have anywhere near as many polys on screen as, say, Madden 2004, and those were textured / lit / etc.
Plus, Katamari is a prime example of a game that could be optimized. All of the "regular" edges were rounded, almost unnecessarily so. Removing or reducing the rounded edges could reduce polycount by 50 - 90%. Likewise, with the reduced size / resolution of the DS screen it would be much easier to "drop out" things from the world sooner, from ants that stick around long after they're black dots on the regular screen to cars that you can barely see when you're giant. Katamari is optimized for such transitions, and to do so would be relatively easy. You could probably get another 50% poly savings there too. Plus the DS is running at about 40% length and 40% height resolution on each of it's screens, saving between 50% - 80% on poly rendering, depending on how they decide to use the second screen.
You can also drop the "special effect" in katamari. You know, that distance blur thing, which so many people find so annoying. On a TFT screen, it will probably be impossible to see anyway.
And if you did have to remove objects from the world, it would be relatively easy to do, and just boost the size multiplier of the remaining objects.
There are a ton of ways that you can optimise the design of Katamari Damacy down to a smaller system. This shouldn't be a problem at all.
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