We Heart Katamari Preview

1up.com has up a look at the upcoming sequel to Katamari Damacy, set to launch in Japan sometime this summer. Besides some screenshots and discussion of new gameplay, the article discusses the original title and its place in the industry. From the article: "With intuitive, non-violent action and simple but stylized visuals, Katamari was one of those rare creations that managed to transcend the stereotypes and demographics of gaming and strike a chord with a wide spectrum of gamers, both casual and hardcore, male and female, youthful and elderly. The brainchild of Keita Takahashi, an artist turned game producer, Katamari's unique appeal can largely be chalked up to its creator's unique aspirations."

Comments

shh!

[SansTinfoilHat]

From the article:

>>The first Katamari didn't rack up sales to strike
>>fear into hearts of Madden and GTA. It's not
>>slated to be made into a big-budget Uwe Boll
>>movie.

For the love of God, don't say that loudly. Uwe Boll might hear you!

video game without violence!?!

[phloydphreak]

BLASPHEMY! im reporting this to the Vatican.

Re:video game without violence!?!

[roseblood]

Ask the guy in the red tie, or the kid in the foreground if there's violence in this game.
here

Re:video game without violence!?!

[ChibiLZ]

I'm not trying to be critical or insulting, just curious. Showing a false god is offensive, even if you know it's not real, and you don't believe in it?

I suppose any title can be offensive to some person or group, but I found KD to be rather unoffensive, and I thought it would be a good game for people of all ages to play.

Re:video game without violence!?!

[snorklewacker]

Yet you seem to have no problem with Guild Wars. What powers the SPELLS in GW, hmm?

Look, we know we should all fall down in theophanic awe and worship at your particular choice of the One True God. Just will you for once shut the fuck up about it already? You're not only not changing anyone's mind, you're just making your religion look like it's populated by narrow-minded superstitious zealots like yourself.

Re:video game without violence!?!

[WarPresident]

Yet you seem to have no problem with Guild Wars. What powers the SPELLS in GW, hmm?

Could it be... SATAN?!?

you're just making your religion look like it's populated by narrow-minded superstitious zealots like yourself.

Well, isn't that special?

Re:video game without violence!?!

[CrazyJim1]

"Yet you seem to have no problem with Guild Wars. What powers the SPELLS in GW, hmm?"

Yeah, you're right. I quit my guild war playing a day after I got it. They have false gods in it too, in addition to necromancy. I'm finding it difficult to find a game that doesn't cross the line in some aspect.

Maybe I am a zealot. And maybe to an unbeliever, it seems strange to see a man with convictions. Yes, I try and read the bible, and I try and out reach to people as all Christians are charged to do. My main goal in life is to consume as little of the pie as possible, while making it bigger for other people. I loved video games when I was young because of this, they cost so little and provided valuable hours of entertainment. But video games have become quite dark indeed. So what am I going to do in my free time now? Maybe I'll experiment with new farming techniques. Today I plan on experimenting with water purification techniques. I guess I'll kick my lifetime video game addiction, and start to make a difference in the real world. I'll still game if something good comes out that isn't sacreligious. But we all have to admit that its rare for a good video game to come at all, let alone one that meets extra qualifications.

Re:video game without violence!?!

[snorklewacker]

> But video games have become quite dark indeed.

You are condemning Katamari Damacy as "dark" ... and you think the problem is with the games? I wish I could just ignore this paranoid insanity ... people like you wouldn't be a problem if they just shut themselves at home away from "worldly" influences. Problem is, they tend to get jobs as politicians.

Re:video game without violence!?!

[CrazyJim1]

Nah, I meant guildwars and other games that have necromancy in them as dark. You need to admit there is a trend in games to be as bad as possible. I think it stems from the long hold cultural phenomena that the bad boy is cool.

Re:video game without violence!?!

[CrazyJim2]

Don't waste your time CrazyJim1. I tried to develop water purification techniques myself (before you thought of it) and they just laughed at me. Apparently, the problem is solved, and people know how to produce pure water already. Here I thought that crops would grow even better if you watered them with pure water, without any of those dangerous minerals in it. I'm going to work on developing the wheel next, either that or Pinky and the Brain cartoons. Or maybe True A.I. I'm also developing a method for P2P as well as a way to make billions with Gobots online. Man, I'm going to invent all of this stuff, and then my life won't be such a disaster!

Non-Violent?

[Chris Acheson]

Katamari Damacy seemed pretty violent to me, with all the screaming and running and whatnot. The cheerful music made it seem like some sort of twisted black comedy.

Re:Non-Violent?

[roseblood]

No, White Chicks, that's a twisted black comedy.

Re:Non-Violent?

[LordJezo]

The King of All Cosmos was a mass murderer.. 1000s of children, old people, animals.. all tossed into space to become starts. I'd hate to be the daughter of a mother and father rolled up on the beach during a summer vacation, watching them be thrown into space killed by the void.

People just working in their office buildings when the Katamari comes and sucks them up to their doom. It's such a sad game.

Re:Non-Violent?

[The Other White Boy]

no way man, you gotta roll up the kid before you can get big enough to roll up her parents. see, they get to be together forever!

Hmm...

[brilinux]

Looks like they got the ball rolling on this one...

Re:Hmm...

[CrazyJim1]

I'm going to wait until theres more gravity to this before they pick me up.

Release Date

[Mandoric]

The release date is 7th July, coinciding with Sakura Taisen 5 and a week before Super Robot Wars Alpha 3; most of the major importers appear to be offering preorders already.

Re:The real question is:

[Anonymous Coward]

A message to The King of All the Cosmos: A cow patterned cone or a "No Stealing Cows" sign is NOT a cow.

God I hate that level.

Non-violent action?

[Anonymous Coward]

The average player kills ten times as many people in Katamari Damacy as they do in GTA. And that's probably an under-estimate.

I'm fed up of hearing about Katamari's sequel

[EnglishTim]

... because the bastards still haven't released the original in Europe. Grrrr.

Re:I'm fed up of hearing about Katamari's sequel

[geoffybiggins]

Indeed, in order to play this raved-about game at all on a PAL format PlayStation one is forced to 'illegally' mod their console and import the damn thing.

Stupid really, I can't imagine there would be great costs involved in producing a PAL version of any game made for the PS2 so far.

Along with the 485,637 Gumdam games available in Japan I think there's a fair bit of money to be made if people in sales think, like, globally.

Turds.

Re:I'm fed up of hearing about Katamari's sequel

[Yer Mom]

The main costs are translation into the various European languages (both the in-game text and the manual) and redoing the video code to cope with PAL's 50Hz and extra vertical resolution.

The 50Hz thing is daft, really - just about any TV sold these days will cope with 50Hz and 60Hz, as it saves the manufacturers having to design two different TVs where one will do. But you're still going to end up with a load of people with old TVs moaning that their games don't work.

Re:I'm fed up of hearing about Katamari's sequel

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Can you please stop perpetuating this stupid myth? First of all, most games are not translated for the European market, just the big ones. Second, the myths of translation (actually the process is called localisation since it might involve other cultural changes to games) are nothing compared to distribution and marketing, let alone actual production.

Re:I'm fed up of hearing about Katamari's sequel

[ChibiLZ]

And Katamari Damacy can't even claim huge localization costs. Anyone who has played the game knows that the game wasn't localized at all. They translated it, very well I must say, but left all the Japanese humor in. I really hope they stick with it in the second.

Re:I'm fed up of hearing about Katamari's sequel

[cgenman]

Having gone through the process of localization several times now, you'd be surprised how frequently things bite you. Text string variations, for example. On one of our games, we had to redo the way the engine handled every text string in the game, in order to work with Chinese, Korean and other non-Ascii languages. We had to lengthen maximum text string lengths for some of the more long-winded European languages. On consoles, this little change can (and did) push you over memory budget. The remote people chosen to handle translations often put in text strings longer than we had done or expected, causing subtle memory corruption errors. We changed a lot of artwork as many displays are handled as bitmaps. Heck, the difference between US and Asian Windows machine file heirchies bit us repeatedly, based in no small part around text usage. There is also your rendering engine, which is probably hardcoded in 60 places to run at 60 Hz... We've had major problems with some of our subsystems getting to PAL speeds, to the point where major chunks of the engine were just rewritten. Think about the tricks you would use to cause something to deinterlace crisply, then warp them to work at a different FPS. And of course the videos were broken and had to be resampled. Oh, and there are legal issues around releasing things in certain countries, like no Nazi insignia can appear in German games and strict restrictions around english and other languages appearing in Korean games. And you have to relicense a lot of music and other content for different territories, sometimes with other agencies and sometimes these deals are sour and you just have to redo your soundscape.

You put a million little bandages into a game to get it into E3, and then onto the shelves in time, and you generally don't think about localization until it is too late. You're far too focused on getting something working, fun, and on frame / memory budget in half the time you realistically should have. It's a superhuman effort to get done in time as is. It just doesn't occur to you that the refresh rate of the screen would be anything other than 60 Hz, or that you would need to check the length of hardcoded text strings. Your design team knew it had to be under 127 characters and you hooked them up yourself. You never expected to have text being put in by 14 different development companies with varying degrees of competence, and that you would be responsible for QA'ing the bugs they mysteriously introduce. And that's just a small sample of what happens during localization.

I'm not saying that translating games isn't worth it financially. But it is definitely a pain in the tail. It's just a lot more emotionally rewarding to start on the next game than to get stuck for 6 months fixing bugs because Gaelic's apostrophy happens to use the same extended ASCII as you're using for your escape character. And the process of localization does take 3 - 6 months in a schedule, minimum.

Re:I'm fed up of hearing about Katamari's sequel

[Nebulochaotic]

I read this and almost cried. Why don't game developers use the same design techniques and standards as other major software developers? Using hard-coded string values? Hard coding the software to run at 60 Hz? Pushing your memory budget so close you cannot fit a few more characters of text? Not only that, but game engines are re-written from scratch for virtually every new game; the wheel is re-invented 12 times a month in any given project.

I am sorry to be insulting, but the reasons you have given for the difficulty in localization are all due to sloppy, poorly thought out code. Every generation of systems take more and more time to develop for, but simply standardizing certain game engine components, and re-use and modularization of code could reduce that by an order of magnitude. Part of this is the fault of publishers, part the fault of the general mentality of programmers in the field, most of which have never worked on a project not in the industry.

Re:I'm fed up of hearing about Katamari's sequel

[cgenman]

I read this and almost cried. Why don't game developers use the same design techniques and standards as other major software developers? Using hard-coded string values? Hard coding the software to run at 60 Hz? Pushing your memory budget so close you cannot fit a few more characters of text? Not only that, but game engines are re-written from scratch for virtually every new game; the wheel is re-invented 12 times a month in any given project.

A lot of it has to do with what you are trying to do with your budget. String lengths aren't checked because that would double the amount of milliseconds the system is spending on text. You can check all of that at export time, but that programmer time might be best spent on another aspect of development. You squeeze the system as hard as you can, and maybe everything including rendering, physics, etc takes 56-59 MS on average. If you reduce the amount of pixels per frame but increase the frame rate, the system may be pushing exactly the same number of pixels, but now you have to update physics 20% more often. Maybe you're using the sound processor to update a part of your physics model because you know *exactly* how much time it needs to spend on rendering your streaming audio, but now your timing is all shot. Maybe you've hardcoded string length because then you can allocate a single text array at the beginning of a level and shave a few cycles off of seek time.

It's not just shoddy code design, and I'm sorry if I made it sound like it was. The programmers I've worked with at game companies have been some of the best I've known or worked with anywhere. But with extreme optimization comes lots of dependencies. It's not a question of being a bad programmer, it's a question of what you're trying to optimize for. And yes, some of that comes down to optimizing for time and not having enough time on any given aspect. I've seen an entire AI system implemented, pretty well I might add, in 3 days by a single coder. You're given a budget, and you want to make the best game possible with that budget, which usually involves pushing things. But a lot of the localization related problems just come from having extremely optimized code and other resources.

And most engines aren't written from scratch, though few are bought. Pretty much every company has a 3D graphics, animation, and gameplay engine they've put through quite a few cycles, even if they're good about making it not look like that's the case.

Re:13 year old girldish style strikes again

[Ex Machina]

Let me guess.... you're in a CounterStrike clan?

Re:13 year old girldish style strikes again

[Ex Machina]

and you could complain about silly crap more and sound like a sad gamer nerd!

Euro release possible: )

[sbszine]

A European release for the sequel has been mentioned here and there. No details, but some scant info here and here. Also, Namco sent Katamari 2 press packs to the Euro press, which would be pointless if there were no Euro release planned. Failing that, there is a Nintendo DS version coming out.

Fingers crossed, eh?

Bleh

[Momoru]

I loved the first Katamary Darmacy...but I just don't see what the point of this sequel is....it looks exactly the same....if you showed me one of these screenshots out of context I wouldn't even assume there was a sequel. I was curious what new ground they would break for this game...and maybe its a little premature but it doesn't seem any different to me, besides the hope of more wacked out cut scenes.

Re:Bleh

[DrZombie]

Don't think of it as a sequel, think of it as more levels for the first one. It was definitely a game where I could have done with about 99 levels. On another note, who the hell dropped the ball at Harmonix (I think) with Amplitude and Frequency. I think everyone I've ever talked to has basically agreed that a cheap paid subscription (~$5/month) that nets you 2 songs a month to download for one of those games would be something than we would easily pay.

Re:Bleh

[llevity]

They went on to make Karaoke games that were more popular. Neat technology, but I want the next Amplitude/Frequency. :(

Re:Bleh

[DrZombie]

Was Karaoke revolution really that popular?

I remember playing both Frequency and Amplitude with groups of 10 - 12 people for 6 - 8 hour blocks. Those games were the most addictive things ever.

Re:Bleh

[UWC]

(Harmonix also made Eyetoy: Antigrav, I think)

The subscriber base for the subscription service you suggest would be a subset of the set that includes people who own a big PS2, a network adapter, the hard drive, and Frequency or Amplitude. They're certainly not going to store songs on $25 8MB memory cards, and downloading or streaming every time you play the song doesn't seem like a very good idea.

Now that you mention it, though, that would be a pretty awesome feature to make buying an XBox port (maybe even a Frequency+Amplitude 2-pack!) worth it. Isn't there a version of Karaoke Revolution for XBox?

Also, have you tried the online play for Amplitude? I never got around to it, and now I'd need to buy a new ethernet cable to reach my PS2.

Re:Bleh

[cgenman]

Yes.
And thanks.

In case people were looking, Harmonix's home page. Of course there is a lot more going on that we can't talk about...

Re:Bleh

[DrZombie]

Well, that's good for you guys, but I would like to seriously re-iterate my previous suggestion of a new Frequency/Amplitude game on a platform with online capabilities. I think there is a huge market for you guys for paid content for those games for just new songs every month. They were one of only maybe a handful of games I can ever remember playing different difficulty levels on, and without a doubt the only games where I played *all* of them. BTW, qualityOfFrequencyAndAmplitude *= (1 hojillion) ^ (1 hojillion); when you hook your PS2 up to an LCD projector and a really good sound system. Plus your neighbors that you never liked really learn to hate your guts.

my friends hate Katamari Damacy.

[Lord Bitman]

I need new friends.

Re:my friends hate Katamari Damacy.

[Lord Bitman]

don't moderate "Insightful"! Be my friend! seriously! I'm a loser!

Re:The real question is:

[Kredal]

COOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!!

Yes, yes, I know it's yelling. Oh well.

Disturbing: Yes, Violent: Not Really.

[Leadhyena]

Nah... they're still wriggling in the katamari after they've been rolled up, so they're still alive. The only time that those people die is when the star they get rolled into gets smashed into dust (because of a failure to meet the sceneraio requirements). Even the ending alludes to this, where the family after being rolled up in the katamari that becomes the moon, is grooving with all the other people rolled in with the other continents that you roll up in the credits.

So I would say that while it is most assuredly disturbing, it's not especially violent.

Re:Disturbing: Yes, Violent: Not Really.

[davez0r]

you don't die

Re:Too Kiddie

[Leadhyena]

Cause, you know, playing video games makes you a Real Man...

dude, grow up... and play video games because they're fun, not because they're cool. :)

for love of god... an xbox port please

[enrico_suave]

I'm dying to play the original katamari damacy but not so much that i'm gonna buy a ps2/gamecube to do so...

e.

Re:for love of god... an xbox port please

[Reignking]

I'd just like to play a demo or get a feeling for why it is so good. About the only thing that I know about the game is that it is Japanese.