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.

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?

[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!

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.

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

[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

[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?

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?

my friends hate Katamari Damacy.

[Lord Bitman]

I need new friends.

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.