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

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.

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

[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.

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?