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We Love Katamari Preview
1up.com has a first look with video of the upcoming We Love Katamari. From the article: "Without question, the new game is its father's son -- very literally so, in fact. (The narrative that appears between stages details the tough-love story of the fruity King Of All Cosmos and his childhood struggles to win the acceptance of his own stern and cold-hearted dad.) More to the point, the gameplay itself is largely unchanged from last year's surprise hit. The control scheme is exactly the same, and the fundamental concept of rolling things into a giant katamari ball within a certain time limit remains intact as well."
EB's taking pre-orders at $30. The sequel sells in Japan for about ¥4400, which is the same as the original cost at launch. The Japanese version is effectively a budget title compared to the usual ¥6850 price point for new games there.
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In the original, you can hit START to skip the conversation and intro sequences. I think the intro sequences disguise the loading time, though, since you have to wait a few more seconds for the level to load.
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Keita Takahashi's speech at the Game Developer's Conference was very interesting, to say the least, and I think more game developers would benefit from listening to what he has to say.
I read that, and I honestly don't think he said much, at least if the story you linked to really got to the essence of his point. From the story, his point seems to be that games aren't very important, that he isn't very good at creating them, and that Katamari Damacy only turned out the way it did because he couldn't figure out how to do what he really wanted to do. He even said simple isn't necessarily best, it's just all he knows how to do.
I don't really see how this helps anybody in the game industry.
His first argument is probably the only one that carries any weight, although it's also the one most likely to be ignored. Game creators do have a sense of self-importance that leads them to create these massively pompous epics that play more like work than games. I don't just mean RPG's, either; I mean almost all games today. If more game creators would take the attitude that what they're doing doesn't really matter, I honestly think we'd get some better games.
Unfortunately, human nature doesn't work that way - nobody wants to think that what they're doing is irrelevant.
If what you took from his speech is that games should be more simple and accessible, well, he pretty much said exactly the opposite. I'd look more to a guy like Shigeru Miyamoto for that sentiment, although he hasn't really been backing up his words with his games lately, and anyway the public seems to be moving in a different direction.
KD at least proved that there is still a market for a really good, innovative, different type of game that's played strictly for the fun of it rather than trying to wow with graphics or create some sort of community of grind addicts online. Unfortunately, I don't see a mad rush of developers trying to emulate what KD did - all I see in the pipeline is a continuing and seemingly endless stream of GTA, Halo, and Everquest clones.
Tetris 2 (SNES and NES) was totally different from Tetris - it relied on color matching as much as shape manipulation. In fact, it was much closer to Columns than the original Tetris.
Hatris (PC) did shape matching, not shape alignment.
Weltris (PC) was all about the different angles, making you think in 3D.
Tetris Plus (Saturn) added a cool puzzle mode (you were in caves and got a spelunker to the bottom of the screen).
I could go on... Most "official" Tetris games offered up original features.
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