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We Love Katamari Review
Balbanes writes "Tim Rogers reviews We Love Katamari. He calls it Katamari Damashii: The Videogame." The original is probably my favorite non World of Warcraft game in the last year or two. I can't wait for this game. This article has a lot of commentary on the gameplay, the music, and more. And really, if you haven't played it the original you owe it to yourself to try. The infectious music and hysterical gameplay are a serious treat.
Was posted yesterday the link can be found here
Can someone here tell me what kind of drugs the Katamari Damacy soundtrack producer was on? Cause I want some.
Why something like this is on the main page I'll never know.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I can't get over the fact the guy basically wrote a book here to review a video game. That's one long review!
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
I just hope it ends up living up to expectations on release. Games that have loyal fans often set unrealistic and unobtainable goals and in the end the fans get upset because of unpromised features or they don't think the new one is as good as the original.
Voice your opinion!
I think another duplicate story about the US not releasing control over ICANN would generate more interest than this story. FWIW I love the original game as well, but would NOT expect to see a review of the sequel as a slashdot story.
v2sw7CUPhw5ln6pr5Pck4ma7u7LFw0m6g/l7Di5e6t5Ab6TH.
I just want whatever this guy takes daily. Seriously.
Y'know it'd be great if the original was released in the UK, since I hear it was a real classic. AFAIK it's not even available anywhere in Europe. What are Sony smoking? Surely with all the great reviews the game(s) would sell here.
The original is probably my favorite non World of Warcraft game in the last year or two.
So, in other words, it is your second-favourite game. Just say it, god damnit.
Enjoy an e-piphany
In response to the "spam" claims, and general distaste for the style of article, I'd like to pose an alternate perception. Katamari Damashi is one of the all-time under-the-radar hits for any console (perhaps any game). Every person I know who has a PS/2 had not heard of it before I started passing it around. Everyone loved it. It is brilliant in its simplicity.
In addition, it came out new at $20. An outstanding market concept that few if any had really tried - a new game that was cheap to develop, with little or no marketing, priced to sell. An unfortunate side effect is that there was very little big media attention payed.
As for the part about fawning over the larger scope of the game - the original was short. Necessarily so given the target of a cheap-to-create, cheap-on-the-shelf game.
It's a good game, And the review is fair and accurate.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
seriously, look at that monolithic article with the red borders!
MY EYES ASPLODE!
sex but not too much sex
Excuse me for asking, but what the hell is too much sex? Can such a thing exist?
Not sure how close it is to the original, but I'm certain the original one is much better if folks are liking it so much.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Can someone please explain to me what the point of this game is? I read about 2/3rds of the linked review and still have no idea; what the objective of the game is or what game play is like.
All I know is that the author feels really bad about swallowing a continent, and that he/she really likes the music, maybe, I think.
The only explination I can come up with is that this article was translated, and lost what little coherence it had to begin with in the process.
... and want to know what drugs this guy takes.
I liked the original game quite a bit. It was short, clever, fun to play. Even "innovative". However, I find it *scary* that the guy spent that many bytes fretting over so many minor details. In the end he could have said:
"The sequel is better technically but perhaps a bit overproduced (particularly in terms of music) for what it is. Fans of the original will enjoy the cleaner level design and improvements, but it doesn't stray far from the original. People who missed the first game shouln't miss it them time. 8 out of 10"
Sig under construction since 1998.
I ask because that was the longest-winded, most self-indulgent review I've ever read of anything.
I'll sum it up:
"Blah, blah, I have rarified tastes in J-pop, blah, blah, I know the producer's name, blah, blah, the game is more of the same and it's good, blah, blah, the game succeeded because of Japanophiles with less knowledge of Japanese culture than me, blah, blah, the game is more of the same and it's bad, blah, blah, I suggest that the producer drop his name in connection with newer projects that have nothing to do with Katamari."
The review was incoherent and was 20-30% about the author of the review more than the game. I smell blog.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
C'mon, what's a videogame review without screenshots? Here's some for the curious, courtesy of IGN.. http://media.ps2.ign.com/media/716/716651/imgs_1.h tml
I'm a Japanophile, too, but there's something about that culture that really attracts some creepy (or at least unsettling) gaijin.
I think it's the fact that nobody obsesses like the Japanese. Think about it. The culture prizes knowledge but excludes people outside the norm. Both forces push those with obsessive tendencies way further out over the edge than in many other countries. You don't get otaku and hikikomori in other countries to the level that whole industries cater to them.
Because of that our own obsessive and socially outcast people get the false impression that obsessing over their entertainment and so on is socially acceptable there. Therefore, it's not bad to be like that. Other people understand. Listen, covering your walls in anime posters and keeping figurines of female characters is even more of a turn-off for women there than it is here. It doesn't help that (much like tabletop gaming and first-person shooters in the states) anime fandom has been tarnished by a few murders by fans Where the media latched onto their hobbies as the cause of their mental degeneration.
(FYI, otaku is not a nice word. It inherently carries connotations of creepy, socially-stunted hermits. The term use for obsessed geeks comes from its use by such people who would use it to greet each other (as a polite form of "you") because they couldn't remember other people's names. Don't wear it like a badge of pride.)
I think if more people realized that the Japanese didn't like their creepy fanboys anymore than we do, it might lose a bit of its sheen. As for the other factors, I'd say that, yes, technology, kid-like spirit, obscurity, and sexual undertones in addition to action and escapist elements strongly influence anime fandom. For those of us that gain no joy from reality television, sit-coms sports, or other drivel, anime makes a nice escape. The problem is the people who don't know how to come back to reality afterwards.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why do people insist on spelling it "Damashii"? "Damacy" is the official transliteration of the name used by the original creators of the game; who can overrule that?
That was the most incomprehensible body of text I've ever attempted to read.
I got tired of him imagining the girl singing the music (in the video game?) after about 3 paragraphs, so I skipped closer to the end only to find out he was still talking about her and relating the game to Armageddon the movie?
Question everything
This is not the greatest game in the world. This is just a review.
Can someone please explain to me what the point of this game is? I read about 2/3rds of the linked review and still have no idea; what the objective of the game is or what game play is like.
Well, imagine a first-person shooter without shooting. Ok, now cross that with an RPG with no underlying point. Now mix that with a Dance Dance Dance soundtrack, and pass that thru a mix machine.
Now imagine it's in a foreign language and your babblefish is sick and translating everything incorrectly.
It's like that.
Only more so.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
After watching this game, I think it's high time Maxis came out with Sim Dung Beetle.
I am not trying to be rude.. But the eternals are pretty easy to unlock. My best advice to getting Eternal #3 (the moon level) Don't fret on the small stuff, and learn where all the good clumps are. Also at about 600 meters, use the charge run thing. You need it to find islands fast enough.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
That was, without exception, the WORST review I have ever read. That wasn't even a review. It was a love letter to Nomiya Maki.
Personally, I love Tim Rogers' writing.
The problem is that many of you go into this "Review" thinking that you are going to be reading a review of a game, but in actuality you are reading a story. An experience, if you will. Kind of a review of what was going in Tim's life when he played Katamari Damacy, rather than a review of the game itself.
It might put off a lot of the people here, but I think it is quite interesting. His writing is frenetic at times, and most certainly stream-of-concious, and he oftentimes assumes the reader already knows about every obscure thing which interests him, but that is what makes his writing interesting. It serves to really get the reader into Tim's mind, and see things the way he sees them. It's this great internal perspective that really shows why things are wonderful to Tim, and captures certain insights that we would never make or experience ourselves, but are somehow made our own through Tim's writing.
The State of Tokyo Transit is one of his fiction stories which I first stumbled upon two years ago, and from the first sentence I was entranced. I highly reccommend giving it a read. He has a whole series on Tokyopia entitled, "The State of Tokyo" & randWord, but I think this is his best. Seriously, go read it. I think it's just great. I liked it so much that I e-mailed him after I read it the first time, and he told me that it's part of a book that he's written but has never been published. He seemed like quite a nice guy.
There's a much wider variety of objectives this time. All of the major level types from the first game are back (the infamous cow level and infamous bear level have been replaced by the extremely frustrating cow-and-bear level) plus some new ones, asking the player to roll up objects that cost the most, roll up the most flowers or fireflies in super-saturated stages, roll up the most food (the player's ball in this level is actually a sumo wrestler -- this is a highlight of the game), roll up clouds in a level where the ball seems like it's full of helium, an underwater stage with floaty physics, roll up a burning ball while continuing to feed the fire so it doesn't go out, a level where the ball constantly rolls forward at high speed and you can only steer where it goes, one where you get 100 items as fast as you can, one where you try to make the biggest ball you can within 50 items, and best of all, the Cosmos stage, which contains all the planets you made in the previous levels, and have to make a ball bigger than the freaking sun. The collect-the-nations level is back (with a kinder camera this time), but I still can't seem to get them all in time, dammit.
There are still a few size levels, but they seem like less of the thrust of the game this time around. Many levels now feature multiple versions; at least two, maybe it was three, have three versions. (Including the Sumo level, hooray!) Many levels, including most of the raw size levels, have a normal version that works like the prior game, and a time attack version where you can't fail, but the level ends once the target size is reached.
My favorite part of the original game, what I affectionately call The Big Level, the one with the largest scale and the one that makes people say "wow" the most, is now surpassed by The New The Big Level.
The problem with the original The Big Level is that, once you know what you're doing, you can quite easily clean out the whole place, leaving you and your ball alone in an ocean of blue, with four or five minutes left on the clock. Once this happens, you will probably have a ball size of 878m, give or take one meter. And that, as we say, is that. The New The Big Level has a tighter time limit (17 minutes as opposed to 25), and seems a lot harder to max out; I've been up to 2200m+ with no end in sight. One really cool thing: The King of All Cosmos is in the level! He's so large in size that it looks like he'd be super hard to collect... but not impossible.
There is one super-disappointing thing about the game so far, and that is there doesn't seem, at this point, to be any Eternal levels. While I never played the original Eternals more than twice each, The New The Big Level is so vast (featuring capsule versions of several countries: you gotta love a game containing the Hollywood Sign, the Effiel Tower and the Great Wall of China, among others) that I can't help but think the only way you could get everything is without a time limit.
As for the music... it's great, but not at catchy as the first game. It's growing on me, though. It has at least three really nice songs. The beatbox version of Katamari On The Rock, surprisingly, isn't as engaging as the originsl (which, unlike what the the linked-to review thinks, I think was *wonderful* for the first game's last level theme).
Overall it's a worthy sequel. It doesn't seem to have as much of the odd grandeur of the original game, but the Cosmos stage is *awesome*. There are so many clever little touches: for example, the "NA" "M" and "CO" letters from the save screen, as well as the (R) symbol, are on the Collection screen! (I'll leave it to you to figure out how to get them all on one file....) I wish it focused more on size objectives, but there's still a lot to like here.
The game, it must be said, is ultimately just more levels of the same, but considering the the original was one of those games that was just *begging* to have more levels added to it, I'm not complaining. If there's room for disap
So when is the hot coffee mod coming out for We Love Katamari?