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You Must Love Katamari Damacy
1up.com has a feature up discussing their deep and abiding love for Katamari Damacy and its sequel. From the article: "The original Katamari Damacy is to many the best example of innovation the game industry has seen in years. It's not easy to define, it doesn't use traditional game mechanics, and it's a game where the music and the feeling of playing are as important as the objective. You roll a ball around, it picks stuff up as you go, and it's a swell time. But to hear game director Keita Takahashi describe it, the concept of "fun" comes before 'innovation.'"
Actually, Katamari uses very traditional game mechanics:
1. Before you can go there, you must get something here.
In Zelda and Metroid, these are usually special items that give you abilities. In Katamari, it's raw mass.
2. To increase tension, the player must have a risk of failure. Not all levels have this, but in the most important ones (the "just size" levels) the player must make a minimum diameter before a time limit expires or acquire the wrath of the King of All Cosmos (who shows his bad parenting skills to the utmost, especially in the new game coming out). A time limit is a fairly arbitrary limiting factor that, neverthless, can be put to good use.
3. High scores; the game begs to be played again and again, in order to better your past efforts. That's about as traditional as you can get.
In my mind, Katamari Damacy is acres more traditional than all these games with boss enemies, pickup powerups and such. It's just a really pure action game that's not afraid (unlike many games) to discard those elements that are not essential to it.
In any real work of art, music, literature, visual arts), all that is unnecessary is discarded. The same applies to game design.
" No, I haven't played Nintendogs or Animcal crossing. I'm a straight male, thanks."
:P
You must not be very confident in that last part if this is your reason for not even giving them a chance...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."