Has anyone actually played Paranoia? It's got a reputation for being entertaining to read but that's about it. I was set to run a game at a con once but we dropped it for some new game at the last minute.
Oh man. You so missed out!
The key to understanding Paranoia (and it took me a failed session and some time to understand this) is that it's a competition. The mission is only a pretext for the players trying to kill each other. Often, missions are impossible to complete.
You can't just shoot the other players however; that's treason. Despite its reputation, not everything is treason in Paranoia BTW, though many things are. Instead, you have to find proof of treason before you shoot. Many times this proof is spurious, or even forged, which naturally is treason itself, but so long as the authorities don't find out about it, you're in the clear.
So in a way, the game is about putting one over on The Man. When The Man is your fellow Troubleshooters, backed by a gigantic totalitarian/capitalist bureaucracy overseen by an omnipresent Computer, it just makes it more fun.
Revolution has monsterous hype? It's got a bunch of people trying to guess whatever it could be about, it's got confirmed downloads of classic Nintendo games, and... that's it. If anything, Nintendo should be hyping it *more*; they're historically the most honest about their consoles capabilities, which is making them seem like a distant third in hardware capability when they'll probably not far so far behind in power, if they fall behind at all.
Meanwhile PS3's Cell processor is supposed to be a supercomputer in a game console.
While Metroid Fusion was so-so, Metroid Zero Mission is a worthy successor to both the original Metroid *and* Super Metroid, for different reasons, while introducing its own share of cool new elements to the series. (Like intentional sequence breaks....)
On the Nintendo front (and this is where I get modded down by the zealots),
You should not be modded down for stating you think Nintendo won't succeed. That question is up in the air, you may very well be right, and in any case you're entitled to your opinion.
But, I think you should be modded down for this phrase. It's a defensive tactic against mod-downs seen a lot on Slashdot recently (pioneered by Microsoft defenders) -- "Only someone who was a zealot would mod me down!" It was a harsh note in an otherwise interesting comment.
While there is a prominent Lovecraftian roleplaying game, that doesn't seem, to me, like enough reason to put this non-game comic in the Games section....
Do you really think Nintendo is going to roll out a wireless network?
Well since you ask...
I figure (okay, guess) what Nintendo will probably do is offer some kind of proprietary access point hardware, first to those installations they partner with, then roll it out nationwide. It'll probably use a standard internet connection, but the wireless part will likely be encrypted by their hardware.
This way, even though they don't make money off of access to their servers they still earn some cash, from access point sales, from their network capability. Of course, this is purest speculation, but it seems like the kind of thing they'd do, for better or worse.
There seems to be some questioning here around Nintendo's Wi-Fi plan. It just happens that Nintendo Power's August issue discusses it, so a quick summary is probably called for. If you're wondering why I have Nintendo Power, hey cut me some slack, it was free:
"The wait for Wi-Fi is nearly over. And if you're wondering if it has been worth the wait, consider this: In a few months, you'll enter a cafe in your home town, plop down with a cup of joe, fire up your DS and challenge a group of friends across town or strangers scattered across the globe to a friendly Mario Kart DS race."
Sift through the marketspeak and, to me, it seems to indicate that Wi-Fi will begin rolling out by having hotspots in public venues, probably through arrangements between Nintendo and those venues. I think there's real potential in that kind of play, making it into a kind of quasi-arcade experience -- it drags portable gaming out of the living room and basement and out into public, which could turn out really cool. Think about it -- videogaming originated, as a mass-market phenomonon, in arcades, where you had spectators and a ready environment to talk games with people you never met. This could go a long way towards reviving gaming in a social context. (It could also crash and burn, but I'm so happy to see Nintendo trying something really risky for a change.)
A little further along, the article talks about Wi-Fi on Revolution, seeming to imply that eventually it'll be available at home.
And that's about it; one page on the tail end of three on the new DS Mario Kart.
But, I already don't put much stock in them -- it deserves to win this particular arbitrary little contest, but I have no illusions about it winning.
In KD's case, I'd say that it's not just the relative obscurity that responsible for its popularity, the game genuinely lives up the hype, however unlikely that may seem.
But... I don't know how many sequels that profound sense of fun could survive, and sequels more or less imply a lack of obscurity. My experiences with the Japanese sequel are similarly fun and have a wide variety of new level types, but the presentation and music seem a little lacking compared to the original, despite much higher production values.
Of course, this was the game I paid half on a used PS2 for, and consider it worth it.
It's just FUN. That's what games are supposed to be, isn't it? I don't have fun playing FPSes anymore. I don't have fun playing fighting games anymore. I've never had fun playing sports games.
The game that gives you the most fun is the best game. Katamari Damacy gave me the most fun by a factor of ten, so it deserves Game of the Year.
This is all in my opinion, of course. But it's not an unconsidered opinion.
I agree they will be extremely powerful. I'm less certain that they'll be superior to desktops. I'm absolutely certain that they will be far surpassed by desktop systems during their lifetime.
Another thing that I'm not certain about: that differences between next-gen and current systems will be like night-and-day. This was the generation where we hit graphics that ran up to the limitations of TV resolution, which is probably the real reason why Sony and MS are hyping HDTV -- viewed on an ordinary TV, if they're viewed on an ordinary TV, there is not a compelling reason to upgrade. (IMHO, of course.)
I think that might be one of the reasons for the excessive hype: Sony and Microsoft are trying to get people excited about them, so when they come out their graphics will seem miles better than current-gen systems. The drawback of that approach is that if it doesn't work, then the industry will probably crash, and crash hard, for graphics are just about the only substantive way they're differentiating next-gen systems from current ones.
But even if it doesn't crash this generation, a crash is in the offing eventually, if not for reasons of stagnant creativity among most of the industry players, then because the upgrade-spark sales-obselence-upgrade cycle can't last forever.
While I'm no expert on the subject, I'm afraid I'm going to have to challenge you on a fact or two....
Stern Electronics, the 80s manufacturer of arcade games (including some pinballs), is not the same thing as Stern Pinball, although Gary Stern was involved with each of them. Stern Pinball is what used to be Sega Pinball, and before that, Data East Pinball. It's a pinball division that's changed hands, and been renamed, a few times. It doesn't make sense to say that they've "survived" all this time; only recently have they become an independent company, bought off Sega by Gary Stern (who had been an employee).
Stern Pinball, in whatever form, has never known for making the best tables. When Williams (who also owned Bally) was in the market, they were king. When they left the market, dismantling their pinball division and firing several star designers including Pat Lawlor (Addams Family, Twilight Zone), that basically meant no one was making pinball games anymore.
Gary Stern saw the opportunity to get into the market. Stern seems to genuinely love pinball, and so has more than a monetary motive in buying the company. Without Williams in the market, he saw that it was possible to make a profit, if he were the only real pinball manufacturer in the world. He's in a very precarious position, however -- if someone else starts making pingames, he could go under easily. Fortunately for him, that seems unlikely.
On to point two: The PS3 and X-Box 360 will certainly be more powerful than the current generation of machines. But there is an amazing amount of hype flying around concerning them right now. In light of the promises made concerning the PS2 and X-Box back at their release, I'm taking whatever either company says with a three-ton grain of salt until the systems are actually released and the play of their games can be assessed.
Point three: I'm not certain that neither Sony or Microsoft's game division will not make a profit. I'd put more money on Sony than Microsoft. Nintendo is not in as much trouble as the article seems to suggest -- reading the original article sources makes it clear what happened is that Nintendo had a large R&D charge this year, probably from development work on the Revolution.
The creators of Sheila seem not to the same guys, who might be "H.A.L. Labs."
However, the creators of the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 cart game Pinball Spectacular, just might be the same guys. Seems they did some development for the C-64 under its Japanese guise, the MAX Machine, and that might be where Commodore and HAL's paths cross. But more research is necessary.
I'm unsure if the Katamari Damacy version on DS is for real. The only information we have on it, that I'm aware of, is that Nintendo Power mentioned it once.
I mean, it'd be absolutely awesome if it were true. Katamari Damacy is a much better fit with Nintendo's design philosophies after all. I just don't know if it is.
It's a mistake to capitalize Television as if it were some single tremendous, amoeba-like object. There are indeed artistic television shows -- The Prisoner jumps most readily to mind.
But my point is, there are glimmers of art in most things if you're looking for them. And, even the "traditional" artistic media (painting, sculpture, music, dance) have their icky, mindlessly populist sides (Elvis on velvet + dogs playing poker, Precious Moments, Brittany Spears, Macarana).
There are also artistic things that don't work - in fact, some of the worst things are of this category. I regretfully point the interested viewer in the direction of a recent movie called Immortel (Ad Vitam), aka "Immortal" on US DVD. Oh, if only Mike and the bots were still up in space....
We have videogames that are fine artwork now. Katamari Damacy arguably fits. Ico, likely. Warioware, probably. Parappa too (especially for the creative aspects to the game).
There are others too, but it isn't often that games truly deserving of the adjective "artistic" become good sellers, for the same reasons that truly original games often don't become good sellers.
I agree about Zelda storylines, but disagree about Wind Waker -- it had an absolutely killer "reveal," where the Big Secret of the game is shown to the player. I don't think I can name a game that did that better. And the final sequences in the game were awesome.
WTF am I talking about? I'm talking about, I didn't like playing the game with the X-box controller.
It's been a while, but it may have been one of the older, huge controllers that I had been playing the game with; the "S" controller was not what originally shipped with the system). Also, I've played a good many Dreamcast games, especially Crazy Taxi, so maybe I was attuned more to the DC controller and my hands didn't like any differences they felt.
But on the other hand, I remember really hating the joystick feel on the X-box controller, which did *not* have the huge ball base that the analog stick on the DC controller and that I liked, and this affected my enjoyment of what I played.
WTF is the point of challenging me on what was presented as being entirely my opinion?
Actually, while we got a lot of play out of Jet Grind Radio (Sup-pa Bra-tha!!), we got much less out of Jet Set Radio Future. We played it for about half an hour before putting it away to focus on TJ&E III and Serious Sam.
I think part of it was being annoyed by the X-Box controller (I still hates it, hates it my precious), but it seemed, in the early levels, that it had a "navigate through the city" vibe, even between levels. I remember being more annoyed with the level design in that one, too.
But then again, it's entirely possible I sold my X-box before absorbing all the juice out of that one. Ah well.
Marble Madness is not a puzzle game. It's a arcade action game featuring marbles.
Super Monkey Ball has a few puzzle elements, but largely it's the same way, the challenge comes from maneuvering the ball, not figuring out what to do.
One of the key insights in KD is that the collecting of objects, itself, is the mechanism by which new areas become avaiable.
In Pac-Man, when you clear a board, unseen outside forces take the old board away and give you a new one. In Katamari Damacy, the new board "is always there*", and you merely grow big enough to interact with it.
* Technically, it's not.
Katamari Damacy cheats a bit to overcome the limitations of the PS2; ever notice, in the Size levels, when the ball passes certain checkpoints the screen is covered with a striped pattern and the King of All Cosmos says something to you. What it's doing is hiding the drive access that's loading new sections of the level in.
When the game comes back, you might notice that all the smallest objects have disappeared from the game; the memory that was used to store them has been used to hold the new large objects.
This is possible because, unlike with raster graphics, 3D models take up roughly the same amount of memory whether they're really small or really large.
1. Expectations concerning the quality of their games. Nintendo's games are almost always at least above average. There's usually some "thing" about most of them that's unique. It's impossible for them to top themselves forever, yet when it happens people are ready to attack. Pikmin 2 is just about as great a game as you'll find this generation, with real improvements over the play in the first game and surprisingly good multiplayer, but it's either like people've never heard of it, or if they have, Nintendo's betrayed the public's trust by making another sequel.
2. Expectations concerning theme. For all people say about how "dark" it is, Katamari Damacy really isn't dark at all. It's true that the fate of people rolled up into katamaris that are up in the night sky (or even turned into stardust) is up for question, but the game doesn't dwell on that. Nintendo games tend to be about as dark. (All those Goombas you squashed? Dead, dead I tell you, DEAD!!)
If you know where to look, you can actually find Nintendo games that acknowledge the darkness of the Mario universe. In Paper Mario 2 this provides some of the most hilarious moments, like encountering a Hammer Brother out for revenge for what happened to his grandfather in World 7-3....
3. If Katamari did come out for a Nintendo system, I actually think it would still be as adored, but since the Gamecube has a much smaller user base than the PS2, there would be correspondingly fewer people crowing about it.
One thing about Katamari is that it is nearly an epiphany in game form. I was playing it on a school game machine, and someone watching actually told me it opened his eyes. (To what, I didn't ask, but it's what he said. Weird.) People who've played these games dating back to the classic era (where a lot of Nintendo fans come from) are less vulnerable to this epiphany; for them Katamari merely confirms something they already knew. But for someone raised on FPS, RTS, sports and fighting games, the fact that a game this fun comes outside of any genre they can identify may come as a bit of a shock. More people in the gaming press are like this than they'd admit, which accounts for KD's high press reputation.
It may come as a shock to them, but it is a shock that, after experiencing it, can only leave them more receptive to the charms of Nintendo's games.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone actually played Paranoia? It's got a reputation for being entertaining to read but that's about it. I was set to run a game at a con once but we dropped it for some new game at the last minute.
Oh man. You so missed out!
The key to understanding Paranoia (and it took me a failed session and some time to understand this) is that it's a competition. The mission is only a pretext for the players trying to kill each other. Often, missions are impossible to complete.
You can't just shoot the other players however; that's treason. Despite its reputation, not everything is treason in Paranoia BTW, though many things are. Instead, you have to find proof of treason before you shoot. Many times this proof is spurious, or even forged, which naturally is treason itself, but so long as the authorities don't find out about it, you're in the clear.
So in a way, the game is about putting one over on The Man. When The Man is your fellow Troubleshooters, backed by a gigantic totalitarian/capitalist bureaucracy overseen by an omnipresent Computer, it just makes it more fun.
Revolution has monsterous hype? It's got a bunch of people trying to guess whatever it could be about, it's got confirmed downloads of classic Nintendo games, and... that's it. If anything, Nintendo should be hyping it *more*; they're historically the most honest about their consoles capabilities, which is making them seem like a distant third in hardware capability when they'll probably not far so far behind in power, if they fall behind at all.
Meanwhile PS3's Cell processor is supposed to be a supercomputer in a game console.
While Metroid Fusion was so-so, Metroid Zero Mission is a worthy successor to both the original Metroid *and* Super Metroid, for different reasons, while introducing its own share of cool new elements to the series. (Like intentional sequence breaks....)
On the Nintendo front (and this is where I get modded down by the zealots),
You should not be modded down for stating you think Nintendo won't succeed. That question is up in the air, you may very well be right, and in any case you're entitled to your opinion.
But, I think you should be modded down for this phrase. It's a defensive tactic against mod-downs seen a lot on Slashdot recently (pioneered by Microsoft defenders) -- "Only someone who was a zealot would mod me down!" It was a harsh note in an otherwise interesting comment.
D'oh! My bad.
While there is a prominent Lovecraftian roleplaying game, that doesn't seem, to me, like enough reason to put this non-game comic in the Games section....
Do you really think Nintendo is going to roll out a wireless network?
Well since you ask...
I figure (okay, guess) what Nintendo will probably do is offer some kind of proprietary access point hardware, first to those installations they partner with, then roll it out nationwide. It'll probably use a standard internet connection, but the wireless part will likely be encrypted by their hardware.
This way, even though they don't make money off of access to their servers they still earn some cash, from access point sales, from their network capability. Of course, this is purest speculation, but it seems like the kind of thing they'd do, for better or worse.
There seems to be some questioning here around Nintendo's Wi-Fi plan. It just happens that Nintendo Power's August issue discusses it, so a quick summary is probably called for. If you're wondering why I have Nintendo Power, hey cut me some slack, it was free:
"The wait for Wi-Fi is nearly over. And if you're wondering if it has been worth the wait, consider this: In a few months, you'll enter a cafe in your home town, plop down with a cup of joe, fire up your DS and challenge a group of friends across town or strangers scattered across the globe to a friendly Mario Kart DS race."
Sift through the marketspeak and, to me, it seems to indicate that Wi-Fi will begin rolling out by having hotspots in public venues, probably through arrangements between Nintendo and those venues. I think there's real potential in that kind of play, making it into a kind of quasi-arcade experience -- it drags portable gaming out of the living room and basement and out into public, which could turn out really cool. Think about it -- videogaming originated, as a mass-market phenomonon, in arcades, where you had spectators and a ready environment to talk games with people you never met. This could go a long way towards reviving gaming in a social context. (It could also crash and burn, but I'm so happy to see Nintendo trying something really risky for a change.)
A little further along, the article talks about Wi-Fi on Revolution, seeming to imply that eventually it'll be available at home.
And that's about it; one page on the tail end of three on the new DS Mario Kart.
But, I already don't put much stock in them -- it deserves to win this particular arbitrary little contest, but I have no illusions about it winning.
In KD's case, I'd say that it's not just the relative obscurity that responsible for its popularity, the game genuinely lives up the hype, however unlikely that may seem.
But... I don't know how many sequels that profound sense of fun could survive, and sequels more or less imply a lack of obscurity. My experiences with the Japanese sequel are similarly fun and have a wide variety of new level types, but the presentation and music seem a little lacking compared to the original, despite much higher production values.
Oh, I can't disagree with you enough.
Of course, this was the game I paid half on a used PS2 for, and consider it worth it.
It's just FUN. That's what games are supposed to be, isn't it? I don't have fun playing FPSes anymore. I don't have fun playing fighting games anymore. I've never had fun playing sports games.
The game that gives you the most fun is the best game. Katamari Damacy gave me the most fun by a factor of ten, so it deserves Game of the Year.
This is all in my opinion, of course. But it's not an unconsidered opinion.
I agree they will be extremely powerful. I'm less certain that they'll be superior to desktops. I'm absolutely certain that they will be far surpassed by desktop systems during their lifetime.
Another thing that I'm not certain about: that differences between next-gen and current systems will be like night-and-day. This was the generation where we hit graphics that ran up to the limitations of TV resolution, which is probably the real reason why Sony and MS are hyping HDTV -- viewed on an ordinary TV, if they're viewed on an ordinary TV, there is not a compelling reason to upgrade. (IMHO, of course.)
I think that might be one of the reasons for the excessive hype: Sony and Microsoft are trying to get people excited about them, so when they come out their graphics will seem miles better than current-gen systems. The drawback of that approach is that if it doesn't work, then the industry will probably crash, and crash hard, for graphics are just about the only substantive way they're differentiating next-gen systems from current ones.
But even if it doesn't crash this generation, a crash is in the offing eventually, if not for reasons of stagnant creativity among most of the industry players, then because the upgrade-spark sales-obselence-upgrade cycle can't last forever.
Alas, I never got to play Earthshaker! I did manage to find a No Good Gofers machine though, I always thought that one was a little underrated.
I also forgot to mention Funhouse. "FUNhouse? WAAAH-HAHAHAHAHAHA!"
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar20 05/sb20050331_4850_sb040.htm
While I'm no expert on the subject, I'm afraid I'm going to have to challenge you on a fact or two....
Stern Electronics, the 80s manufacturer of arcade games (including some pinballs), is not the same thing as Stern Pinball, although Gary Stern was involved with each of them. Stern Pinball is what used to be Sega Pinball, and before that, Data East Pinball. It's a pinball division that's changed hands, and been renamed, a few times. It doesn't make sense to say that they've "survived" all this time; only recently have they become an independent company, bought off Sega by Gary Stern (who had been an employee).
Stern Pinball, in whatever form, has never known for making the best tables. When Williams (who also owned Bally) was in the market, they were king. When they left the market, dismantling their pinball division and firing several star designers including Pat Lawlor (Addams Family, Twilight Zone), that basically meant no one was making pinball games anymore.
Gary Stern saw the opportunity to get into the market. Stern seems to genuinely love pinball, and so has more than a monetary motive in buying the company. Without Williams in the market, he saw that it was possible to make a profit, if he were the only real pinball manufacturer in the world. He's in a very precarious position, however -- if someone else starts making pingames, he could go under easily. Fortunately for him, that seems unlikely.
On to point two:
The PS3 and X-Box 360 will certainly be more powerful than the current generation of machines. But there is an amazing amount of hype flying around concerning them right now. In light of the promises made concerning the PS2 and X-Box back at their release, I'm taking whatever either company says with a three-ton grain of salt until the systems are actually released and the play of their games can be assessed.
Point three:
I'm not certain that neither Sony or Microsoft's game division will not make a profit. I'd put more money on Sony than Microsoft. Nintendo is not in as much trouble as the article seems to suggest -- reading the original article sources makes it clear what happened is that Nintendo had a large R&D charge this year, probably from development work on the Revolution.
The creators of Sheila seem not to the same guys, who might be "H.A.L. Labs."
However, the creators of the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 cart game Pinball Spectacular, just might be the same guys. Seems they did some development for the C-64 under its Japanese guise, the MAX Machine, and that might be where Commodore and HAL's paths cross. But more research is necessary.
I'm unsure if the Katamari Damacy version on DS is for real. The only information we have on it, that I'm aware of, is that Nintendo Power mentioned it once.
I mean, it'd be absolutely awesome if it were true. Katamari Damacy is a much better fit with Nintendo's design philosophies after all. I just don't know if it is.
It's a mistake to capitalize Television as if it were some single tremendous, amoeba-like object. There are indeed artistic television shows -- The Prisoner jumps most readily to mind.
But my point is, there are glimmers of art in most things if you're looking for them. And, even the "traditional" artistic media (painting, sculpture, music, dance) have their icky, mindlessly populist sides (Elvis on velvet + dogs playing poker, Precious Moments, Brittany Spears, Macarana).
There are also artistic things that don't work - in fact, some of the worst things are of this category. I regretfully point the interested viewer in the direction of a recent movie called Immortel (Ad Vitam), aka "Immortal" on US DVD. Oh, if only Mike and the bots were still up in space....
We have videogames that are fine artwork now. Katamari Damacy arguably fits. Ico, likely. Warioware, probably. Parappa too (especially for the creative aspects to the game).
There are others too, but it isn't often that games truly deserving of the adjective "artistic" become good sellers, for the same reasons that truly original games often don't become good sellers.
Come to think of it, for exactly the same reason.
I agree about Zelda storylines, but disagree about Wind Waker -- it had an absolutely killer "reveal," where the Big Secret of the game is shown to the player. I don't think I can name a game that did that better. And the final sequences in the game were awesome.
http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war8.html
There's nothing like taking a crappy image from childhood culture and using it in the context of Bush foreign policy....
Oh for the love of...
Look, dude, it's not like I'm defending Karl Rove here. I was expressing a PERSONAL opinion, okay? You know, your mileage may vary, kind of thing.
WTF am I talking about? I'm talking about, I didn't like playing the game with the X-box controller.
It's been a while, but it may have been one of the older, huge controllers that I had been playing the game with; the "S" controller was not what originally shipped with the system). Also, I've played a good many Dreamcast games, especially Crazy Taxi, so maybe I was attuned more to the DC controller and my hands didn't like any differences they felt.
But on the other hand, I remember really hating the joystick feel on the X-box controller, which did *not* have the huge ball base that the analog stick on the DC controller and that I liked, and this affected my enjoyment of what I played.
WTF is the point of challenging me on what was presented as being entirely my opinion?
Actually, while we got a lot of play out of Jet Grind Radio (Sup-pa Bra-tha!!), we got much less out of Jet Set Radio Future. We played it for about half an hour before putting it away to focus on TJ&E III and Serious Sam.
I think part of it was being annoyed by the X-Box controller (I still hates it, hates it my precious), but it seemed, in the early levels, that it had a "navigate through the city" vibe, even between levels. I remember being more annoyed with the level design in that one, too.
But then again, it's entirely possible I sold my X-box before absorbing all the juice out of that one. Ah well.
Er, where are there puzzles in Marble Madness?
Marble Madness is not a puzzle game. It's a arcade action game featuring marbles.
Super Monkey Ball has a few puzzle elements, but largely it's the same way, the challenge comes from maneuvering the ball, not figuring out what to do.
One of the key insights in KD is that the collecting of objects, itself, is the mechanism by which new areas become avaiable.
In Pac-Man, when you clear a board, unseen outside forces take the old board away and give you a new one. In Katamari Damacy, the new board "is always there*", and you merely grow big enough to interact with it.
* Technically, it's not.
Katamari Damacy cheats a bit to overcome the limitations of the PS2; ever notice, in the Size levels, when the ball passes certain checkpoints the screen is covered with a striped pattern and the King of All Cosmos says something to you. What it's doing is hiding the drive access that's loading new sections of the level in.
When the game comes back, you might notice that all the smallest objects have disappeared from the game; the memory that was used to store them has been used to hold the new large objects.
This is possible because, unlike with raster graphics, 3D models take up roughly the same amount of memory whether they're really small or really large.
Well the thing about Nintendo has to do with...
1. Expectations concerning the quality of their games. Nintendo's games are almost always at least above average. There's usually some "thing" about most of them that's unique. It's impossible for them to top themselves forever, yet when it happens people are ready to attack. Pikmin 2 is just about as great a game as you'll find this generation, with real improvements over the play in the first game and surprisingly good multiplayer, but it's either like people've never heard of it, or if they have, Nintendo's betrayed the public's trust by making another sequel.
2. Expectations concerning theme. For all people say about how "dark" it is, Katamari Damacy really isn't dark at all. It's true that the fate of people rolled up into katamaris that are up in the night sky (or even turned into stardust) is up for question, but the game doesn't dwell on that. Nintendo games tend to be about as dark. (All those Goombas you squashed? Dead, dead I tell you, DEAD!!)
If you know where to look, you can actually find Nintendo games that acknowledge the darkness of the Mario universe. In Paper Mario 2 this provides some of the most hilarious moments, like encountering a Hammer Brother out for revenge for what happened to his grandfather in World 7-3....
3.
If Katamari did come out for a Nintendo system, I actually think it would still be as adored, but since the Gamecube has a much smaller user base than the PS2, there would be correspondingly fewer people crowing about it.
One thing about Katamari is that it is nearly an epiphany in game form. I was playing it on a school game machine, and someone watching actually told me it opened his eyes. (To what, I didn't ask, but it's what he said. Weird.) People who've played these games dating back to the classic era (where a lot of Nintendo fans come from) are less vulnerable to this epiphany; for them Katamari merely confirms something they already knew. But for someone raised on FPS, RTS, sports and fighting games, the fact that a game this fun comes outside of any genre they can identify may come as a bit of a shock. More people in the gaming press are like this than they'd admit, which accounts for KD's high press reputation.
It may come as a shock to them, but it is a shock that, after experiencing it, can only leave them more receptive to the charms of Nintendo's games.