Not just storytelling ability. Game design ability is something distinct from both programming *and* storytelling.
There is nothing that says that a good programmer cannot be a good storyteller and a good game designer. But the industry, as it stands, almost seems to either weed out those with other skills, or to squash those skills in their cradle.
That's Michael Crawford, I believe, not Chris Crawford, who is a much better known designer. Which isn't to say anything against Michael Crawford. He designed entertaining (if maddeningly tricky) games.
But that doesn't make you a designer, it makes you more of a scenario writer, or just an ordinary writer. You don't decide what the powerups are or the obstacles that they overcome, beyond coming up with the setting. You don't decide where bosses go or their precise means of attack, even if you have some kind of say over what they look like and what their attacks appear to be. You don't wrack your brain trying to decide if an enemy should to eight points of damage or only five.
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.
It's not just like that, you'd be hard-pressed to find a good description of a music CD's contents on the BACK cover -- song titles are not a description to someone who's never heard those songs before.
I think the answer is, video games are expected to engage the player intellectually more than a song, and market themselves as being more of an experience for the player: to someone who doesn't like sports, a sports game would be extremely unenjoyable, while even if you don't like a music CD, it's over in a hour in any case.
Music CDs also have more of an intellectual "air" about them than games. It's viewed as acceptable for a music disc to "put itself out there" with an abstract album cover that requests the purchaser interpret it (especially since music doesn't have a direct pictoral representation that the average listener would understand), while games are viewed as more of a commodity that is expected to explain itself to the player.
And don't underestimate this: games are more expensive than music CDs.
I am one of those people who have been crowing about Katamari Damacy.
I am also *not* a Sony fanboy -- I've owned every Nintendo system (except the Virtual Boy) since the NES, and while I have a Gamecube and DS and most every significant game released for those systems in the U.S., my PS2 was bought for this ONE game.
The hype is justified, in this case, but it's difficult to explain it without playing it. (Or should I say, playing it with an unbiased mind -- if you go into something with a negative attitude it's really hard to overcome.)
It's not just the concept in this case, and it's not just the music. Mostly it's the stellar play control and level design, and the extremely well realized play metaphor (5 cm to 878 meters is just *cool*), but really it's all these things.
I agree with you about all the games you mentioned, but disagree about Katamari Damacy. It's exactly like a Nintendo game, but one that just happens by Namco for the PS2. There are very few games like this for the PS2, but the fact is, there is one. (Damn close to ONLY one.)
At the end of the sequel (currently only out in Japan) there is the special Rose Level. In it, with no time limit, the player must collect one million roses in sets of one and ten that slowly regenerate. Only roses can be picked up on this level, and the ball never grows in size. (You can stop and save your progress at any time, however.)
After about two hours of play, I've finally broken 30,000. Some people on the Gamefaqs message boards have gotten to a million, however, by tying rubber bands around the control sticks and leaving their PS2 running for days, a sure but inefficent process.
N-Gage? I won't argue. But the Game Gear, Lynx and certainly Nomad all had really great games. And actually the GBA's SNES remakes ultimately total up to being two of the Super Mario Advance games and Link to the Past.
For my money, the reasons to own a GBA are Fire Emblem, Metroid Zero Mission, Wario Ware, and (especially) Advance Wars. None of these games are direct remakes of SNES titles. Zero Mission might be called a remake of a NES game, but it's really a lot more than that.
But my original point still holds, being, lots of systems have tried to dethrone the Gameboy/GBC/GBA, and they've all failed. The PSP may not fail, but other than Lumines, I haven't seen worthy games for it yet.
Ah, but you don't know for sure if it helped the PS2 or not. Separating the benefits (or drawbacks) of the PS2's features from one another is not a simple matter.
Anyway, my point is that backward compatibility was seen as potentially hurting a console once. It could also, obviously, help it.
Notice that most online DS games will be quite casual, slow-paced games: (...) Bomberman.
(boggle) Has it really been that long since Super Bomberman, with its Duel Zone that tended to host two-second-long games? DS Bomberman better measure up!
Haven't people predicted this before?
on
The GBA's Last Stand
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
The NeoGeo Pocket Color should have killed it. N-Gage should have killed it. Its predecessors should have been killed by the Game Gear, Lynx and Nomad -- which was a freaking portable Sega Genesis.
But the Gameboy Advance is so cheap, and has so many games for it, that it might not die quickly. The DS, remember, has GBA compatibility, which lessens the pressure on developers to switch to the DS. Every DS sold effectively increases the Advance's user base, which may work against Nintendo the same way the Atari 5200's 2600 compatibility worked against it.
Add into this the fact that Advance seems super easy to develop for. I don't think it'll last forever, but it's not dead yet.
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
Aria of Sorrows (and the upcoming, DS sequel) takes place in the future, after a mysterious event that was supposed to have taken place in the year 2000 that resulted in Drac's castle being sealed away "inside an eclipse." Interestingly, although the game takes place in the future you wouldn't know it by the graphics, except for a few cool weapons found late in the game, you'd think it was the 16th century still.
There are dozens of these kinds of sites, maybe of them hosted by Classic Gaming. I've seen several for Zelda, a few for Mario, one for Blaster Master, one for Shmups in general, one for the Guardian Legend, etc, etc.
Still my favorite, although it's been officially dead for five years now, is |tsr's NES Archive. Oh |tsr, where have you gone?
But... the game files have to be modified to make the damn thing visible!
Mind you, I don't think the game should be played by kids, but a lot of this furor looks simply like hysterics, something for particular people to point at and say "Oh my God!! Look, just look at how far society is breaking down now! If you're a decent human being you'll join me in comdemning this, and vote Republican!"
Companies are there to make money not for moral or social values.
But a company is not a person, but merely a sociological and financial construct. The people making the decisions are sure-as-hell still bound by ethics and morals, and are the ones to blame. (As are, I'm sorry to say, the ones who work for the company in implementing those decisions -- the "only following orders" excuse has been used too many times in our race's short history.)
Further, I'm not aware of anything in the definition of a company that requires them to pursue money over all objections. Some may talk about a responsibility to shareholders, but company officials surely also have a responsibility to those people to not embroil their company in potentially damaging public relations situations.
They also have the choice of either not signing something if they can't be bothered to look at what they're agreeing to, or signing it and accepting the consequences. Fuck them if they're too lazy or stupid to figure it out.
The problem with that is, almost everything interesting, cool, or even necessary about our culture comes along with that fine print. If you read all of it you'd have a lot less room in your life, and in your brain, to do other things, including enjoying the thing you're signing. And usually, the fine print is an all-or-nothing deal -- you agree with their draconian terms, or you reject them and go find someone else and think about their draconian terms. It's either sign away your first born or become a virtual Luddite.
There's probably a potential market for companies that don't do this kind of thing, but because people don't typically care about the terms until they get bitten, it won't have a chance to emerge until a real public furor emerges. The people who run these companies are mostly me-too sorts, so it'll take a company making Google-style declaration of no-screwing, and also becoming a great success, in order for that to catch on.
Am I the only person who sees a relationship to these kinds of form letters and magical phrases? I've been thinking for a while now about the relationship between the legal system and traditional concepts of magic....
What I was trying to say about Miyamoto is that the man isn't responsible for everything Nintendo puts out, he's more of a producer these days, he supervises and suggests, even recommends, but he doesn't make games himself as much anymore. There are many creative minds at Nintendo these days, and they all deserve some of the credit (or lack thereof) for their output.
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.
It's because he's honest about all these facts. Also, that he was willing to try something that no one else had done instead of making yet another same-old-same-old. And the fact that he's so new to the industry was precisely what allowed him to design a game so utterly different from others out there -- his expectations have yet to be blunted.
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.
Shigeru Miyamoto is notUnfortunately, 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.
Oh god, tell me about it. Katamari Damacy was the game that convinced me to chip in for half the price of a used PS2. While I've played it so much that my record for the last level is now 12:34, four seconds shy of finishing within half the time limit, and I can easily clear the ocean of all matter with five minutes left to go on the clock, there has been nothing else for the PS2 that has much interested me that I don't already have for my Gamecube (specifically, the two Midway Arcade Treasures compilations).
I may, sometime in the future, get one of the earlier GTAs, but I rented San Andreas once and we were immediately put off by the deluge of profanity. Not for us, I fear.
Slashdot Mirror
Not just storytelling ability. Game design ability is something distinct from both programming *and* storytelling.
There is nothing that says that a good programmer cannot be a good storyteller and a good game designer. But the industry, as it stands, almost seems to either weed out those with other skills, or to squash those skills in their cradle.
That's Michael Crawford, I believe, not Chris Crawford, who is a much better known designer. Which isn't to say anything against Michael Crawford. He designed entertaining (if maddeningly tricky) games.
Well I'd say you ARE a game designer (by that measure, I'm one too). And it is a lot of work, if you want it to be any good.
But lots of fun things are also hard work. Nethack is the best computer game I've ever played, but you have to practically have a degree in it to win.
But that doesn't make you a designer, it makes you more of a scenario writer, or just an ordinary writer. You don't decide what the powerups are or the obstacles that they overcome, beyond coming up with the setting. You don't decide where bosses go or their precise means of attack, even if you have some kind of say over what they look like and what their attacks appear to be. You don't wrack your brain trying to decide if an enemy should to eight points of damage or only five.
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.
It's not just like that, you'd be hard-pressed to find a good description of a music CD's contents on the BACK cover -- song titles are not a description to someone who's never heard those songs before.
I think the answer is, video games are expected to engage the player intellectually more than a song, and market themselves as being more of an experience for the player: to someone who doesn't like sports, a sports game would be extremely unenjoyable, while even if you don't like a music CD, it's over in a hour in any case.
Music CDs also have more of an intellectual "air" about them than games. It's viewed as acceptable for a music disc to "put itself out there" with an abstract album cover that requests the purchaser interpret it (especially since music doesn't have a direct pictoral representation that the average listener would understand), while games are viewed as more of a commodity that is expected to explain itself to the player.
And don't underestimate this: games are more expensive than music CDs.
I am one of those people who have been crowing about Katamari Damacy.
I am also *not* a Sony fanboy -- I've owned every Nintendo system (except the Virtual Boy) since the NES, and while I have a Gamecube and DS and most every significant game released for those systems in the U.S., my PS2 was bought for this ONE game.
The hype is justified, in this case, but it's difficult to explain it without playing it. (Or should I say, playing it with an unbiased mind -- if you go into something with a negative attitude it's really hard to overcome.)
It's not just the concept in this case, and it's not just the music. Mostly it's the stellar play control and level design, and the extremely well realized play metaphor (5 cm to 878 meters is just *cool*), but really it's all these things.
I agree with you about all the games you mentioned, but disagree about Katamari Damacy. It's exactly like a Nintendo game, but one that just happens by Namco for the PS2. There are very few games like this for the PS2, but the fact is, there is one. (Damn close to ONLY one.)
You laugh, but....
At the end of the sequel (currently only out in Japan) there is the special Rose Level. In it, with no time limit, the player must collect one million roses in sets of one and ten that slowly regenerate. Only roses can be picked up on this level, and the ball never grows in size. (You can stop and save your progress at any time, however.)
After about two hours of play, I've finally broken 30,000. Some people on the Gamefaqs message boards have gotten to a million, however, by tying rubber bands around the control sticks and leaving their PS2 running for days, a sure but inefficent process.
A Katamari bot would work wonders on this level.
Well.....
N-Gage? I won't argue. But the Game Gear, Lynx and certainly Nomad all had really great games. And actually the GBA's SNES remakes ultimately total up to being two of the Super Mario Advance games and Link to the Past.
For my money, the reasons to own a GBA are Fire Emblem, Metroid Zero Mission, Wario Ware, and (especially) Advance Wars. None of these games are direct remakes of SNES titles. Zero Mission might be called a remake of a NES game, but it's really a lot more than that.
But my original point still holds, being, lots of systems have tried to dethrone the Gameboy/GBC/GBA, and they've all failed. The PSP may not fail, but other than Lumines, I haven't seen worthy games for it yet.
Ah, but you don't know for sure if it helped the PS2 or not. Separating the benefits (or drawbacks) of the PS2's features from one another is not a simple matter.
Anyway, my point is that backward compatibility was seen as potentially hurting a console once. It could also, obviously, help it.
And that's it.
Notice that most online DS games will be quite casual, slow-paced games: (...) Bomberman.
(boggle) Has it really been that long since Super Bomberman, with its Duel Zone that tended to host two-second-long games? DS Bomberman better measure up!
The NeoGeo Pocket Color should have killed it. N-Gage should have killed it. Its predecessors should have been killed by the Game Gear, Lynx and Nomad -- which was a freaking portable Sega Genesis.
But the Gameboy Advance is so cheap, and has so many games for it, that it might not die quickly. The DS, remember, has GBA compatibility, which lessens the pressure on developers to switch to the DS. Every DS sold effectively increases the Advance's user base, which may work against Nintendo the same way the Atari 5200's 2600 compatibility worked against it.
Add into this the fact that Advance seems super easy to develop for. I don't think it'll last forever, but it's not dead yet.
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
Ah, cool! Glad to see he's still around.
Hm, good point. While I'm leaning well on the Democrat side these days, Lieberman is one of 'em I could do well without.
Aria of Sorrows (and the upcoming, DS sequel) takes place in the future, after a mysterious event that was supposed to have taken place in the year 2000 that resulted in Drac's castle being sealed away "inside an eclipse." Interestingly, although the game takes place in the future you wouldn't know it by the graphics, except for a few cool weapons found late in the game, you'd think it was the 16th century still.
There are dozens of these kinds of sites, maybe of them hosted by Classic Gaming. I've seen several for Zelda, a few for Mario, one for Blaster Master, one for Shmups in general, one for the Guardian Legend, etc, etc.
Still my favorite, although it's been officially dead for five years now, is |tsr's NES Archive. Oh |tsr, where have you gone?
But... the game files have to be modified to make the damn thing visible!
Mind you, I don't think the game should be played by kids, but a lot of this furor looks simply like hysterics, something for particular people to point at and say "Oh my God!! Look, just look at how far society is breaking down now! If you're a decent human being you'll join me in comdemning this, and vote Republican!"
Companies are there to make money not for moral or social values.
But a company is not a person, but merely a sociological and financial construct. The people making the decisions are sure-as-hell still bound by ethics and morals, and are the ones to blame. (As are, I'm sorry to say, the ones who work for the company in implementing those decisions -- the "only following orders" excuse has been used too many times in our race's short history.)
Further, I'm not aware of anything in the definition of a company that requires them to pursue money over all objections. Some may talk about a responsibility to shareholders, but company officials surely also have a responsibility to those people to not embroil their company in potentially damaging public relations situations.
They also have the choice of either not signing something if they can't be bothered to look at what they're agreeing to, or signing it and accepting the consequences. Fuck them if they're too lazy or stupid to figure it out.
The problem with that is, almost everything interesting, cool, or even necessary about our culture comes along with that fine print. If you read all of it you'd have a lot less room in your life, and in your brain, to do other things, including enjoying the thing you're signing. And usually, the fine print is an all-or-nothing deal -- you agree with their draconian terms, or you reject them and go find someone else and think about their draconian terms. It's either sign away your first born or become a virtual Luddite.
There's probably a potential market for companies that don't do this kind of thing, but because people don't typically care about the terms until they get bitten, it won't have a chance to emerge until a real public furor emerges. The people who run these companies are mostly me-too sorts, so it'll take a company making Google-style declaration of no-screwing, and also becoming a great success, in order for that to catch on.
Am I the only person who sees a relationship to these kinds of form letters and magical phrases? I've been thinking for a while now about the relationship between the legal system and traditional concepts of magic....
Don't forget the light of Slashdot magnifying the light of the media. Websites don't suffer from the "SF Chronicle Effect."
Oh, for the ability to mod someone up past 5!
Argh, my comment seems to have messed up.
What I was trying to say about Miyamoto is that the man isn't responsible for everything Nintendo puts out, he's more of a producer these days, he supervises and suggests, even recommends, but he doesn't make games himself as much anymore. There are many creative minds at Nintendo these days, and they all deserve some of the credit (or lack thereof) for their output.
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.
It's because he's honest about all these facts. Also, that he was willing to try something that no one else had done instead of making yet another same-old-same-old. And the fact that he's so new to the industry was precisely what allowed him to design a game so utterly different from others out there -- his expectations have yet to be blunted.
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.
Shigeru Miyamoto is notUnfortunately, 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.
Oh god, tell me about it. Katamari Damacy was the game that convinced me to chip in for half the price of a used PS2. While I've played it so much that my record for the last level is now 12:34, four seconds shy of finishing within half the time limit, and I can easily clear the ocean of all matter with five minutes left to go on the clock, there has been nothing else for the PS2 that has much interested me that I don't already have for my Gamecube (specifically, the two Midway Arcade Treasures compilations).
I may, sometime in the future, get one of the earlier GTAs, but I rented San Andreas once and we were immediately put off by the deluge of profanity. Not for us, I fear.