White Space (El Blanco's Archive):blog

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Rolling Up Madness - Katamari Damacy 4.5/5


     Back in the day, say around 1978 or 1980 or whenever, video
games were simple and playable affairs with easy to learn though deep
play mechanics. Most games sported a stick and at most 1 or 2 buttons.
You could literally jump in to play a game you had never seen before
and still walk away feeling that it was 25cents well spent. During this
so called golden age, Namco reigned as one of the kings of the arcade.
They produced such wonderous hits as Galaxian and Pac-Man. During the
late 80's they started to have issues with reproducing such accessible
wonders of video entertainment. They had few hits and derivative tripe
such as Pac-Land was a joystick-free blahfest.

     It wasn't till the early 90's that Namco started to find its way
again. Ridge Racer was a fast, arcady drift racing game that was loud,
easy to learn and most of all fun! 1994 was also the beginning of the
Tekken (2,3,4,5,TT) franchise. This was a turn for the company down a
long list of fighting games. Fighting game afficianados saw this as a
boon and arguably some of the best arcade fighters ever have come from
the Namco stables.

     However, fighting games have one shortcoming -- they are almost
entirely designed to thwart the entrance of new customers. Often with 5
or even 6 buttons and dozens of complicated moves and rules for each
character, fighting games are extremely deep but lack the easy
accessibility of Namco's early Reagan years games. Clearly something
needed to be done since the style, nay the genre of fighting
games is clearly settling itself into a niche.

     Namco decided to fight this issue by taking a risk and released
what is possibly one of the greatest, quirkiest, most original and
slickest games of the last few years -- and for $20 to boot. This game
returns Namco to its roots with simple, easy to learn gameplay that can
be picked up in minutes. The gameplay is simple and uses pretty much
just the analogue sticks to play (read simple controls). Wheras
Pac-Man's goal was to eat stuff, KD's goal is to roll up stuff. That's
it. And that's the beauty of this game.


Image from Gamespot

     You start in strange locals and at different sizes and simply roll
around your "katamari". The katamari picks up things that it
runs into. It can only pick up things that are smaller than your
current ball and beside a time-limit or certain simple goals on some
levels that's pretty much the entire game. It's simple, it's fun and
it's probably one of the best things to happen to games since...well...
Pac-Man.

     Graphics are serviceable, but somehow surreal and with their own
style. On their own, you might expect to see each model in a PS1 game
not a PS2 game. But when you have hundreds of models on the screen
things start to get interesting. And eventually you come to the
realization that every single thing you see on-screen is potential
katamari fodder you start to realize the possibilities. There is also a
nice depth-of-view blurr that they put on things far away. Somehow this
really helps emphasize the scale of the world that you're in.

     Sound is quirky and cute. Appropriate bubbly sounds when picking
up most items. Larger items respond with an item appropriate sound
(bikes result in a ring ring, cars with a honk of the horn).
Eventually, these sounds result in a fun cacophony of screams, beeps,
honks and various barnyards sounds that usually doesn't get annoying.
The only problem I ever had is when picking up numerous people the
screams can sometimes start to get under the skin.

     Music is in a word, fantastic. Easily some of the best music I've
ever heard in a game short of the radio stations in GTA3. There is a
wide variety of songs each with an appropriate Katamari theme.
Everything from surreal electronic instrumentals to children's choirs
to an upbeat Vegas esque night club song.

     Overall, an excellent game at a good pricepoint fun and with
reasonably good replayability. Everybody can pick this up and have a
good time, a worthy addition to any PS2 owner's library.