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Friday 25 January, 2008
GAMEPLAY:
While my second hour of Katamari was certainly more frustrating than the first, it was no less fun. One of the major problems I encountered, was that it was very easy to accidentally become stuck. Also, trying to wiggle your way out of whatever crevice you managed to get yourself into wasted valuable time. If you were stuck for too long and happened to bump into larger things in your efforts to escape, you would lose items from your katamari (which you would then have to backtrack and re-collect). A lot of the living objects also tended to move around a lot, bumping into you and making you drop things. The camera angles also made things extremely difficult. They would often zoom right into a wall, which made it very frustrating to try and blindly navigate your way out.
The only other major thing I had trouble with was the time limit. I would often come in only a centimeter or two under the goal and have to restart the entire level from scratch. I understand the limit was the only way to add conflict to the game, but it seemed a little strict for the earliest levels. It was very stressful to try and maneuver the katamari around obstacles, especially when it got larger and unwieldier. It was also tough to navigate my way around the world when I only had a height radius of 10 centimeters or so. However, this could easily be attributed to my lack of directional skills at even 5 feet tall :)
DESIGN:
The design of the game was extremely innovative. The entire concept is ingeniously simple, rolling a ball around and sticking things to it. But the simplicity of it leaves room for all other sorts of genius, such as the humorous characters and dialogue. The game also uses both of the PS2 directional joysticks, which results in movement very similar to the controls of a wheelchair. You have to push one up and one down in order to sharply turn. This happens to work very well considering you're mainly controlling a giant sphere. The game also makes it a little easier by having a few hot buttons that help you charge-roll or flip to the opposite side of the katamari quickly.
The levels of the game are all extremely similar. Even though at the start of each, The King specifically places you in Buenos Aires or The Philippines, they all look incredibly like Japan. The Spain level is even full of Japanese candy, products, and people. The levels are a bit difficult to navigate, but extremely rewarding as you get to pick up larger and larger items. You are also rewarded with little presents that The King leaves for you on each of the levels. If you manage to find and pick them up, you can put them on The Prince at the menu screen. Despite the similarity of the levels, each of your katamaris are categorized differently depending on how much of each type of object you pick up. For example, if you grabbed a lot of stationary material, your star would be labeled "The Pencil Star" or something like that
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