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Saturday 26 January, 2008
Gameplay:
The second time I played Katamari Damacy, I started to get really good, really fast. As someone who generally sucks at this sort of thing (any video game ever made) it was actually kind of nice to make some sort of progress. In general, even though the missions get harder, you get better at finding things faster. It actually takes a lot of strategy to find things in a certain order.
My favorite part about playing again is that I could pick up bigger and better things. Cows and other miscellaneos barnyard animals, for instance, are fun because they make barnyard noises. People, too, make horrified sounds that are hillarious because some of them are Japanese and some American and some you cannot even tell. They also flail around and look ridiculous. My favorite things to pick up were watering cans, bits of sushi, crabs, fish, sumo wrestlers, street lamps, gasoline pumps and fireworks.
Design:
The most prevelant innovative part of this game, to me, is that when your Katamari gets lopsided, it actually stays lopsided. You wouldn't think that would actually mean anything, but as silly and unrealistic and positively ridiculous as this game is, the realness of the crazy rolling makes it kind of like real life. You feel like if you were rolling a giant ball over random parts of Japanese homes in order to remake the stars that your effeminate father, the king of the universe, illiminated, it would look just like it does on the screen.
The downside of the graphics is that they're a little blocky and sometimes they block the screen. This, since its a time sensitive game, is hugely frustrating. One of the neat things about the graphics, and the game world is that almost anything short of absolute vertical walls is possible to roll up, even if it seems improbable. This makes the game pretty interesting because it seems like there are many places to go even though each level only has a few rooms.
To make the game more interesting periodically, different things hit you or run into you and stop you or knock things off of you Katamari. This makes things really frustrating because you work so hard to get things to stick on you and they're knocked off by a at driving a baby carriage with an alligator in it. I understand that it has to be that way because the game would be pretty boring without it. However, they warn you, but it seems a little odd because its like a five second warning that doesn't even give you enough time to react.
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