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> Results: Katamari Damacy
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When you were a kid, did you ever get some scrap aluminum foil and roll it up into a ball? Did you ever try and collect more and try to make as big a foil ball as you could? At that moment did you ever think that someday, someone would make a video game based on that premise? Well, now someone has!
Namco has taken a big gamble by releasing in the US a unique PS2 game from Japan called Katamari Damacy (pronounced kah-tah-mah-ree dah-mah-see). As can be seen by the game's title, hardly any localizing was done. Katamari Damacy loosely translates into ﾑclump soul.' But that's okay, no title can accurately describe how weird, strange, unique, and fun this game is.  In Katamari Damacy, the great King of the Cosmos has accidentally destroyed all the stars in the sky. The King is a pretty big guy, he can do that. So, in order to fix things, he calls upon you, his princely son, to solve the problem of a starless sky. The bad thing is the prince is only a few centimeters tall. How is such a small alien guy going to manage such a big job? With a Katamari ball, of course! The King sends you and a special ball down to Earth. This ball is like an everything magnet. Anything that is smaller than the ball will stick to it. Your job is to roll around the ball on Earth until enough stuff is on it that it is large enough to be shot up into the sky to make a new star. You may start out picking up thumbtacks and nuts and bolts underneath a car, but eventually enough stuff will stick to your ball that you can start picking up bigger and bigger things. Before you know it you'll be picking up small animals, people, the car you were under at the beginning, houses, buildings, and beyond! In each of the main stages, your goal is to make your ball a certain size in a given time limit. You'll probably start out a stage very small, able to roll under tables and collect screws and pieces of candy and other little things. They will get attached to the ball as you roll around. Eventually your ball will get bigger and be able to roll over larger things. Soon you'll be able to roll over mice, bottles of eyedrops, milk cartons, and other stuff scattered around. When you reach landmark sizes, the screen blurs and the camera pans out, showing how much bigger in scale you are to everything else. But you have to watch out. Not only is there a time limit, if you run into a wall or a person or animal bigger than your ball runs into you, things that you collected on your Katamari will fall off. Finish the stage with the correct size or bigger in the time limit and you can go onto the next stage. The King will take your ball and send it up into space to be a new star. It's great how the game leads you up to the game's climax. Early stages you'll be stuck inside a house, collecting bits of food and junk. Later you'll be in a town and then a city and then the whole world! Gameplay is kind of a combination of Namco's own Pac-Man, their tank game Assault, and Atari's Marble Madness or Sega's Super Monkey Ball.  In other stages you'll have to make constellations. In the Cancer stage, you have to roll up as many crabs as you can, and in the Virgo stage, you have to roll up as many females as you can! When building Taurus, your goal is to roll up the largest cow. You can also go back and replay stages you completed to try and roll a bigger ball, or to roll up the allotted size as quickly as you can. Hidden in each stage is a present from the King and if you find it and roll it up, you can keep it. The presents are accessories like a scarf or a wrestling belt that you can put on the prince while you play. There's also a small two-player mode where each player tries to roll up the biggest ball of junk. If your ball is large enough, you can even roll up your opponent's ball! There is also a gallery that keeps track of every item you've picked up. Every color crayon, food item, animal, human, building, island can be in the gallery. There are thousands of items and each one has a funny little description to go with it. You can catalog your items by location, size, and type.  Katamari Damacy is just oozing with style. The King of the Cosmos is a treat in himself as he only talks in the plural first person, and his lines are strangely poeticﾅalmost like the old Krazy Kat comic strip. He teleports you to and from Earth via a rainbow that comes out of his mouth. The game's intro is a mix of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine and The Simpson's Mr. Sparkle commercial. Anyone around 30 years old may remember the old 80's music video for the song "Money For Nothing" (my favorite 80's song). The video used computer-animated graphics for the characters, and since it was the early 80's, needless to say the video was very blocky. Well, that's what the graphics look like in Katamari Damacy. Everything is all blocks and square corners and as little detail as possible. While a casual gamer may call it bad graphics, it actually gives the game a sense of style and scale and humor. Plus there is the added advantage of no slowdown, even when there are tons of objects on your Katamari ball or scattered on the ground for you to pick up (I swear, people in this game are so messy to leave all this stuff lying around). Music is an eclectic mix of mambo, jazz, synth techno, and lounge music. Most of the songs have vocals, some are in Japanese, and some are in English. Either way, the music in this game is very catchy and will get stuck in your head like clutter on a Katamari ball. Play control is also unique in that you only use the two analog sticks on the PS2 pad. It controls like a more maneuverable tank, similar to Namco's arcade classic Assault game. Think of the directions like tank treads. Move both analog sticks up and you roll forward, pull back on both and you'll go backwards. Put one analog stick up and the other down and you'll turn sharply to the left or right. You can also sidestep or strafe by pressing both analog sticks left or right. Wiggle the sticks up and down to get a burst of rolling speed. Press the joystick buttons down (L3 and R3) and the prince will hop to the other side of the ball for quick 180-degree direction shifts. And the L1 and R1 buttons let you look around at your surroundings. The play control does take a moment to get used to, but it really does give you the most rolling maneuverability available. Sometimes the camera angles can keep you from seeing where you are going, but that is the only real problem, and it's fairly minor. The game is also short. You can beat it in a weekend. But Katamari Damacy is so much fun that you'll want to keep on playing to make bigger clumps and get better scores and get all the presents and items for your gallery. The best part is this game is only 20 bucks. For a game with so much style and uniqueness and fun, 20 dollars is well worth the price. 
Well, the game is rated E for Everyone, but you do roll up people in this game, and they do scream and twitch about when being stuck to the Katamari. Same thing happens when you start to roll up buildings. The people inside do scream and you can hear them panic. But it's all silly and funny screams, and some people even giggle or sing when stuck to the Katamari. Any kid who cut their teeth on Godzilla movies will do just fine here. Katamari Damacy is a lot like a Godzilla movie, actually. The idea that these clumps of people and trees and buildings and tornadoes getting sent up to space to be turned into stars isn't pictured graphically or anything, but the idea may upset more sensitive kids and disturb some parents. Again, everything is done humorously and nothing is to be taken seriously. I think kids would really like this game, though. Children can see whole worlds on a tabletop or under their bed, and I think Katamari Damacy really captures that childlike imagination in the level design. Plus kids may learn a thing or two about measurement comparison and basic astronomy with this game. But most importantly, this game is just pure fun for only 20 bucks. I certainly wouldn't want to deny any kid gamer such a fun experience. Everyone, get Katamari Damacy today! Thank you Namco for releasing this game in the US!
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