Monday, February 13, 2006

I love Katamari



"We Love Katamari" game for PlayStation 2 was released in Europe at last. Actually a sequel to "Katamari Damacy" (which was never released in Europe), this is totally bizarre game about Cosmic Prince (with hammer-shaped head, occassionally with giraffe on it) who is rolling the sticky ball across the Earth, rolling up everything (including living things) in order to make the biggest Katamaris and create new planets from them (which are then rolled together and thrown into the Sun). In one of the levels, you start with 1 meter ball (rolling up eggs, frogs etc.) and have to reach the size of 1 kilometer (rolling up whales, skyscrapers, clouds and small islands)!



Apart from being 110% original it also features psychedelic art direction and soundtrack, plus off-the-wall Japanese humor. The Official Site is weird but the game itself is much weirder.

It also has the most beautiful game manual I've ever seen, in which there are no screenshots bud hand paintings looking like screenshots.

UPDATE: Read the comments for game mechanics explanation.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

what are you playing against ? How are you supposed to lose in this game ??

František Fuka said...

anonymous: There are various rules for various levels but basically it boils down to either "Make as large Katamari as possible in X minutes" or "Make Katamari Y meters large in shortes possible time". You are then graded and awarded according to your time/size.

There is fair bit of strategy involved because you can only roll up things that are significantly smaller than your current ball size. That means if your Katamari is 150 cm, you can pick up small children but in order to pick up their teacher you first have to pick up several children or whole lot of cats. That means you have to be pretty familiar with object placement in each level if you are going for gold.

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot for explanation Fuxoft, seems like I've got a problem with imagiantion :D