Intelligent Artifice

What I like about Katamari Damacy December 30, 2004

I just finished Katamari Damacy. I started playing Monday night, now it’s Wednesday night. I guess I played about 8-12 hours in total. Here’s what I liked about the game:

• The save game selection screen
• Looking up in the tutorial level
• Looking down in the constellation screen
• The TV in the living room
• The King of All Cosmos and his parenting skills (and his diary)
• The Prince
• What you see when a level is loaded
• Starting with a 1m katamari and going all the way to 300m in one level
• Wiggling creatures and screaming people attached to my katamari
• Despite the fact that aforementioned creatures and people get collapsed into flaming balls of gas, it’s a non-violent game
• What happens when you lose a level (somehow I saw this a lot on star 7)
• The music
• The fact that it’s a short game, but there seems to be genuinely cool hidden stuff
• The very satisfying ending (I didn’t even get the ‘UN mode’ even though I’d seen it at GDC…)
• Easy access to everything you’ve seen or unlocked
• The visual style and general upbeat wackiness
• “Oh! I feel it! I feel the cosmos!”

Update: Fixed stupid typos.

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Katamari Damacy and the Game of the Year lists December 28, 2004

Good news: I am now finally able to play Katamari Damacy at home. Also, I am playing the US version instead of the Japanese version, and that makes things a lot easier to understand. And the quirkiness made it across for once.

So what did other people think of Katamari Damacy?
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Industry size December 24, 2004

Ron Gilbert is being grumpy about the “games biz > Hollywood” stories one occasionally sees (like this one). He actually looks at the figures. When I am annoyed by overblown statements regarding industry size, I usually just point out that the porn industry also likes to claim it’s bigger than Hollywood. But then, I’m lazy.
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The Twelve Days of Crunch Time

The Twelve Days of Crunch Time.

A poem by Gilbert and Kauzlaric. Unfinished as I post this, but already very funny.

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Nullsumme

Dear Markus,

for some reason, your blog is not easy to read in my RSS reader. Tobe apparently has similar problems. I don’t know if there’s something you can do about it, but I thought I’d mention it.

Meanwhile, I’ve found this to be the most enjoyable way to read your blog :P

Merry Christmas, a happy New Year, good luck with your work, and keep on blogging,

Jurie

P.S.
See you next Tuesday at Johnny’s maybe?

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Snowball effect December 21, 2004

The Katamari Damacy references on Robin’s blog are now officially out of control. It’s as if she’s pushing a huge ball over the entire internet that grows and grows as more topics stick to it.

E.g.:

• Robin mentions the KD post-mortem in Game Developer.
• Robin posts about KD appearing in Time Magazine.
• Robin somehow manages to connect the fact that EA is to buy a 20 percent share in Ubisoft to KD.

I found the new KD 2 screenshots mere nano-seconds before her - but only by distracting her by talking about food.

She must be stopped, for her own good. Imagine what were to happen if she found out about the very cute KD Christmas card?

But what can I do? I am well over the edge myself. I will soon have two copies of Katamari Damacy, and no PS2 to play it on. I am stuck, stuck to a ball that keeps turning and turning…

Update: More details on KD2.

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Geek On Stun December 20, 2004

And while I’m at it: Geek On Stun looks like an excellent source of games information from Japan.

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Upcoming DS goodness

I think this video showcasing upcoming games for the Nintendo DS contains more cool ideas than I’ve seen all year.

(Via Geek On Stun.)

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Kotaku

You may have noticed that a fair amount of recent links are from Kotaku. It’s a fairly new site, part of hip New York entity Gawker Media. It has quickly become one of my top news sources. So cut out the middleman (i.e. me) and subscribe to their RSS feed. No, wait! Come back!

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Apple Improves World of Warcraft December 16, 2004

Apple just released version 10.3.7 of Mac OS X. Among the changes:

• Addresses an issue with Blizzard World of Warcraft in which the game’s frame rate could drop considerably when in “Ghost mode,” if the computer uses an nVidia graphics card.
• Resolves an issue in which enabling Vertex Shaders in World of Warcraft could lead to unexpected graphics issues when using an nVidia graphics card.
• Addresses an issue with World of Warcraft in which incorrect colors or unexpectedly flashing objects could appear when using an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card, making gameplay difficult.

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft came out on the 23rd of November - less than a month ago. I find these fixes quite striking, both because of Apple’s speedy reaction (more speedy, alas, than their fix for the intermittent internet problems I’ve been having), and for the fact that they would do so for one game.

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