Video Game Review - Katamari Damacy

Corbin was up at his grandparents for a sleepover last night, so Jenn and I hit the town. We did some extravagant spending for my benefit (lucky me!) and among other things, I picked up Katamari Damacy for the PS2. My brother-in-law had a spare PS2 that he thought might be broken. I took the case apart and cleared out some dust, and after putting it all back together it seems to be working fine. One game that I had wanted to try for a while was Katamari Damacy, a really unique game where the goal is to roll up your Katamari, or ball of junk, to incredible size. I spied it in Best Buy for $20 and I was all over it.


This game is truly bizarre. You play as the Prince of All Cosmos, a litte fella in an oversized green shirt, purple tighties, and an oddly shaped (cylindrical?) head. Your father, The King of All Cosmos, has accidentally broken all the stars in the night sky. He has given you the job of cleaning up his mess. To do so, you must roll your Katamari, which is a ball to which anything will stick, around until you have collected enough junk to create a star.


The games starts with some fairly simple goals. You start with a 5cm Katamari. Anything smaller will stick, anything larger will bump you away, and possibly cause some of your junk to fall off. You roll the katamari around, increasing it's size until you reach your first goal of 10cm. The music in the game is really cheesy, but it is also very catchy, and I caught myself humming the tunes throughout the day. Some of the levels are really hard. In each session, you are given a set amount of time, and a goal size to build up your katamari to. The first levels start with smaller sizes, but by the end of the game you are building up your Katamari to 300 meters. The game is very short (I was awake to 4am, but I beat the game), but there is a tremendous amount of replay value. There are collection levels in addition to the size goal levels. Most of the collection levels I only achieved 60% of the goal. That's plenty enough to pass, but it allows for a lot of replay value as I try to reach a higher percentage.


This game is just plain fun. It has been out for a while, and it has received lots and lots of critical praise. I'm just jumping on the bandwagon here I guess. If I had one complaint, it would be that there are too few stages. It would be nice to have a bit more variety in the goals for each level, but otherwise this game is tremendous fun. The controls are dead easy too, and only take a second to learn (steer both analog joysticks in the direction you want to push, or push the joysticks in opposite directions to spin around the katamari). If you have a PS2, you owe it to yourself to try out this truly bizarre, one of a kind game.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can you review an xbox game? I mostly play Madden and that is about it. Im too scared to get burned by anything else. I look fwd. to more reviews.

Troy

www.theobservationist.com

Adam Jones said...

Good idea! I've been playing a couple of my new ones, and I think I've seen enough so far to give a fair review.

 
Jade Mason