Game review - Katamari Damacy

Title: Katamari Damacy
Platform: PS2
Genre: ???????
Price Paid: $19.99 (+ borrowed)
Would pay: $29.99
Finshed: Yes

Katamari is one of those game successes that makes little sense. It's not like anything else out there, had little advertising, and the graphics are far from state of the art. It still sold like hotcakes, and for a very good reason - it's fun.

The game itself defies description and classification. You have to wonder how many kilograms of LSD[1] were used in the production of this game. The whole goal of the game is to roll a ball, the Katamari, around to collect of things and make it bigger. It sounds strange, and it is, but the environments are even stranger, with wacked out combinations that make no sense. A pigeon driving a shoe like a bumper car? A teddy bear flying around in a basket? A bear on a rocket bike? No matter how strange, it boils down to "Am I big enough to take this thing into my Katamari?"

The soundtrack is rather catchy too, a combination of Japanese versions of American songs like "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing", and songs that sound like they're original, written for the game. The soundtrack is on jenbooks' list of CDs to get, it's that catchy.


[1] For those unaware, the dose of LSD is ~100-200 micrograms. If I'm not losing decimal places any where, that's 10,000,000 doses/kilogram