If Life Were a Videogame - Katamari's

Life is no walk in the park. Slogging it through school, looking for a job, getting no shifts 'coz Sam's Warehouse has gone into receivership (fuck); this is life. We hate it sometimes but it's all we've got. Life is full of problems but according to We Love Katamari (read my reviews my minions) all of lifes problems can be solved in some abstract way using Katamari's. All anyone has to do in We Love Katamari is stand outside waving their arms and yelling to get the attention of the King of the Cosmos and then after a short brown-nosing session the King will order that a Katamari be dispatched to solve the problem. Let me just put this into a real life scenario. In real life, to get a job, you need a slick resume a suit and the skills to convince an employer that you are, in actuality, THE SHIT. It can be grooling and take anywhere up to and beyond a week. In the world of Katamari's however, if I wanted a job I'd stand outside shouting "Jobs!" over and over and eventually the King of the Cosmos will hear me out. At first he will scourne the idea of helping me but all I'd have to do is say "the King is jolly good" and he'll bend over backwards to make sure I get employed. Then what'll happen is the Prince will roll things up in a katamari until he can roll up the employer or even the entire company and then somehow this will get me a job. It's quick, fun and abstract. I like it. Plus you get to chat with the crazy old King of the Cosmos and he'll probably turn your workplace into a planet. Actually this kinda brings me to another point. If life WERE a world of rolling shit up to turn into stars then We Love Katamari is kind of disturbing. People and animals are often rolled up into katamaris along with all sorts of other crap and these katamari's are always either thrown into space as planets or blown into stardust. Two veeeerrrry unappealing fates there. So although Katamaris are seeminly excellent tools for employment or building campfires they come at the price of potentially being rolled up between a dozen thumbtacs and an elephants arse before being thrown into space to orbit helplessly until you die. Still, we all need jobs.

We Love Katamari (A Review)

I think it's fair to say that creativity is NOT as profitable as people might imagine. There are people out there making genuinely excellent, original products and all people ever seem to buy are the same old products in new boxes. One of the worst mediums for this trend in stupidity amongst the spending public is gaming. Games are expensive to make and expensive to buy. When so much money is a stake people don't take risks. People are apparently incapable of research and so instead of learning about great, innovative titles they just opt for sequals and recycled ideas that they are already quite familiar with. The games industry knows this and so instead of spending heaps of money on something risky and surprising they instead re-use the same formulas that have worked over and over and over in making money. The reason I say all this is because I'm sick of it. It sickens me that souless clones sell a zillion copies whilst exciting, original titles lay forgotten. I say all of this because We Love Katamari is one of those games.

So there I was, I had just trudged through the 60 hours or so of Final Fantasy XII and was left feeling extremely lukewarm about the ending (these games are SUPPOSED to be heavily story driven, I liked FFX's story heaps more). Sure I thought the game was good and there was some exciting new gameplay in there but after 10 hours it had grown quite familiar. Anyway after finishing it I was in need of something exciting and fun. I started to play We Love Katamari (on the Playstation 2, just so you know). So what is this game? It's really hard to describe faithfully but here it goes. You roll sticky ball around and as you do so things stick to it. Only small things at first, but as it grows bigger it can pick up larger stuff. Essentially everything (and I mean EV-ER-Y-THING) can be rolled up eventually. It doesn't sound like much but it's truely a shining example of how one simple idea can be polished up and applied in so many varying environments. There's a level where you roll a sumo wrestler around in food so that he may grow large and defeat his opponent. There's another where you go the the zoo to roll up animals for a lonely dog so that he may have some friends. I particularly like the one where you roll up the gingerbread cottage for Hansel and Gretel. Time and size are the 2 most common challenges withing the game. Roll a Katamari this big in this many minutes is the basic idea. This idea wouldn't hold up the game on it's own but everything is designed stylishly and humorously. All you ever really do is roll stuff into a ball but the design is so wickedly clever and entertaining that it never feels repeditive. I was playing this game solidly for a week before I have to send it away for a scratch repair job and I miss it quite a bit. There's not alot else to say really, I think the game is excellent and deserves to sell zillions and if you think differently you are wrong. Simple as that.