2004.10.02
My, Earth really is full of things.That game is the current big sleeper hit (Sold Out in many places, but I found it at EB for $20)
This Review is as good as I've seen...the basic idea is one night The King of the All Cosmos got drunk and wiped out all of the stars. So now he sends you, his princely son, on missions on Earth to roll around a sticky ball...anything you run into that's smaller than your clump gets added to your clump, and thus the Katamari ball grows and grows until the level is over. If you meet the level's size goal, the ball gets converted into a star and placed in the sky above.
The change of scale is amazing...on some levels (actually I haven't made it quite as far as this) "you start out picking up nigiri sushi and strawberries, and getting beaten up by mice, and end up uprooting trees and grabbing entire houses" (That's according to Nick B's journal...his praise of the game got me to check it out, in fact, and the insane man wants to try an Atari 2600 version of it.) The entire game is soaked in Japanese weirdness, from the music (supposedly singing about the game itself, though I haven't heard one of the tunes in English yet), to the regal but alien mindset and "Royal We" of the King of All Cosmos, to strange cutscenes straight out of a stylized early 60s cartoon about a Japanese family.You can get some cool desktop backgrounds on the official site's download page, here's a good gameplay movie with some neat music, and then there's the brief Japanese Commercial.
It does seem like one of those games that could end up in your dreams...
Quote of the Moment
I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.I think he was speaking sarcastically/rhetorically, explaining that a judge can't mix up personal views on social issues with their courtroom decisions, but I'm not sure...