This proves that innovation is the best tool for making a good video game. Katamari Damacy is the latest goofball game to come out of Japan. The game's story involves your father, the great and giant king of the cosmose, getting drunk and knocking down all the stars in the sky and also obliterating the moon. Being too high and mighty to soil his own hands, he sends you, the small 1cm tall prince, to fix the problem. You use a sticky ball, a Katamari, and go down to earth, rolling your Katamari so that things of all shapes and sizes get stuck to the ball, creating a bigger ball as you roll up more and more stuff, until its big enough to make into a star. This sounds simple and stupid, but its not. For one, it is a lot more fun then it seems, rolling around and picking up small thumb tacks, dice, and candies, until you are big enough to roll over small animals and house appliences, and then roll over people and cars, and then buildings and land masses is very fun and addictive. Also, it is a lot harder then it looks, since you can only roll up things smaller then your Katamari, you will desperately be looking for small things to roll up so you can finaly get big enough to roll up the next size up objects to progress befor time runs out. The game splits into levels with size requirements, a time limit set so that it adds a chalange. There are some bonus stages involving making star constilations, where you have to roll up a large number of one kind of object or roll up the biggest of one object you can find. The game uses blocky graphics, but this adds to the overall cartoony look of the game, the bright colors giving the world a happy apperence... before you come along and roll everything up. The dialog is very funny and also kinda strange, keeping the overall off the wall style of the game going. There are presents to find in the levels, and there is also a collection feature, which lets you look at detailed 3-D scans of the items you have picked up so far, including descriptions of the items, most of which are rather funny. The game's only downside is that it is VERY short, and can be finished in a day or two if you play non-stop, but this is countered by the fact that it's only 20 bucks. This game points out something important about games in general, the fact that some of the most well made, innovative games are kept from the states because of the culture gap or the pre-conception of most game companies that people in the US wont want a game in a style that they are used too. This game almost never made it to the States, but game magazines made such a big deal about it when it previewed at a Tokyo video game expo that Namco took a chance on it. Maybe this game will get other well made but unreleased games from Japan into the US. For such a small amount of money, this game is deffinately worth a buy.
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