| Owners of chipped PS2s currently have two big reasons to be cheerful. Gradius V (more on that, soon) and this.
In this, you play a little green man with a battery-shaped head who collects stuff.
By stuff, I don’t mean glowing coins or power-up icons or anything so painfully conventional. I mean pins, paperclips, bits of Lego, twigs, chips, toast, tomatoes, Alan keys (and Colin hammers? - SubEd), irons, crabs, prawns, wastepaper baskets, mouse-traps, chairs, house-plants, cows…
And you don’t collect this stuff by walking through it or pressing the ‘X’ button or buying it in some stupid shop with stupid tokens. You collect it by rolling a sticky ball over it.
Insert ‘What do you think of the show so far?’ gag in here.
And then, snowball effect-style, you collect more and more of this stuff until you don’t look like a little green man with a battery-shaped head any more. You look like a great big, squelchy, stinky, all-consuming pile of rubbish.
At the beginning of each level, a scary king in a purple dress says some things in Japanese and gives you a target diameter for you/the ball to reach as quickly as possible.
At first, the target is just a few inches, but it soon grows to tens, twenties, hundreds of metres, as you grow bigger and bigger and collect not only the stuff lying around but bits of gates and walls and people and chunks of fencing and, eventually, even buildings and countries and ENTIRE WORLDS.
Never before has a game laid out such an almighty ego-trip. By the end, you become the master of your universe, because YOU ARE YOUR UNIVERSE.
”Ink, shoes, dragons, toaster, nails… Haha. Eat my holism, motherfuckers!”
Katamari Damashii is not wilfully, archly weird and impenetrable in a ‘Those crAaAaAzy Japanese…’ kind of way. It’s silly and thrilling and laugh-out-loud funny. It’s also outrageously playable and compulsive – a little bit obsessive-compulsive.
In a gaming climate so currently obsessed with hyper-realism and sumptuous but soulless graphic engines, KD’s little green battery-headed man is here to remind us why videogames are FUN.
As he cheerily tumbles his little ball of junk through the living, moving environments, he’s saying: “Look at me! I COLLECT your precious ‘reality’ like so much existential litter. To me, bits of the world are not there to be cleverly simulated with posho texture-mapping. They are there to be ACQUIRED and used for my own end – personal growth.”.
This is a game with the glorious, unquestionable internal comic logic of old coin-ops like Burger Time, Mr Do!, Zoo-Keeper, Amidar, Food Fight… A celebration of a simple idea taken to wonderfully strange extremes.
”Don’t worry, son. It’s just an all-consuming
vortex. Type thing”.
If this were 1984 and not 2004, and I was writing this in my ermine-lined converted warehouse taking delivery of every new arcade release from busty lady-minions – their slick, dusky skin glistening with fresh sweat – then I’d be saying that Katamari Damashii is ahead of its time or something. But that wouldn’t even vaguely get close to how ace I think it is.
What I’m trying to say is that Katamari Damashii isn’t only one of the games of the year. It’s the long lost ‘80s coin-op.
SICKBOY, July
2004.
RODENT CASH RATING -
£30
"Katanga!"
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