katamari damacy game review
KATAMARI DAMACY: NA NA NA NA ...TESTED FOR PLAYSTATION 2
Between mom who takes a dim view of your motley plantations in his geranium tank, and dad who hardly tolerates that you borrow his Xsara every weekend to go to Amsterdam in the company of cousin Hubert and his band of rasta potters, there are always some logistical concerns to come and hinder your assumed existence as a neo-bab '. Namco has the solution to all your problems, however. Yes, with Katamari Damacy, we offer you a one-way ticket to the Other World, without having to hide behind the school's bicycle garage ...
When four green collars and four geese emerge from the screen to interpret a stupid song, and a Gargantua screaming scratches his stomach to sing the chorus in chorus, doubt is no longer allowed. Katamari Damacy has nothing to do with all these very violent games that scare Mamie so much when she is passing through. No SWAT in dark corridors, no bloody beheadings or intestines exposed to the world, only green, gray and good humor. Misleading appearance. In Katamari Damacy, both a play on words and a writing to designate the spirit of accumulation, we spend our time swallowing a lot of mad people without worrying about their existence. And then dogs, too, cows, eggs, telephones, buildings, erasers, bunches of cherries; whatever. But not in any order. It may sound amoral, but it is undoubtedly less so than the behavior of the King of the Cosmos (the guy on the guitar, there), who, too drunk to be lucid, has just extinguished the stars in the Sky. Rather than doing the dirty work himself, this garbage in pajamas, which made gibberish his only means of expression, decided to send his son to reconstitute the constellations with makeshift objects. The task seems insurmountable for a small being of barely 5 centimeters, especially when the E.T. in question is also cheesy, with a head shaped like nothing and a body all green. Very naive! With his adhesive ball capable of taping everything that is within range, Ôji will be able to meet all the requirements of his stupid paternal, who will give him progressively much more important missions, while increasing the initial diameter of the ball Magic.
Have you dreamed of the knee?
Eliminate from the start the fat valves of the bide not funny, but then at no time: yes, Katamari Damacy is a ball game, yes, you have to have the biggest to win, and no, it is not of a metaphor for life. Although, given the ardor that Prince Ôji puts in to send Japanese society flying, driven by his greedy desire to reconstitute the stars in the sky, there must be an underlying metaphor that the great thinkers of the video game will not miss to clear up. Katamari Damacy bet everything on bullshit, but not only. Because behind a tendency to play the card of the big nawak trendy fresh omelet with mushrooms hides a rather brilliant physics of the ball, which makes the playability precise, if not to be instinctive. Because to be honest, the first games are often unsuccessful. And it will take half an hour, if not two, to correctly assimilate the principle of movement with the two sticks, and not to bump into all the walls like the little blind puppy that comes out hot from the womb. Push the two sticks to advance in the same direction, then play with the inclination of each to turn right or left, it is however within the reach of the first moron come. The tutorial shows it well. But you have to believe that the brain has trouble printing this kind of binary process. Fortunately, for all dummies like the rest of us, there are a few tips to not be totally lacking: subjective view with L1 to refocus, 180 ° jump by pressing the two sticks at the same time, and R1 to widen its horizon with a huge jump in the air. This makes life easier.In most classic levels, the king of Cosmos demands that you bring him a ball as big as that in the time limit. It can be envisaged, but at the beginning, the ball is dwarf in addition to being light, and as it cannot grip what is larger and heavier, poor Ôji must slalom between the objects which swallow and others. In this lamentable state, the cats repel it, the slightest mouse swatter sends it flying, and the men do not even pay attention to its presence. In addition, at each touch a little too much, Ôji loses a small part of the gadgets and things he had managed to stick on his funny utensil. Let them be wary, these idiots, because scrupulous level designers have placed most of the objects with enough vice for the accumulation to take place quickly. And when a certain diameter is reached (the counter at the top left of the screen is proof), the King of Cosmos intervenes to make the ball grow to the next level. This is the key to Katamari Damacy's success. When Ôji grows, the world does not change. But as the ball grows in size, everything that was an obstacle becomes potential prey. Suddenly, cats can meow bitterness, they will get caught anyway, just like fats and humans, who this time will think of running away as soon as the ball approaches. The cops will even take out their guns! Go tell them it's for the good of the cosmos ...
But full growth gives rise to other concerns, and not just a desire to rebel against All Consumption by listening to Avril Lavigne. You will have to constantly struggle with the weight, and therefore the inertia, of its large spherical tape. The larger and larger the objects, the more difficult it will be for the ball to roll properly. For example, you will need to gain more momentum when climbing the hill, otherwise you will descend as dry. Some partitioned areas and other suspension bridges may even trap you if you overdo it without thinking of the way out. And then the large objects are not necessarily round or adapted to your physiognomy. A floor lamp, for example, is not round. Neither is a billboard. Suddenly taking all objects indiscriminately can force you to fight with the ball until finding a roughly smooth surface, to roll well. So much less time to reach the goal set by your unworthy father. In short, the change of scale changes everything: perspectives, prey and physical behavior. The game is all the more diabolical.
Marvelous Mambo
Magnanimous, the King of the Cosmos will not always ask you to reach a size limit to reconstitute the stars. Certain special missions, intended to revive entire constellations, will assign you slightly more varied objectives. To make the Swan or the Taurus shine again in the heavens, Ôji will de facto have to recover as many birds as possible in the time available, or else catch the biggest cow from the neighboring meadow, as a good legionnaire of the cosmos. As the mission stops as soon as the Prince takes hold of the said animal, players who want to bring a good big milkman to their father's badger will constantly have to slalom between the cattle, to continue to grow without being interrupted. It's a bit of an illustration of Katamari Damacy's two-speed gameplay. For all those obsessed with 100%, the game takes into account a very precise register on the number of objects that you will collect or on the size of your balls at the end of the course. He also thinks of hiding many hidden objects to dress up your little Prince (guitar, camera), and even little snowmen hidden in view of the multiplayer mode with two players in split screen, no more hilarious than that. Unfortunately, it is not these small additional challenges that will be enough to make the life decent. Unless you want to recover everything or explode your own records, Katamari Damacy was thought to be pecked in four-five hours, before eventually coming back to redo the best missions. As the difficulty is not particularly high to complete the objectives, orientation for the general public requires, the game really ends very quickly, all the more quickly since there are only three playing fields, the house, the city and the world. Even if the passage to different scales makes us discover the different zones under a new eye, it is downright insufficient when we consider the price of the object in French shop (70 €). It's a shame, because with nice little penalties (reversal of directions, severe slowdown, game on heaviness) or more areas, the game would have really gained in interest. For the rest, maybe ...With a graphic bias as surreal as this one, it was difficult to imagine a flamboyant achievement, and besides, there is no miracle on this point. Naive and refined, or ugly and empty, the appreciation of the graphics of Katamari Damacy very much depends on your tolerance for ambient Japanese delirium. Anyway, Katamari has the good taste to almost never row despite boxing on the screen, which was still the least of things, especially with the different scales that constantly change the depth of field. Simplicity being the key word of the game, the animations are just as basic, of the genre four to five stages maximum. It is in the mind, but we can understand that it is shocking. On the other hand, and on this point no debate, how not to succumb to happiness listening to the different musical themes, whose underground eclecticism is matched only by excellence? Incredibly licked, the soundscape contributes greatly to the experience, to the instant fun that Katamari Damacy provides. The shady sounds launched at each object that the ball hangs, the cries of cows, children, cats, sumotoris, remind us at all times that we have finally crossed the bounds of reason. In an environment slightly sclerotic by routine, it feels good.
0 comments:
Post a Comment