Affectionate Diary

Katamari Damacy is one of the most brilliant gameplay concepts ever, so it stands to reason that having Katamari on the PSP would be a pretty fucking awesome thing to behold.

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On the whole, it is. It’s got the same incredibly joyous omni-snowball gameplay and the same deranged presentation, both brimming with detail, nuance and charm.

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However, its control method is one of the most horrific crimes in gaming history. I’ll make no fucking bones about this: it’s the shit in the punchbowl. It’s a foul, idiotic thing, being both horribly clunky and spectacularly frustrating. Why the fuck I have to control my ball of PURE POLYGON JOY like a fucking tank is beyond me. I could kind of cope with the orginal’s dual-analog, even though it was fucking shit, but on the PSP it’s a nightmarish aberration of face buttons, stick movements and shoulders just to go around in a fucking circle. This is truly the stuff of gaming nightmares, like playing Halo with the 360 wheel’s pedals for looking round or something. People have defended it, saying that you get used to it eventually, but that doesn’t change a thing. It’s still fucking awful and this sort of shit shouldn’t be tolerated.

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What’s marginally more annoying as you can never get used to it is the bizarre, seemingly arbitrary choices for what’s allowed to be rolled up. You’ll see some shit that’s clearly smaller than your ball, sometimes smaller in volume and dimensions than stuff you’ve already collected, and it tells you to fuck off. Just before bouncing you into corner where you have to slowly rotate to get out because you can’t be fucked to learn the quick 180 move, as it’s some stupid combination press rather than a single button. This is pure gaming bullshit of the very worst kind. I also hate the time limits, which seem so brutal, not to mention the lack of checkpoints on long, difficult stages that have two or three map loads in them. I mean honestly, a temporary quicksave wouldn’t have fucking hurt. What would be nice would be a dumping of that shitty time limit and introducing some puzzle mechanic for progression, where being able to access areas depends on what you have on your Katamar or something. Cunts.
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But despite all this, Katamari is still an absolute joy. The sheer detail in the world, combined with the staggering variety of objects, casts profound beams of pleasure into my heart. The incredibly charming presentation sings to me like a beautiful bird on a really nice leafy branch in Bob Ross’s best ever painting of a forest river with mountains in the background. Going from picking up grains of salt to eating the entire world is still a fantastic journey that sees me regularly going “NOM NOM NOM” when I get on a good roll. The best is when you go back through one of the size barriers and all that shit that got in the way or fucked you about doesn’t even fucking matter cos you’re going back to eat the fucking house the whole sorry episode to place in. That kind of revenge against the game’s own bullshit is absolutely delicious and is all too rare these days. If I was god of games, I’d make full system raping the reward for finishing a game, rather than some shitty cutscene and credit roll.

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Tell you what, though. That shit with the Rollercoaster when viewing your collection is seriously fucking awesome.

10/10

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Definitive Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.