Since I missed class last monday (because I was here) and was unable to see some of the game demonstrations, I decided the best way to make up for the missed class would be to spend the same amount of time playing a video game. So I spent 3 hours tucked away in the basement of Axinn playing Katamari Damacy. This seemed like a reasonably trade-off to me.
When I walked out of the game room, after the 3 hour adventure, I’m not going to lie, I felt a little weird. Katamari is one strange strange game. As a premise, it is pretty neat. You are a tiny alien prince with a funky shaped head who rolls his katamari around on earth. As you hit objects smaller than your katamari it picks up the objects and your katamari grows in size. The premise is simple, but fun, combining both destructiveness and playfulness.
The purpose behind collecting material on the katamari is where the story begins to get strange. In the opening sequence of the game the King of All Cosmos, a strange-looking creature in his own right, in a drunken spree destroys all the stars. He sends his son to earth to collect material to replace the stars with.
The king is never quite satisfied with the prince/player’s collections and has a serious of strange quips before he carries the katamari and his son off on a rainbow back to their home planet.
You can also collect presents amongst all of the objects you collect on each of the star creating missions. You get fun outfits for the prince, as well as a cousin that can be used in multiplayer and probably a lot of other things I may have missed.
As your katamari grows in size you can begin to pick up strange shaped objects like pencils or recorders that cause the katamari to jump in the air or fling itself as it springs off the large objects. You also need to look out for rats, snails and other animals that bump into you causing the haptic feedback to go insane. I started out pretty terrible at the game and ended up stuck in corners with the controller vibrating insanely for longer than I would like to admit.
I imagine playing through this game is a little bit what a hallucinatory drug is like. Everything is okay, just a little bit off, and some super weird sctuff goes down (that being said my knowledge of hallucinatory drugs is limited to film/television and a few rumor-mill stories).