We Love Katamari is great fun, but it's basically the same game as the original. Pretty much it's just a new set of levels: it's more like an "expansion pack" than a sequel. But if you reached the end of the first one and didn't want it to be over yet (that's me) then it's well worth buying. The music is not nearly as good as in the original.
the music is catchy but in a 70's/80's kind of way.
still like the original music.
when is the DNA hosting a katamari fetish party?
October 29th?
I'm sitting here trying to think of a costume for the 29th, and now I'm wondering if I should fix up my king of all cosmos costume. The prototype was at fanime with that other photoshoot you linked to...
//only slightly insane//
i think we need to have katamari playable and projected on the screen during the party at some point, could be fun... and yeah the music from the first is way better. Still, no one has told me where I can buy the soundtrack to it though...?
I liked the Nomiya Maki song in the soundtrack of We Love Katamari, which I played a few months ago due to living in Japan. Neener, neener, neener.
As for the soundtrack for Katamari I, I picked it up at one of the nerdier record stores in Akihabara, but you can find it on Amazon Japan for only a slightly ridiculous sum. Note that the $25 price tag is the discounted price—the normal price for a CD in Japan is about $30.
cd's in japan are very expensive. more accurately, the japanese cd's are expensive. the imports are generally cheaper.
That's somewhat reassuring. At least those of us who live in PAL territories will eventually get to see what most of the fuss is about.
(Apparently Namco have ruled out doing a PAL port of Katamari Damacy because it'd be "too hard"; there is a petition to get them to reconsider.)
Too. Hard.
Gah.
Idiots.
My thoughts exactly. I mean, it's not like it's an Atari 2600 game or something finetuned to the refresh rate at the machine-code level, is it?
It could be that, unmodified, a PAL build would tax the CPU or GPU too much. In which case they could prune some polygons or reduce the display area by a few scanlines or whatever. I very much doubt that adapting a modern PlayStation 2 game from NTSC to PAL would require serious open-heart surgery.
Usually the PAL version of a PS2 game turns out to be just about a wash: instead of processing 448 scan lines, you process 512 (x 1.15). Instead of N/60 of a second to do it, you have N/50 of a second (x1.2).
The other issue is that the PS2 is severely limited in video RAM, with a total of 4MB. 32-bit front, back, and Z buffers consume ~2.6 MB for 512x448 NTSC, leaving ~1.3 MB for textures, but 512x512 PAL requires 3MB leaving 1MB for textures. Most PS2 games simply DMA tons of texture data (8-16MB is typical) from main memory every frame through that small window, and the difference between a 1.3MB window and a 1MB window isn't that signficant.
It's barely conceivable that KD, with its almost completely untextured world, expects to keep 1.3MB of texture in VRAM at all times, and that would require a little rethinking for PAL. But nothing an experienced engineer couldn't take care of in a few weeks.
I was under the impression that PAL v. NTSC was something handled by the game hardware, surely not on a game-by-game basis?
I dunno... I love the accapella version of the songs, and the animal version....
Plus... 2 player mode is pretty neat.
Yup, I agree. Fun, but not as revolutionary as the first (ha, get it....revolutionary?). :p
Serriouly, though, I thought the Sumo level was pretty damn funny. I just finished the game a couple of nights ago. :>
Egan >:>
I think some levels are sufficiently different in gameplay to make them feel new, like the racetrack and underwater requests.
The music in general feels less experimental, less clicky IDM more 70s lounge. There are a couple of outstanding tracks that I may even prefer to anything on the first game, but overall the quality of music on the first game was more interesting, I think.
"Dear video game players..."