Hall - Katamari Damacy

And oh, We have an idea.

If the katamari is large enough,

Well be sure to turn it into a star.

The King of All Cosmos

If I were to ask you , What is Katamari Damacy about?, it would be no surprise if you started telling me about the games goofy plot: A tiny, hammer-headed Prince is sent to Earth on a mission to reconstruct the night sky after his father, the bossy King of All Cosmos, destroyed all of the stars on a drunken bender. Katamari , you might tell me, is a game about putting the stars back together again.

But what Katamari is really about is how you form those stars: by rolling a sticky, bumpy ball around and picking up objects as you run into them. You and the ball are controlled by the two analog thumb sticks on the PlayStation 2 controller. Push both forward to go forward, or push one back and one forward to turn. That simple mechanic, hinted at in the games opening screen, is at the core of all the fun to follow.

As the five-centimeter-high Prince, you begin the first level, Make a Star 1, in an ordinary Japanese home, on a tabletop littered with small objects like thumbtacks, dice, stamps, matches, and erasers. The art style is blocky and childlike, and rendered with a cartoony economy of detail that imbues the objects with humor.

The bowls, teapots, and cans of condensed milk surrounding you are massive compared to you and your katamaris current size. But with each object thats added to it, the katamari grows. And the larger the katamari gets, the bigger the objects that will stick to it.

For now you are confined to the living room of the house, with potential objects to roll up generally adhering to things you might find in a regular home: pushpins, memory cards, pencils. Everything has a fairly simplistic geometry, although some objects are longer or bulkier than others.

By rolling around and either picking up or colliding with objects, the player quickly gets a sense of what things are likely to stick to the katamari at a given size, versus which things theyll merely bounce off of. Generally, much larger objects, such as phones or books, form part of the level environment, providing barrier walls or ramps from low to high areas.

Growing in scale as you pick up objects, you roll off the table, and begin to move around the floor. Larger things, like lipsticks, batteries, coins, ping pong balls, and mahjong tiles, begin to stick to your katamari. All around you are animal obstacles, including snails and butterflies; getting too close to one sounds a warning alarm.

Rolling your katamari over a small object picks it up with a satisfying sproing -y noise, but collide with an object thats too big for you and a few pieces will drop off of your katamari, reducing its size. If the oversized object is one of those animal obstacles, it can knock you off course, scattering your katamari pieces. But if youre almost big enough to roll it up, the animal will bounce and fall away from you, momentarily stunned. Later, you can do this to humans on the street, who will scream and run away from you as you chase them down, a cartoonish reaction thats more funny than frightening.

You eventually learn to test whether smaller objects are the right size for collecting by colliding with them. When an object appears to be a likely candidate, but is slightly too big for the katamari to pick up, it wiggles when the katamari hits it, and the controller vibrates. Often this interaction proves to be a fun challenge, as players scout nearby for other, smaller objects they can collect, in order to roll up the tantalizingly close item, which has taken on a new desirability.

Once your katamari has reached ten centimeters in size (roughly the size of an in-game cucumber), the screen shimmers for a moment as the camera angle adjusts to be slightly higher and farther back. Now youre able to roll past the houses barriers and out into the garden, where you encounter more objects like dandelions, pairs of glasses, paintbrushes, vegetables, magnets, plates of chicken drumsticks, and more.

When youre in the house and garden levels, the objects you encounter are fairly commonplace, like food, books, or clothing. Nothing ever feels completely out of place, although theyre sometimes playfully absurd in their placement or arrangementa massive stack of piggy banks, for example, or a row of golf balls that also contains one bird egg.