02550: Rolling Up Things Again


When you get into a relationship, you have the unique joy of enjoying things together. Whether it's food, sports, movies, or whatever, the shared experience is always something to celebrate in the moment and look back on fondly. And one of the quirky joys of our relationship was how Tobie introduced me to the insane world of Katamari Damacy.

Despite having gone through most iterations of the PlayStation console, I had somehow skipped Katamari Damacy. So it fell to Tobie to explain the game to me and this inevitably got me hooked. The unusual game mechanic of needing to roll-up objects until your Katamari ball reaches sufficient size to replace a missing star in the sky was a brilliant one that you can't improve on all that much and it has made for some great gaming.

Beyond the game itself, the strange yet funny characters along with the major earworm of a soundtrackn all come together to make the franchise so entertaining. Why the Queen continues to put up with the King of All Cosmos and his tendency to destroy all of creation at the start of pretty much every episode in the franchise is beyond me. And yet so the story goes and thus it falls to our diminuative prince (and his colorful cousins) to wad up the world of things to restore the sky to order.

It all doesn't have to make sense. It just needs to be fun and memorable.

And thus we can't help but dive into Katamari's various efforts to break into the mobile market as well. Games like Tap My Katamari were enough to stir up nostalgia buck lacked the sort of satisfying game experience to make it feel like a true part of the franchise. But now they've come up with  Amazing Kamari Damacy, this time being a procedural runner instead of an idle clicker game. And man this game is rather satisfying. It's not the full Katamari experience - you'll never quite get that on mobile.  But it is enough of an experience to feel close to the original with its quirky physics and cats on skateboads and Tobie and I have both found yourselves playing the game with big smiles on our faces.

It's the little things that make things all the greater. Or maybe the little things that gather up random objects until they're not so little.

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