The Prince from Katamari Damacy
Tara and I are certainly not video game junkies by any means, but we finally bought a Playstation 2 a few months ago (on Massachusetts’ Tax Free Day). We’ve been buying mostly used or re-issued games, so nothing I write about video games will likely be a surprise to anyone. The one game we bought new was Katamari Damacy. It was cheap, the concept was just too weird to pass up, and man was it worth it.
Unless you have absolutely no interest in video games, or you live on another planet, you already know the premise, but I’ll repeat it anyway. The King of the Cosmos has accidentally knocked all the stars out of the sky. As his son, the Prince, it’s your job to collect enough stuff from the Earth to recreate the stars. You do this by rolling around a ball (the katamari). As you touch things, if the katamari is large enough, they will stick to it. The larger your katamari, the larger things that stick to it. In most levels, the goal is to make the katamari as large as possible, but there are other challenges, as well.
There is a certain hypnotic, serene quality to the game, which sounds odd since that makes it sound boring, but that is certainly not the case. I absolutely love this game. I didn’t think I would get a lot of replay value out of it, but I’ve completed the whole game, and I keep going back to the older levels to try again. There is also a head to head mode which is pretty entertaining, and the soundtrack is the best I’ve ever heard in a video game.