Twenty years after his quirky project Katamari Damacy delighted the video game industry, Keita Takahashi is an independent designer who receives no royalties for his debut work.
I love Katamari. It’s vibrant, it’s weird and once you start rolling you get into the zone and time flies.
I’m still playing the Katamari games regularly.
We Love Katamari is probably the best in the series IMO. Beautiful Katamari was later released for the 360, but felt much shorter and really didn’t add much. A lot of the content in that one was locked behind DLC, too.
Beautiful Katamari was the first time I recall seeing controversy about on-disc DLC. You had to buy a few stages, including the one they advertised the most that went from like 1cm to rolling up the sun iirc, and all the purchase did was toggle a key that allowed you to play the levels which were already in your CD. It’s normal now, but at the time I remember people hating it.
For what it’s worth I liked We Love Katamari (and the original, which I only played once the re-release came out) much more than Beautiful Katamari! They tried to mix it up in Beautiful Katamari where you not only needed to roll a sufficiently large Katamari, but also it needed to be made of specific categories of items, and while this is fun for a few levels it ends up being boring when they do it for almost the whole game.
I love Katamari. It’s vibrant, it’s weird and once you start rolling you get into the zone and time flies. I’m still playing the Katamari games regularly.
And FYI there are two recent remastered releases:
We Love Katamari is probably the best in the series IMO. Beautiful Katamari was later released for the 360, but felt much shorter and really didn’t add much. A lot of the content in that one was locked behind DLC, too.
Beautiful Katamari was the first time I recall seeing controversy about on-disc DLC. You had to buy a few stages, including the one they advertised the most that went from like 1cm to rolling up the sun iirc, and all the purchase did was toggle a key that allowed you to play the levels which were already in your CD. It’s normal now, but at the time I remember people hating it.
For what it’s worth I liked We Love Katamari (and the original, which I only played once the re-release came out) much more than Beautiful Katamari! They tried to mix it up in Beautiful Katamari where you not only needed to roll a sufficiently large Katamari, but also it needed to be made of specific categories of items, and while this is fun for a few levels it ends up being boring when they do it for almost the whole game.