• SuperDuper@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • AlolanYoda
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • AlolanYoda
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    1 year ago

    Oh my god, the creator of Katamari is (tangentially) related to the creation of the messaging program Slack. I was not expecting that.

    Makes it so much more interesting when I think back to all of the days I turned off Slack to go relax with some Katamari Damacy Reroll!

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    “I cannot forget that moment when everyone started laughing,” Takahashi recalled from his office in the garage of the San Francisco home where he lives with his wife, Asuka Sakai, a composer, and their two children.

    A demo at the 2003 Game Developers Conference in San Jose caught the attention of industry leaders at a time when the market was mostly focused on multiplayer shooters like Medal of Honor and Halo.

    There was no guaranteed global market for a game with a flamboyant deity known as the King of All Cosmos, who transforms katamaris into stars, replacing the constellations he accidentally hip-checked out of existence during a drunken pirouette across the universe.

    “It feels like Katamari Damacy escaped Japan by accident,” said Paul Galloway, a collection specialist at the Museum of Modern Art who helped establish its video game program, which includes Takahashi’s debut.

    Instead, Takahashi moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to help the co-founder of Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, develop a massively multiplayer online game called Glitch.

    The experiment fizzled out within a year, but the development team he left behind continued working on the internal communications system it had created for the game — a messaging program now called Slack.


    The original article contains 1,273 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!