I’m going to do two games here. One for “best graphics” and one for “best art style”.

For “best graphics”, in recent memory, I’m going to have to go with Final Fantasy XIII. It’s pretty. It’s shiny. It’s everything that Final Fantasy is known for all wrapped up in a pretty pretty package that makes me want to lick the screen and purr at it.

…Okay maybe not that far, but you know what I mean. >.>

It’s got the visuals that the Final Fantasy has become known for: the oddly colored monsters, the heroes with candy-colored hair, the drop dead gorgeous backgrounds. I mean, even the ugly things are somewhat visually appealing! It’s so gorgeously styled, all I want to do is sit there and just sigh at the pretty pictures on my screen while I’m playing it. /sigh

But for “best art style”, I’m going to have to go with the Katamari Damacy series. The first game, which came out on the Playstation 2, almost felt lo-res when I first started playing it. It’s blocky, it’s almost candy-colored, and it just works. It’s a funky little game and needed a funky style. They’ve kept the same style through the rest of the games, and tweaked it with the latest iteration for the PS3. But it’s always immediately recognizable as “Oh, that’s a Katamari game!” Brand recognition: it’s not just the name, it’s also how it looks, people!

Hmm, well if you go by “protagonist that makes me smile and happy when I play it”, then that’s easy.

Through all the games, the Prince is dealing with his dad, doing whatever he tells him, even if it makes no sense (which is rather common in the games, really), and cheerfully goes about his way, doing it all. And you get to push a ball around that makes things stick to it, eventually even people. People that scream in terror (and occasionally ones that scream in delight). He’s got a life. He’s got purpose. He’s pantsless and 2cm tall. He just makes me giggle. Oh and then roll after that girl that’s racing off screaming as a giant ball of doom comes after her with all of her friends already stuck to it. /cackle

Yep, this week is one I’ve been looking forward to for months. It’s Dragon*con time! What is Dragon*Con? To quote them:

Dragon*Con is the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the US.

Translation? 30,000 geeks, freaks, furries, nerds, and gamers (and the people that love them!) in downtown Atlanta, GA for Labor Day weekend. Oh yeahhhh. Looking forward to seeing the guys from Ghost Hunters, Adam Savage, and the cast of Farscape and B5. And then there’s the authors, friends, artists, and just plain people-watching. God I love this con.

Instead of getting hotels rooms this year (hey, money’s tight!), we’re going to be staying with friends at their house. As part of my “thank you!” and bribe, I’m baking cookies for them. Oh and bagels. Can’t forget the bagels. Thursday we’ll drive over and end up having dinner with them and another couple we know that are coming in for the con. Friday night, we’ll be having dinner with an author friend that’s coming in for the con. Hopefully they haven’t double booked her for panels this time like they keep trying to do. Saturday is going to be insane racing around in the afternoon to get to everything we want to. Sunday’s gonna be a bit more relaxed, then Monday we drive home, complete with a kitten in the back of the car.

Why a kitten? Well the friends we’re staying with took in a stray cat, only it was a soon-to-be momma cat. She gave birth to a healthy litter, and one of my employees fell in love with the pictures of one of the kittens. So we’re transporting him to his new home when we come home. Yey for kitties with homes!

And then there’s this weekend. Saturday, during the raid, a couple of us were chatting and decided to hook up on Sunday to run “old world” heroics. So Sunday afternoon, Jared and I logged in, grabbed the others, and went racing around Burning Crusade picking up achievements. We started around 2pm, at 5:30 took a 2 hour break, then finished up around 10:30-11pm. That was 2 Hellfire Penninsula heroics, 3 Coilfang heroics, 2 Auchindoun heroics, 2 CoT heroics, 1 Magister’s Terrace heroic, and 3 TK heroics. Plus, I didn’t have the rep for the key to get into the TK instances, so add in 3 regular Mech runs to get the rep, and a regular MT run since I hadn’t ever been to it on Wrenn to get keyed for heroic mode. Oy! But damn it was fun!

So this is what my week looks like right now:
1. Knit like it’s no one’s business to finish one project
2. Go to Kara for a fun run (how fast CAN a bunch of lvl 80s cruise through there with bad jokes and puns a’flyin’?) tonight
3. Finish laundry tonight
4. Clean kitchen tonight
5. Start baking bagels and cookies tomorrow
6. Settle who’s babysitting the cats while we’re gone
7. Raid tomorrow night
8. Finish baking bagels and cookies Wednesday
9. Re-clean kitchen Wednesday
10. Doublecheck laundry pile to make sure it didn’t regrow Wednesday
11. Pack Wednesday (make sure to take items to be signed, multiple books from multiple people, DVDs, etc, plus clothes, etc., gifts, baked goods, batteries for camera, cables for eletronics we’re taking, Katamari games, PSPs, extra books to read, plus knitting for the drive)
12. Clean out car trunk of excess crap Wednesday
13. Attempt to go to bed “early” Wednesday night
14. Wake up at “deargodnoit’stooearlydon’tmakemedriiiiiiive!” on Thursday and get this whole thing started!

…

Damn. I’m gonna be busy. o.O /gets back to the knitting frenzy

Katamari Damacy US Release Box

Oh Katamari Damacy, what a wonderful game you are. A simple premise: push a ball around the enviroment, causing things to stick to it, making the ball get bigger and bigger things can stick to it. When I got the first game shortly after it came out, I was bemused at first, then quickly obsessed. The same thing happened when We (Heart) Katamari came out. Pretty much by now, I’ve played all the Katamari games other than the one on the Xbox 360, and I still love them. Playing the Katamari games puts me in a “happy place”. There are other games that give me the same “happy place” reaction: Diablo 2, Flower, Final Fantasy 10 and 12, with some hits from 11. But for whatever reason, Katamari is my “I need a quick fix of feel good, gimme the controller!” game.

Part of it is the silliness of it all. The first time people played the US game, there were quite a few posts on various forums asking “Seriously? Oh dear lord, did Namco release something this badly translated? Cos this King or whatever is saying some really weird crap.” Then the people that could get copies of the Japanese game translated and posted, saying “Believe it or not, it’s not Engrish. This is just how it is.”

The King of All Cosmos gets tanked. Whatever excuse he comes up with, please, we all know better here. He gets tanked and on his happy “Wheee!” moment, rampages through the sky, taking out all the stars and planets. Oops. My mom always joked that she had a kid (me) so she could get free tech support whenever she needed it. Apparently the King had the same idea, cos he sends his 2 centimeter tall son (the player) out to go make right what the King made wrong. Roll stuff up! Roll lots of stuff up! And if you get it X big in Y amount of time, awesome! we’ll turn it into a star!

Okay that’s all well and good, but now you get to the part that I love: the rolling. It’s not a static environment you’re going through here. This is a living, moving, fleeing, attacking, shrieking environment. I admit it: when I get big enough to roll over the people in the world (did I mention you’re rolling on Earth? Mwhaha), I giggle when they shriek and their arms and legs are flailing off the side of the katamari. Each element you roll up makes it’s own sound. All the humans are slightly different. There’s multiple types of housecats, and each one is slightly different. The butterflies have a sound they make. Tacks, jacks, tuna cans, bento boxes, they all make a distinctive noise when they get run over. And when you get big enough, some elements, animals and humans at the forefront, will flee from you for fear of getting rolled up. And some, a little more aggressive than others, will attack. The cows? Not so much with the attacking. that bull, tho? Oh yeah, until you reach a size to snag him, he’s gonna attack you if you get near.

Once you’ve completed a katamari and the King’s turned it into a star, you can go through the collection screen and look at what you’ve picked up new. Each of these objects has a description. And when they say “Buildings” catagories, we aren’t talking about “Building (Small)” and “Building (Large)” here. We’re talking “Hoshino House”, “Takahashi House”, “Nissan House”. There’s tons of buildings, all named. Office buildings, stores, homes, you name it. It’s weirdly insanely detailed in a way.

Katamari in rolling action

And then there’s how everything looks. All the games have bright colors, heavily simplified models, almost a weird Lego feeling to them. But they’re charming. They’re fun and funky. They make me smile. (It’s prolly also the wiggling legs sticking out from the katamari, but we already know I need help in that respect.)

And the music: I love the music. No, that’s not right. I ADORE the music. I have the soundtracks from the first two games and play them often, probably annoyingly often for the boyfriend’s taste. Mwhaha. The music, like the game, is quirky, odd, and bouncy. In the first game, each stage has it’s own song, but in the second game, you can choose which song you want to be playing for each level. Usually I just leave it on whatever is “suggested” for that level.

So why the hell am I singing the praises of a game that first came out in 2004? For a couple of reasons:

1. It was the best $20 I ever spent on a PS2 game.
2. It’s got a new release coming out soon.

Yep, a new release. A demo got released to the Japanese Playstation store, and Phil gave me the directions on how to get a Japanese Playstation account. Oh sweet sweet demos! I resisted the impulse to try and search for more demos of stuff I know are never going to get released into the US and went to play with the Katamari Tribute (or how it’s being called in the US, Katamari Forever) demo.

It’s only two levels and rather short ones at that. One was to use the katamari like a sponge to soak up water and the water the enviroment, changing it from sand to green and lush. You had 5 minutes to water 800 square meters, which was easily met. The other level a basic katamari level to pick stuff up and get from 10 centimeters to 20 centimeters in 5 minutes. Again, no biggie. The controls were the same: still nice and responsive with a new addition of what they’re calling a “Prince Hop”. Flip the Sixaxis controller up and the whole katamari bounces. Prolly a nice way to try and get you over some of those sticky bumps you might not have been able to get over in previous games. There’s also a “gravity well” bonus: roll into a tall purple column of light and suddenly you just need to get near stuff and it’s sliding over to you to stick to the katamari. The music was a similar vein to what they’ve had in previous games, with one of them being a remix of a previous song.

And then there’s the  graphics. Glorious 1080p, and a hint of the new visual effects that you can play with in the full game. The water level was the standard Katamari graphics, just much much shinier than I’ve seen. /happy sigh The other level, tho, used an effect so the whole world looked like it was drawn and painted. It was fascinating and I can’t wait to see the rest of the effects in the full game.

So yeah, I prolly went on way too long about a game, but dammit, I love me some Katamari. When this comes out, the PS3 is mineminemine and no way in hell am I letting it go for at least a week. Can’t wait!