Game Geek Alert! Touches of Weird, Done Best in Japan

[Captain Japan]

Touches of Weird, Done Best in Japan
NY Times

No one does weird quite as well as Japanese game designers and animators, who come up with concepts so bizarre that one feels a mix of admiration and astonishment, best expressed as admironishment. What other word would fit Namco's Katamari Damacy, a game in which the King of All Cosmos sends his inch-high son to earth to collect star material by rolling things up?

Specifically, the prince has a ball called a katamari that will fasten to any smaller objects it rolls over. As more things stick to the katamari, it grows larger and can absorb larger objects. You may begin by rolling up tacks, proceed to dominoes, then move on to mice, shoes, the table the tacks were on, young children, cows and trees.

[Unspoken]

Katamari looks like an incredibly fun game, and its first run sold out in the states within a few hours of being released.

The odd part here, though, is that the above screenshot--and the NYT title image--comes from Fable, a game produced and developed in the UK...

[Kuang_Grade]

While folks like engadget regularly (and generally justifiably) skewer writers in the NYTs circuits section (for the likes of a story a few months ago when the go on and on about this new thing called a USB port that they just seemed to notice), this game reviewer is just an idiot. He often sounds like he would be rather be reading up on Lacanian theory than doing something so proletarian as play a video game. Almost every time I read this clown, he gets some relatively basic concept completely dead ass wrong.

I first noticed this when he did a review comparing the Dreamcast version of Dead or Alive 2 vs the PS2 version of it, DOA2:Hardcore.

http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9C07E7D7103BF937A35752C0A9679C8B63

The PlayStation 2 version has a few visual improvements -- kicked-up snow forms a fine mist instead of discrete puffs, water splashes more realistically. But it really offers more stuff: more arenas to fight in, a couple of extra characters and a greater selection of costumes. You can dress one fighter in a cat suit and another in -- surprise -- a Catholic schoolgirl uniform with a remarkably short skirt. There is more room for arenas and characters because the PlayStation 2 handles games on DVD's, which hold far more information than CD-ROM's.

1)The Dreamcast used Disks called GD-Roms, which could hold more than CD-Roms (up to a Gigabyte, hence the G), and if he had bothered to flip it over, he would have seen that about 90% of the disk space wasn