Finished: Me and My Katamari

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 02:58:39 +0000

In my continuing obsession with Namco’s Katamari Damacy game, I’ve finished the PSP version of the game “Me and my Katamari” (僕の私の塊魂 / Boku no Watashi no Katamari Damashii). The end sequence was quite nice, with an ‘8 bit’ version of the game, as a side scroller as the credits run past. Very nice. Fear not though, there are still 2 gifts I need to collect from a couple of levels, and two songs to unlock. On the last level I even managed to roll the King and Queen into my Katamari!

Aside from the very quirky game play and characters, the music is also some of the best songs I’ve heard in a game; no cheap remixes like EA often use, these are all well themed pieces. I was disappointed this game got a lot of 7/10 reviews as I thought it added even to the PS2 Katamari Damacy game, allowing you to go indoors on outdoor levels and do a few things you couldn’t before. I sometimes wonder if living in Japan has benefits for this type of game because so many objects, sound effects are Japanese, and without knowing the context, maybe it lessens the scope. Just a thought.

It’s also really well designed as a portable game, with some later levels split into for or five sub levels of five minutes, with different weather effects thrown in. You can also name your own island, and even change how the prince looks - personally, I had him with the dragon hat and the Queen’s pink roller head…but I digress.

Anyway, now time to move on to the PS2 Katamari sequel “We love Katamari” (みんな大好き塊魂 / ‘Minna Daisuki Katamari’ which I guess is closer to ‘Everyone really likes katamari damacy’).

By the way, for those who don’t know (looking at you NA), 8-bit computers describe the technology of the early to mid-1980’s. As in, my PC has an Athlon 64, it’s a 64bit data path in the CPU, so the Atari ST was 16-bit, and before that the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 (and Nintendo Famicon I believe) were 8-bit.

Thanks also to my aforementioned gamer wife for pointing out the kanji 「塊魂」for ‘Katamari Damacy’ is entered as ‘katamari’ ‘塊’ and tamashii ‘魂’. Which is why I was struggling to enter it.

PSP v2.0 Firmware

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:09:57 +0000

With Fuji Rock Festival coming up soon I thought I better get my camera, phone and PSP charged for the trip and the event.

After a tip off that the PSP was getting a firmware update, I decided to download it and see how it was. The update adds a fair few features across several applications. The crown jewel of course is the official release of the new web browser, and with the exception of no flash support yet, it works really well - the acid test being that it successfully rendered the Slashdot site (ironically, that bastion of freedom is one of the biggest foulers of W3C standards). It even rendered this site well, and even managed to send some mail from gmail (though in truth it’s slow for anything more than URL input).

I’m not sure it’s a killer app, but I can definitely see it being useful in a coffee shop during a bored moment, and of course it’s a free update.

There’s also updates to the different types of audio and video it can take, but thus ar I haven’t really played with it, and right now, it’ll have to wait until after 3 awesome days of music festival!

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

ruuku — 2005-07-29

hey typing this from my PSP! took a while to get used to the browsing & text entry. of course being trained on typing on cellphones for years helps a lot! enjoy Fuji Rock!

Psp on Nanikore

Finished: Me and My Katamari

PSP v2.0 Firmware

Original Comments