Katamari Taters
After reading about the fun that kittykatya, eeedge, jsciv and impink are having, I put a copy of Katamari Damacy (PS2) on my Wish List, and raininva bought it for my birthday. This game is incredibly surreal and trippy, and has that wonderful “let me just try this level one more time” quality. The player must rebuild stars by rolling together clumps of loose objects on Earth – you have to try it out to understand it. Highly recommended.
Finished watching the Brent Spiner episodes of Enterprise. Pretty good overall, with the last episode the strongest. Despite its enjoyability, the arc hit some of the most tiresome cliches in Star Trek: “it only takes five guys to take over a Starfleet vessel”, “with the fate of humanity at stake, we’ll nevertheless give the bad guys all the access codes they want if they threaten one of the show’s stars”, “the Enterprise isn’t worth diddly in a real fight unless the heroes know their opponent’s Secret Weak Point(tm)”. Yes, they all made sense in the story context, I’m just tired of seeing them again.
The Meyers-Briggs-Trek personality test says that I’m an INFP, much like Kes or Elim Garak. Rain’s response was “Garak? Eww! Well… hm. Actually…”
“Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew…” – Sam Gamgee rapping about taters.
Tags: memes, star trek, videogames, web video
Katamari Damacy is thoroughly evil. I’ve played each level enough that I have 88% of the items in the game, but I’ve only got three of the “gifts” and three of the “cousins.” H loves watching the game enough that last night she chose to watch me play it over choosing a television show on her turn. Yeesh!
You’ve pin-pointed exactly what bothered me about the Brent Spiner episodes!! I still think that they are the best that Enterprise has done in more than a season, though. Enough so that I’ve put it back on the TiVo.
I don’t know who decided that three story arcs are a good idea, but I didn’t bother watching any of them until I had all three of the Brent Spiner ones, and I won’t bother with any of the Vulcan ones until I have all three.
And I strongly suspect that T’Pol won’t be dead at the end of that arc, either.
Yeah, Katamari has been quite fun for all of us at my office, too (I’m sure I mentioned it somewhere in addition you your other friends…), although now that Ratchet is out we’re hoping people play it. 🙂
One of the things that’s nice about it vs. some of the others is that you can just drop it in for a few minutes and do one or two Katamaris if necessary, whereas popping in GTA or Halo 2 or something requires a decent amount of time to be set aside. For a game that retails at $20, you really can’t go wrong with it, though. I do have to agree with the one criticism: I wish it were longer.
Right now, I am just trying to finish the levels… then I’ll go back and look for presents and cousins and bigger stars. Make A Star 7 is kicking my butt, it’s one of those where you can’t make a mistake if you want to finish!
I definitely think I’ll be watching more Trek this year, especially since we have indeed decided to give ourselves a TiVo for Xmas. I had my nits to pick about these last three, but I liked ’em, and I had some fun. The “Archer cannon” at the beginning of “Augments” was cool :p And I agree with you – though I’m not a Blalock fan, the interaction between T’Pol and Trip is the best character stuff on the show. They can’t afford to lose that.
That’s right, I knew I had left out a Damacy player. And the short levels are great for just the reasons you say – I’m way behind on a bunch of PS and Mac games because I don’t have 3-4 hour blocks of time to spend on them right now.
I’ve been thinking about picking up Ratchet, I’ve heard good reviews of it. I’ll take another look 🙂
There were two levels that I had to try repeatedly in order to get through them, and 7 was one of them. I still like the Moon best, even though you have to devote 25 minutes to it each time. Something about picking up a not-Godzilla-really was just too entertaining. You’re aiming for 300 M on that level. My best is 777 M so far.
You do know that the TiVo space really has to be divided by 3 because you do NOT want to record on the basic level. I’m not a techno-snob and I couldn’t watch the level of pixellation on it. So, a 40 hour TiVo just isn’t big enough.
Re: Enterprise. I just wish they’d lighten up a little and show some more humor. I think one of the reasons that Soong was so good was that he tried to inject some humor into his life.
One of the guys at work got stuck on star 7 (I think it’s that one) in a pretty spectacular way. He got his Katamari penned in underneath the windmill in the village: it was too small to roll over the wall around it, and to large to squeeze out through the gap in the wall next to it. Every time the windmill vane came down, stuff would just fly off the Katamari like nobody’s business. He lost about 30% of his size before he got out. Of course he lost it that round (you can’t be stuck for almost a minute and lose that much and win that one), but it was pretty satisfying the next round to pick up the windmill at the end. 🙂
Get a DirecTiVo if you have DirecTV. If you don’t, think about getting DTV instead of cable. The DTiVo can record two channels at once and there’s no issue of quality (as notes below about other TiVo units). One other note about TiVo is that it’s super-easy to updgrade the disk drive to get more space (yeah, it voids your warranty and you have to be comfortable opening up a PC, but given that it’s easy). I’m extremely satisfied with mine, and because the DTV stream is full-quality, I never see artifacting, either. DTiVo is my friend!!! 🙂
Whats taters, eh?
I tried going through that test four times, answering radically differently each time. Three of the four answers seemed like a pretty good match for me.
But there’s only *two* of me….