Reviews// Katamari Damacy

Now’s the season to be jolly blah blah blah. So why are all the best games released in the festive period so bloody violent? As much as we do love killing stuff and stabbing things and making blood squirt out of creatures we’ve never seen before, the last few weeks have been a bit much. Halo 2, San Andreas, Half-Life 2 and a general obsession with firing bits of metal into the bodies of others seem to have taken over our lives. But still fending off those psychotic tendencies, as it has done for the last few months, is one of our favourite games of the year – Namco’s Katamari Damacy for PS2.

Earlier in the week, SPOnG broke the rather sad news that Katamari Damacy is not to receive a PAL release, having already hit the shops in Japan and the US earlier in the year. And although Namco has promised that Katamari Damacy 2 will get a European release, this still still seems hugely unfair. The original is incredibly cool; and now you can't have it (unless you're import-inclined). But SPOnG's also incredibly cool, and so we do have it; and that leads us inexorably towards our first full-length version of our regular ‘cool things that you can’t have’ news feature. Bring your faces over here, and we’ll grind them into this review with some salt and lemon-juice, cruelly emphasising the unparalleled joy of what you’re missing.

The first cool thing that you won't be able to do is take control of a fancifully conceived alien, Damacy: a green-suited fellow with a very wide head; and while that design has clearly been plucked out of thin air following a particularly tangy cheese-dream, the main gameplay principle has evidently been inspired by the life and times of a hyperactive dung beetle. Fusing the notions of sphericalism and adhesivity, without ever once resorting to cheap jokes about sticky balls, the sublimely simple gameplay is as more-ish as cocaine flavoured Pringles. Its uncompromising originality scooped it the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization’s 2004 Good Design Award, and yet confusingly, most of Europe has been denied even the merest glimpse of these delights. That's just one of the many totally insane and incomprehensible things about Katamari Damacy.