bedeviled mojo slop

One of my Christmas presents this year was a brand spanking new PlayStation 2 (slim design). Moblog shot of the actual console when it arrived. Anyhoo...

I basically had to have this machine because some colleagues wouldn't shut their pie holes about one particular game, Katamari Damacy. Damn them to hell. I'm paying the price. Thankfully I was lucky enough to get one of the machines from ToysRUs.com for the $149.95 price. It was selling on eBay before Christmas for like $225. Tack on $25 that people were charging for shipping and folks out there were paying $100 more for the console alone.

The last console I bought was the Nintendo 64 and the last console I owned before that was the 8-bit Nintendo. Basically I'm not really a console person, but there are certain types of games that I really like. I'm a big fan of the Mario Bros. series and I really like the Mario Kart type games. Mario Kart 64 was a total blast and I really had fun beating the game forward and backward.

Back to Katamari Damacy ... I'm hooked. And after not playing console games for years now, this is probably the best re-introduction into the world and damned abyss that is the console and console games. The basic premise of the game is as follows.

When the King of All Cosmos accidentally destroys all the stars in the sky, he orders you, his pint-sized princely son, to put the twinkle back in the heavens above. How, you ask? By rolling everything and anything on earth into clumps, so he can replace what's missing in space.

I'm seriously here folks, if you don't think rolling around a giant clump of stuff can be fun, think again. The controls are piss simple. Basically you use the thumbsticks on the controller to navigate around and control the clump and your character. No weirdo button combinations to remember or anything like that. That's probably what makes the game so fun is that it basically requires very little skill from the player(s).

There are skill levels to create stars and there are skill levels to create constellations. For example, to create Cancer, you basically have to roll around and clump up as many crabs as you can in the world. It's insane! My peeps tell me there's also a level where you have to create a moon. You've got 35 minutes to create the moon. I forget how big you have to roll your clump, but you basically get to the point where eventually you're able to roll up clouds! Seriously, you can kill some time quick as anything with this game.

And then there's the soundtrack. These guys really did it right. They knew right away that the theme song was so infectious that the music on starting the game is some guy actually humming the theme song. Wow ... just wow.

Unfortunately I think there are only 9 star levels and like 5 or 6 constellations. But hey, the game is $20. And yeah, I'll probably be one of those dorks there at 12:01 AM the day the follow-up to the game, Everyone Loves Katamari Damacy, is released.

Na-NAAAAAAA ...