December 2004 Archives

One of my Christmas gifts to my wife was Katamari Damacy (which translates roughly as “divine lump,” or “wad of spirit”), for the PS2. She loves it. So do I. Katamari Damacy is the weirdest, most inspired game I’ve seen in a long time.

The back story: the King of Cosmos, in an ecstatic fit, has knocked the stars from the sky, and must now replace them. He delegates the job to you, his inch-tall son, providing you with a small, knobby ball – the katamari – to accomplish the task of accumulating enough mass to replace the lost stars. The katamari has a strong gravity field; if it touches a small object, like a strawberry or thumbtack, the object will stick to the katamari. The more matter your katamari accumulates, the larger the items it will be capable of picking up, so you soon graduate from snatching loose coins to sake bottles, household pets, furniture, cars, trees, buildings, and eventually clouds and rainbows as you roll the growing ball of stuff over the hapless earth.

But you can’t just pick up everything you find. When the katamari bumps into something too large to absorb, it comes to an abrupt halt; if the impact is too jarring, it can even shake loose some of your carefully amassed material. Fortunately, size is all relative in this game. What was an obstacle a minute ago soon becomes food for the voracious monster that is your katamari.

This evolution of scale brings a fascinating dynamic to the game. Objects’ progress from obstacle to target isn’t the only consequence. Lucrative areas may become inaccessible as your katamari grows too large to fit through a gate to reach them, only to become available again once you grow large enough to roll over the fence, or even pull the fence itself into your load. A small katamari can roll across objects that act as ramps or bridges; a medium-sized katamari will instead snatch these objects up, cutting off its own progress. But bridges and ramps become unnecessary once you get large enough to roll right over rough terrain – and should therefore be absorbed.

The game masterfully keeps your attention riveted on what’s next. Players continually find themselves thinking something like, “Okay, I finally got all those oil drums I wanted, and it was fun…but look! I’m almost big enough to pick up a cow!” The difficulties of rolling a misshapen mass add a layer of strategy: do you pick up those pencils, knowing they will make your ball unwieldy, or leave them behind? If you’re sharp, you can often find an approach that will incorporate oblongs reasonably smoothly into your ball, but snagging a flagpole by one end is bad news.

Most of your missions focus on sheer mass: reach a certain minimum size by a given time limit. For variety, a few missions use a different objective. Replacing the constellation Cancer, for example, depends on how many crabs you can grab. Pick up anything you like, but only crabs affect the score. The Polaris mission asks you to reach a size of exactly 10m, and Ursa Major requires you to pick up exactly one bear, as large as possible for maximum score.

As compelling as the original gameplay is, Katamari Damacy reaches its sublime heights only through its bizarre tone. The King of Cosmos is a charming screwball, with a fashion sense straight out of Yellow Submarine, alternately praising your princely splendor and berating your size and lack of ambition. His desires swing wildly from cosmic duty to the silliest of self-indulgence. After every mission, he appears and evaluates your performance, launching successful stars into the sky for display. That his comments come in a weird pidgin only adds to the fun: “It is not good. It is not good at all. Yes, the sky must have a delicious quality, don’t you think so? And for the deliciousness, I pick: Crab! So good, so very yummy.” Add some equally strange cut scenes with a family going to a rendezvous with Dad, and you’ve got some very silly entertainment.

Katamari Damacy will never get the attention it deserves; it is far too original to draw in pre-teens who want another shooter clone. Also, be warned that the game is quite short. My wife finished it in a week, without playing obsessively, or the benefit of cheat codes. Nonetheless, anybody looking for some sophistication in their games, or willing to try something new, owes it to themselves to give this title a try.

****½ (out of 5)

I’m back in Illinois for Christmas, and it’s cold. According to weather forecast, New Jersey was supposed to get up to fifty the day after I left. It’s around ten degrees here, windchill of thirty below. Sitting near a window requires a blanket overtop a sweater. My hair is flat and stringy, partly from wearing a hat, partly from atmospheric dryness. My hands and face are chapped. Shaving is uncomfortable. My lower lip has split. It’s only a matter of time before I get a bloody nose; my boogers are starting to shade into pink.

It’s glorious.

New Jersey makes it hard for me to feel any Christmas at all, and I think it’s all because of the weather. We tend to get the same ups and downs, three days after Illinois, but the temperature is five to ten degrees warmer, and the air is always moist. Snow by Christmas is a rarity; we hardly get a good, hard frost. By the time I finish my Christmas shopping, my physiological thermometer is telling me it’s time to bring in the pumpkins after Halloween.

There’s no place like home for the holidays. For Americans, I suspect this has as much to do with climate as family. I can't feel the Christmas spirit until I'm shivering.

We gave San Juan, the card game adaptation of the popular Puerto Rico, a test run last night: two games with four players each time. I’m happy to report that, while it differs significantly from its parent, San Juan retains the involving play.

This is due in large part to the ingenious turn sequence they share. For those who haven’t seen them, both games divide turns into functional phases – good production, export, building construction, etc. – but not in fixed order. Instead, players take turns declaring one of the phases to execute. After each declaration, every player takes that action, with the declarer enjoying some bonus, such as turning out an extra good in the production phase, or selling goods for extra money in the trader phase. After each player has initiated a phase, a round ends, and the privilege of first declaring a phase in a new round advances around the table.

The subtleties of this approach to the turn sequence are delightful, and unique to Puerto Rico and San Juan, though imitations are no doubt already headed for the shelves. Timing is everything. Should you declare a production phase now, to have goods to sell in the next trader phase, or a builder phase, so another factory will be available when a production phase is inevitably declared? Will the phase sequence most productive for you benefit another player even more? And don’t forget the importance of the declarer’s bonus, which can make the difference between a major acquisition and diddly squat. If you declare one type of phase to enjoy the bonus, can you count on another player to declare the phase you actually want to occur?

Beyond the signature turn sequence, San Juan begins to diverge from Puerto Rico. San Juan revolves entirely around constructing buildings for victory points, and raising the money to pay for it. Money is cleverly represented by the cards you have in hand: each card is not only a potential building project, but one unit of money to finance building. If you wish to build, say, a sugar mill, costing two doubloons, you must simultaneously discard two other cards from your hand to pay for it. Deciding which cards to relinquish can be painful. Money comes from two major sources: goods turned out by factories in a production phase can then be sold for cash in a trader phase, and the miner and councilor phases entitle one or more players to draw new cards directly from the deck. Some buildings may supplement this income.

Every building is worth victory points; generally, more expensive buildings offer more victory points. But just as important, every building performs a useful function. A market, for example, allows you to sell goods for an extra doubloon in the trader phase, and a library doubles the privilege for declaring any phase. Some buildings work particularly well in combination; finding these combinations is part of the fun of the game. If San Juan has a weakness, it is the random nature of your hand. Coming up a doubloon short for building that coffee plant is trying, but getting stuck with a bad hand when you only need a monument to clinch a victory is maddening, especially when the other players are building monuments of their own.

Eventually, someone builds his twelfth building. The game ends at the completion of the builder phase, and victory points are totaled. Most of your points come from the buildings themselves, but a few buildings provide conditional bonuses. The most expensive buildings give extra points for other construction accomplishments, and a chapel allows a player to sacrifice a card every round for a victory point, exchanging cash for status. The game comes with a pad for tallying points, but we found it unnecessary.

Play in San Juan is fast and exciting, though the remembering to take advantage of all your building bonuses requires some attention, and it isn’t a game for small children. Ignoring labor, agriculture, and shipping, the game is less complicated than Puerto Rico: there is no labor, agriculture, or question of shipping goods directly for victory points. Between the simplification and the injection of randomness, purists may be disappointed in San Juan as an adaptation, but I found the game intense, engaging, and full of meaningful choices.

***** (out of 5)

We’ve got plenty of atrocious Christmas music; you can hear every last bit of it right now at your local mall. Be sure to stop by Spencer’s novelties for the raunchy ones. My vote for very worst goes to “Feliz Navidad,” for the sheer aesthetic affront, but an honorable mention has to go to “We Need a Little Christmas.”

The music itself isn't bad, but the manic tone is deeply disturbing; it has the forced enthusiasm of a kid who has eaten way too much sugar and wound himself up running around the house in his pajamas. Peace and goodwill are impossible in the onslaught of aggressive cheer, and the demand that you participate: We need more! Need it! More holly! more fruitcake! more sleigh bells! NownownownownowIcan’tstopmyself! I just hate this song.

So I wrote my own version.

-----
Pile up the fruitcake!
We need some plastic statues of Jesus on the lawn!
More Perry Como!
My pulse is one-oh-eight, but I can't slow it down now.

So I need my medication
Right this very minute
Get a good, stiff eggnog
Put some “specials” in it
Yes I need some medication
Right this very minute
I'm so wound up I'm incoherent,
But I'm still shopping for my parents.

Replay the Peanuts!
I love to see Charlie Brown's wretched little tree!
Rockin’ to Xmas
Deserves at least a dozen Grammies, really, I vow.

For I need some medication
I can't restrain myself
I weigh 'bout twenty stone, but
I'm dressed like Santa's elf
'Cause I need my medication
They say it's for my welf-
are. Need some medication now

Yes, I need some medication.
I sing “Rudolph” to strangers
I watched Gilligan's Xmas
My sanity's in danger
I tore down my garage
For wood to build a manger
Need my medication now.

I downloaded a demo of “Children of the Nile” last night, and tried it out during my lunch break today. It looks very promising.

CotN appeared on my radar several months ago in a brief CGW preview, but I didn’t take much notice at the time. Only on visiting the official site did I realize it is meant as a continuation of Impressions Games’ city-builder series: Caesar I-III, Pharaoh, Zeus, and the Cleopatra and Poseidon expansions. This is a good sign; the city builder line includes some of the most underrated computer games on the shelves. The heart of city builders is transportation. Although they provide various economic, political, and military goals to meet, all of them depend on getting goods, especially consumer goods, shipped in bulk to the right places.

At least that’s how it used to be. There are reasons I didn’t make the connection between CotN and the rest of the city-builder series.
CotN makes a radical departure from its forebears by abandoning a “push” delivery system, where suppliers send goods to consumers as they are produced, for a “pull” system, where consumers fetch their own supplies from producers as their stocks dwindle. That’s a huge change for a game that’s all about distribut

Don’t ask the twisty paths I took to reach this video, but the link labeled “corn starch comes alive” at HAMNCHEEZ.com is amazing. (Warning! This site has a lot of vulgarity mixed with its cooler entries. That's why I don't add a direct link here.) Basically, these guys at a fluid dynamics lab at the University of Texas at Austin mix some corn starch into a Petri dish full of water, and vibrate the dish at various frequencies to demonstrate some interesting wave forms.

First the dish is made to produce some standing waves, shaping the surface of the mixture like a brain coral. While the visual image is striking, there’s no real mystery here; it’s just a function of resonance. For the uninitiated, resonance is a sort of “piling up” of waves. If you paddle on the edge of a pool, waves spread out from the point where you touch the surface. As the waves hit the sides of the pool, they bounce back and begin crossing over one another. Where two peaks meet, you momentarily get a very high wave; where two troughs meet, you get a particularly low trough; where a peak and trough meet, they cancel each other out, leaving a momentary stillness at that point. But if you paddle at just the right frequency for the size of the pool, and the pool has a shape that allows it, those peaks and troughs keep meeting at the same places, and some areas of the pool wave like made while others remain dead still. This alignment of a wave with its own reflection is called resonance, and that’s what the Petri dish is doing. But the demonstration gets more complicated.

Using a straw to blow a pea-sized depression in the surface, the presenter shows how a hole in the fluid can be part of the stable wave form: the starch mixture doesn’t flow back together, but maintains that dent right in the middle. I was surprised to learn that this form could be stable, but I have faith that I could work out the math behind it, with a lot of time and my old 8.03 book handy. Differential equations can be complicated and waves can take a lot of shapes.

Then there’s a clip showing the interactions of three such holes: cohesion and gravity cause two of the holes to pull together, but the vibrations of the dish force them away from each other; they seem to bounce off one another. I can’t confidently explain why, though I can offer a few plausible guesses. Maybe small holes are stable, but a larger hole isn’t. Maybe the holes can only exist in certain areas of the wave form, and when they drift too far, they move back toward the center. If that’s true, the holes aren’t reacting to one another at all, but simply pushing away from an unstable point somewhere between.

Up until this point, the movie is fairly familiar ground for me. I may not be able to explain it in detail, but it still makes some kind of sense. But the movie finishes with something that, frankly, boggles my mind. At 120Hz, the presenter blows another hole in the starch mixture and steps back. Briefly, the hole expands, and it looks like the walls of the hole will widen to the edge of the dish. Instead, the walls then climb out of the mixture, much higher than they were blown by the straw, and begin to grow and split into a writhing mass of shapes, maybe half an inch high, which spread to cover the entire dish. Okay, so the energy for this lifelike behavior comes from the persistent vibration, but…what the hell? I would never have believed it possible without seeing it, and nothing in my physics or differential equations classes ever prepared me to explain something like this. I’m not even sure I could absorb an explanation were it given to me.

The Rules

1. An oath is binding.
2. The Rules may change by agreement at any time.
3. Details unspecified admit to any interpretation.
4. Silence implies agreement.
5. Boons are limitless.
6. A debt of kindness must be repaid.
7. Warnings are to be heeded.
8. Signs that a contest has begun are reliable.
9. No trespassing.
10. Sometimes the dragon wins.
11. Treasure unguarded is forfeit.
12. A thief who steals from a thief is pardoned.
13. Victory guarantees no further protection.
14. Extortion is permissible.
15. Any excuse will do for a bully.
16. Created is slave to the creator.
17. Home ground is an advantage.
18. Sharing a meal, a drink, a roof, or a bed is a sacred act.
19. Evil, once welcomed, cannot be easily dismissed.
20. One may not harm host, guest, or kin unless first wronged by him.
21. There is power in the unusual.
22. There is power in the precious.
23. There is power in names.
24. Power may be kept hidden.
25. There are larger games than yours.
26. There are smaller games than yours.
27. Local rules may not be global.
28. Rigged games (eventually) fail disastrously.
29. The Devil cheats.
30. It is not meet to joke with demons.
31. There are things mortals should not have.
32. Nature is wild, and trumps all.

Further updated the recommended reading list: Spirited Away and various stories growing out of Larry Niven's "Not Long Before the End."