{"id":104,"date":"2010-06-18T21:11:34","date_gmt":"2010-06-19T01:11:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/?p=104"},"modified":"2010-07-27T21:13:12","modified_gmt":"2010-07-28T01:13:12","slug":"til-you-run-out-of-cake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/?p=104","title":{"rendered":"‘Til You Run Out of Cake"},"content":{"rendered":"

While Eileene was away on an overnight business trip, I dug out Katamari Damacy<\/em> to keep me busy. It’s still fun. It’s a shame the sequels kind of fizzled, but I think that was inevitable because of what Katamari Damacy<\/em> was.<\/p>\n

Elegance in game design can be a wonderful thing. If you’ve got a game mechanic that is at once simple and capable of producing complex challenges, you hardly need anything else. See Go, Tetris<\/em>, and Pacman<\/em> for instructive examples. Add a little humor in the form of a character like the superlatively zany King of Cosmos, and you’ve got a smash hit on your hands.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, elegance has its limits, specifically that you can only exploit a simple game mechanic so far before you either run out of ideas or have to add so many new elements that you destroy the elegance. That’s why Katamari Damacy<\/em> was a one-hit wonder: the first version pretty much did everything there was to do to explore the exponential growth of a snowball. The King of Cosmos remained his wacky self, but there just wasn’t anything else for the sequels to explore without adding things that simply weren’t sufficiently katamari-ish.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to the buzz about Portal 2<\/em>. The teaser trailer<\/a> is all over the web, and you can find a few snippets of game play if you hunt around a bit. And it looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun. There is no way in hell it’s going to be as good as the original. Quite apart from the difficulty of topping near-perfection, the addition of elements like extra-bouncy gel and slippery gel and laser-pointing lenses and vacuum tubes and an ability to form your own tunnels mid-air means you’ll be learning what each new element does, rather than experiencing multiple, serial satori in discovering all the cool things your one toy<\/i> can do. That was a wonderful<\/i> element of the original, and the source of much of its success. I understand that’s how the game began: somebody made the portal gun for Half-Life<\/em>, and it got axed because it was too powerful…but developers couldn’t stop playing with it, even when they were supposed to be coding. I have every confidence Portal 2<\/i> will be fun. There will be cake. Just not the cake you want to believe in.<\/p>\n

GlaDOS, though, she’ll always be awesome, just like King of Cosmos. How could you ever doubt that? You monster.<\/p>\n

Postscript:<\/strong> I had to remove the link to the game play bits; I guess they were deliberately made available only for a limited time. Go figure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Too many bells and whistles for Portal 2?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mdlake.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}