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Katamari Damacy REROLL - Katamari Mambo de, lalala yowasete raocow!

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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - hoshi ni negai wo kakeru toki, kimi ni o todoke katamari

Post by Karatekid5 »

I took a look at the timing changes between Reroll and the original, and at most some stages got a minute added on. Overall this shouldn't have a big impact on the game's difficulty. If anything, the bit of extra leniency is what the constellation stages really needed!
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - hoshi ni negai wo kakeru toki, kimi ni o todoke katamari

Post by thatguyif »

xnamkcor wrote: 3 years ago What is there to see or do in Portugal?
Where is KobaBeach when you need him

(I mean, I could answer, but he's a better person to answer)
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - hoshi ni negai wo kakeru toki, kimi ni o todoke katamari

Post by xnamkcor »

thatguyif wrote: 3 years ago Something worth noting that's a distinct technical difference between the REROLL versions: The PC version seems to frontload the level right when you are speaking the King of All Cosmos, which is why there's this pause at the start, and then the level loads very quick right after that. The Switch version does not do this, retaining the original PS2 mechanism of loading the level after the King speaks to you. On its own, that doesn't seem like much of a big deal.

However, because of this, the PC version changed a key way the game is presented: In the original PS2 version, the game masked its level loading time by having the King of All Cosmos list all the things he was sending to Earth. It was one of those little details that made the original game really charming. The Switch version retains this little element, even going so far as to show the entirety of the list of things the King sent down. (One could argue it was hiding the Switch version's own loading issues, but that's another matter) On the other hand, the PC version simply loads the level at the earliest opportunity (right while the King is saying "Sending things to Earth...")

Stuff like this and other things I've observed in raocow's playthrough make me suspect the PC and Switch versions were developed by two separate teams, with the former going for optimization, and the latter seeking to retain the spirit/feel of the original PS2 version.
As someone who had at least one PS2 with a non-working optical drive, using a HDD to load games almost completely ruins most the loading gimmicks of most games.
thatguyif wrote: 3 years ago
xnamkcor wrote: 3 years ago What is there to see or do in Portugal?
Where is KobaBeach when you need him

(I mean, I could answer, but he's a better person to answer)
Find a post by him and quote him and copy paste the quote code to this topic and see if the forum sends him a notice?
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - hoshi ni negai wo kakeru toki, kimi ni o todoke katamari

Post by thatguyif »

That was rhetorical :P

I mean, as I said, I could answer. I loved visiting Portugal, having been there twice. Both Lisboa and Porto are beautiful cities. I have friends who have done residencies in Lisboa and Faro. Lisboa has a surprisingly strong expat art/music scene (always been a minor dream of mine to liaise for a venue like ZDB or something). It is also a place where you should buy bread or cake, because the Portuguese are secretly the best bakers in Europe. There are a lot of good things going for it, though there are certainly downsides (as I'm sure KobaBeach or NastCF would certainly tell you).

That said, forgot to mention this to raocow: The King's dialogue for each level only changes after you get the Royal Present, assuming there's one in the level.
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - Hidamari sansan, kokoro wa haremoyou

Post by Crow »

naaaaaa na na na na naaa naaa naaa eternal suffering :rao:
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - Hidamari sansan, kokoro wa haremoyou

Post by Piesonscreations »

I had to make something for this LP, so I did.
https://twitter.com/Piesonscreation/sta ... 9511257089
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - Hidamari sansan, kokoro wa haremoyou

Post by Peliptia »

woah〜just catching up with this series⚊and i absolutely adore the wacky minimalism of everythings✧゚ it obviously knows its going for surrealism but its just so so charming and cute about it! i love it♡🎔 now im super duper looking forward to seeing more cus ive never played any of this series before* ͙܍
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - Hidamari sansan, kokoro wa haremoyou

Post by Crow »

Piesonscreations wrote: 3 years ago I had to make something for this LP, so I did.
https://twitter.com/Piesonscreation/sta ... 9511257089
this is perfect, thank you
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - Hidamari sansan, kokoro wa haremoyou

Post by xnamkcor »

Metric can be confusing at first, but 25cm is 1/4 100cm, not 1/2.

PS: The idea was that maybe raocow remembered something from his report about tourism. But it's completely possible that the report focused so sharply on the industry itself, it never included any tourist destinations.
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - Hidamari sansan, kokoro wa haremoyou

Post by Reecer7 »

oh no my fun fact was wrong and now i've made raocow the fool
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - Hidamari sansan, kokoro wa haremoyou

Post by Piesonscreations »

Cyril wrote: 3 years ago this is perfect, thank you
Glad you liked it :mgmn:
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by Piesonscreations »

Having made that 3D Demo Damacy model got me thinking about the way the PS2 handled this game. Like, the models have always been pretty low-poly, but it's still a lot of models to process. Would be nice to get a look into how they achieved that, but I don't think there's much info on that kind of stuff for this game. Hell, there's not even a model rip for the prince that I could find.
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by Leet »

I believe the smallest items despawn as you grow to points where they wouldn't be useful, so the total number of objects is kept in a manageable state
Well it is a decent hack but sometime its just too repetitif there no level that actually pop in your face and your like oh yeah that level they all ressemble themselves and just monster along the way.
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by Piesonscreations »

Leet wrote: 3 years ago I believe the smallest items despawn as you grow to points where they wouldn't be useful, so the total number of objects is kept in a manageable state
That would seem like a reasonable thing to do, although there's probably more optimization with how they're scattered all around and loaded, I'd imagine. Also, I wonder if this remaster takes all of that into consideration, since systems like the PS4 could obviously handle everything this game would throw at it, and with the fact that they updated the model for the prince and (i believe) the katamari, to be rounder. Which, as a side note, I kinda prefer how the prince's face looked in the original, but not a big deal.
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by thatguyif »

Piesonscreations wrote: 3 years ago
Leet wrote: 3 years ago I believe the smallest items despawn as you grow to points where they wouldn't be useful, so the total number of objects is kept in a manageable state
That would seem like a reasonable thing to do, although there's probably more optimization with how they're scattered all around and loaded, I'd imagine. Also, I wonder if this remaster takes all of that into consideration, since systems like the PS4 could obviously handle everything this game would throw at it, and with the fact that they updated the model for the prince and (i believe) the katamari, to be rounder. Which, as a side note, I kinda prefer how the prince's face looked in the original, but not a big deal.
Optimization I doubt played a role in item placement. A large number of items are placed with pathing in mind, to give the player a sense of direction (or, in a certain upcoming level or two, an obstacle) with how they roll. The despawning is the more practical solution: Not only do smaller items despawn, but they are "absorbed" into the katamari. This is to help make up for smaller items being harder to pick up (since they need to contact either the katamari or an item attached to it for a pick-up to be successful). In turn, as we will see in later levels, larger items get spawned into the game with each growth point (which occurs at size thresholds with a flourish coming from the katamari and a slight camera shift).

Anyway, songs!

"LONELY ROLLING STAR" is probably the song most people remember when they think of the soundtrack. I've always liked it myself. It kind of really contains the bubbly spirit of the game in a single song. The lyrics themselves are somewhat sad, in which a girl pines for her lover who is rolling a katamari but will cheer him on regardless. Interestingly, the song spawned two sequels that appeared later in the series, "Sayonara Rolling Star" and "Lonely Rolling No More."



Today's song is "Que Sera Sera," very much a traditional pop song that Frank Sinatra would've been able to sing. Fittingly, the singer himself is not too far detached from that period: It's Charlie Kosei, one of the original composers to the Lupin the 3rd anime series. He was the guy who laid the foundation for its particular musical style throughout its animated history. While this is the first example, it's evident throughout the soundtrack that Namco went out of its way to get figures from a lot of the developers' childhoods to perform. It's a really fascinating aspect that doesn't get talked about as much in discussions of the music. More on this later.
Fun fact: This is the only track in the entire Katamari series that's sung entirely in English.

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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by kitikami »

"Que Sera Sera" was always the song i remembered best from this game. Maybe it's because of the English lyrics so it was the only one i could tell they were singing about katamari stuff, but i also just really like it

It's kind of funny that it's the only one in English but also one of the only ones that doesn't have an English or English-translated title.
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by AuraLancer »

Yeah, the Prince's face looks really weird in this game. He looks very different from all of the other games.
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by Karatekid5 »

AuraLancer wrote: 3 years ago Yeah, the Prince's face looks really weird in this game. He looks very different from all of the other games.
Agreed! I love how the Prince is much more expressive now, but I still prefer the old faces over the new ones.

Que Sera Sera is such a gem, they really went super diverse with the musical styles, which really suits the spirit of the game!
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by Ditocoaf »

Leet wrote: 3 years ago I believe the smallest items despawn as you grow to points where they wouldn't be useful, so the total number of objects is kept in a manageable state
Piesonscreations wrote: 3 years agoThat would seem like a reasonable thing to do, although there's probably more optimization with how they're scattered all around and loaded, I'd imagine. Also, I wonder if this remaster takes all of that into consideration, since systems like the PS4 could obviously handle everything this game would throw at it, and with the fact that they updated the model for the prince and (i believe) the katamari, to be rounder. Which, as a side note, I kinda prefer how the prince's face looked in the original, but not a big deal.
I got curious about maps of these levels, and I found this amazing site where you can look around videogame maps emulated from the actual game data: noclip.website

One of the things you can see in Katamari Darmacy is that levels are stored as 2-4 different stages. noclip.website calls them "areas", but they're more like size-based variants of the map. I poked around for a while and got a feel for how it works.

Each stage includes the entire level's unmovable landscape, but has different items loaded up. Early stages include all sizes of items, but only in part of the level, leaving the inaccessible parts of the level empty. Later stages have items scattered through more of the level, but some of the smallest items disappear from the early parts, and it drops some details from textures. Those "XX cm" fences always block off areas that start out empty, and whenever you reach one of those sizes, the game pauses to tell you "you're as big as 100 sausages". Presumably that's when it's loading the next stage, carrying over information about all the items that persist.
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by kitikami »

By the way, this game is a perfect unifier of the All the Megamen/Sonics because it has Metools and you play as an invincible rolling ball of destruction.
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by thatguyif »

kitikami wrote: 3 years ago It's kind of funny that it's the only one in English but also one of the only ones that doesn't have an English or English-translated title.
Actually, it may surprise you to know that "que sera sera" is only said in English, with its roots in a heraldic motto of some English noble family. The phrase is based on a heavily pidgined archaic Italian phrase "che sera, sera." In modern Spanish (as many people claim it comes from), the statement is grammatically incorrect, as is the Italian variant. (For those wondering, the actual phrases are "Lo que será será" and "quel che sarà sarà," respectively.)
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by Piesonscreations »

You know, with the prince being the king of all cosmo's son and all that, does that mean that eventually he too will get huge and buff?
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Re: Katamari Damacy REROLL - I wanna wad you up into my life

Post by Reecer7 »

in my experience, MAS5 is the first level that really penalizes you for entering a new area as soon as possible, so it's a good thing raocow modified his strategy a lil' bit and stuck around on the hilltop
Piesonscreations wrote: 3 years ago You know, with the prince being the king of all cosmo's son and all that, does that mean that eventually he too will get huge and buff?
i like to imagine space royalty grow with their ego, and since the king is afraid to lose his little boy, he must constantly demean him to keep him a pipsqueak.
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