Computerized D&D games are basically an exercise in trying to ignore all the weird D&D edge case stuff that makes it actually fun to play on tabletop and just powering up some obvious upgrade path in a Diabloesque manner to slay everyone
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Katamari Damacy: Still the most wonderful game of all time. I really hope they rerelease We <3 Katamari as well because I would like to play that game and compare it against the original, again.
I still feel like the original has better level design, but I do miss being able to play as the cousins and some of the Largeness of the sequel.
One thing Iāve noticed in some of the levels is that there tend to be loops to follow where, just as you get back to your starting point, youāre just big enough to pick up the stuff you couldnāt get before. Sometimes it happens 2 or 3 times, too.
Thereās also a lot of beautiful repetition between scales. For instance, objects tend to be grouped by size in four ways: Paths, Circles, Columns, and Piles/Stacks. This repeats over and over from the smallest to largest sizes you can achieve. Itās remarkable.
And for completenessā sake, here are what I am defining as groupings:
Paths: a line of similarly sized items
Circles: a circle of similarly sized items
Columns: Similarly sized items distributed evenly among items of other sizes - usually these items are tall, hence columns
Piles/Stacks: Just a big olā pile of shit that you can pick up all at once
The handling between Very Small and Very Large is so different, though, that traversing these repeating patterns feels different, and naturally more challenging. So even though you are repeating the same things, they become harder simply because the Katamari is so unwieldy.
Itās hard to really consider the level design of Katamari Damacy because itās so free-form and strange, but I do think itās very well considered. There always tend to be guiding lines that will build you up to the next size to follow even more guiding lines.
Last thing: Some of the jokes in this game are amazing. In one level, youāre small enough that people kick you around for most of it, so you just see their legs, but once youāve gained enough size, you can see that one of the people kicking you around was actually, like, 5 people stacked on top of each other for no reason. What a good gag!!!
EDIT: Oh thereās one more thing, which is just Big-Ass Items That Stand Alone, Usually In The Center Of a Circle Of Smaller Items. These are almost always used as goals for the size one or two levels above the items in the circle - when you can pick up the big fucken thing, youāve made it in life. It could be a ring of mice around a big cheese, or a series of whirlpools around an octopus the size of Manhattan.
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This is more-or-less my ongoing relationship with BG1 of the past 2 decades before realising last year āoh, but Divinity feels like an honest videogame whereas here Iām always at the mercy of being potentially splattered by a low-level kobold in a dingy mine shaft RELOAD SAVEā.
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Fired up the 360 for the first time in forever and it reminded me that Raystorm HD is a thing that exists and I still love it.
See also: Score Rush and Guwange 360 Arrange mode
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In a lot of ways, Katamari is consolidating and re-presenting the trails of coins and pickups used to structure the then-dying 3D platformers. These are similar techniques of guiding player interest and routes but Katamariās genius is in making the walls temporary, or rather, overcome through a flash of insight.
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Itās funnier when you consider that it was one of the very first western-developed games announced for the system.
Also the developers unlocked some previously canceled on-disc DLC for it in 2017
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Iām sorry to report that the work stations in classic graphical adventure LOOM are not particularly ergonomic
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They are there to suffer for their work, not ENJOY it. :V
occupational injuries lead to lost productivity no way a massive organized guild the text suggests is motivated primarily by $$$ would set up like this youāre talking nonsense 
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ergonomics may not be as medieval a science as I have been lead to believe
I would not have thought of it this way!
Thatās why you get paid the big bucks
I just listened to people talk like this for years, which doesnāt get you anywhere close to making a good game like Katamari
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today i started playing the PS2 sopranos game. i also finished the PS2 sopranos game. its kind of shitty-charming in the same way dead to rights is? it weirdly reminds me of the first yakuza except itās totally linear and the main character is a dumb asshole with no personality. most of the gameplay is fighting, and these fights consist of 2 or 3 nameless goons trying to push you into a corner to stunlock you by taking turns grappling you. in between stages you hang out at the bada bing or satrialeās and talk to people. later on they add brief fights to these intermissions where tony or paulie tell you to beat the shit out of health inspectors and food critics for some reason?? there is a stage where you visit a law office and roving packs of lawyers try to beat the shit out of you in the bathroom because big pussy is your father. big pussyās ghost also haunts you throughout the entire game and gives you useless advice. at one point i killed a rastafarian with a pineapple. all the incidental dialogue is incoherent nonsense. when you die, james gandolfini tells you that youre a piece of shit before making you restart the stage. it is incredible
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yeah, divinity is certainly less obtuse and more modernized. iāve been playing that lately as well, actually. I originally started playing it last summer sometime, at my usual glacial pace. I stopped eventually, because I almost always stop playing a game before I get through it, even if I like the game a lot. but Iāve been playing it again with a friend (hi rei) over the last few months. I like it a lot, but its weak points are exactly BG2ās strong points, so itās kinda nice to go back and forth with them a bit. divinity feels more āhonest,ā as you put it, but it also feels more like a video game. itās transparent, the world is not particularly believable, and the characters donāt have a lot to say or do. it feels smaller than it is. sometimes these things work well for it, because the game rarely takes itself seriously and it knows how to make the player have fun.
BG2 feels sprawling and endless and weird and hostile. youāre always finding something. someone is always talking to you. you miss things because you have to miss things. but I sure wish the game bothered to realize that not everyone in the world knows how DnD works. combat is just guess work for me. some mage will cast a bunch of shit on themselves and the only way to know what the fuck it is is to scroll through the combat log, which can be impossible when 12 characters are all doing shit. and then you find what the fuck is going on and it just says MAGE MAN is casting OBSCURE WIZARD SPELL OF THE GOOD LUCK FIGURING OUT HOW TO KILL THEM and thatās about it. maybe one of them is a thief, but you donāt know it until your tiny mage lady is already dead. maybe your own thief can stealth and hit something, but maybe one of those guys has passive Detect Everything spell so youāre fucked. but then maybe you have Stealth What Is Immune To Detect Everything or you do that and the enemies have the JK LOL Immune To Detect Everything Only Works On Some Everything spell.
ok Iām done
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i hope you made all this up
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From twitter and your account this seems like it was awesome.
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its a weirdly charming game, probably because its just short enough to feel like a fever dream and not wear you down with how boring it is mechanically
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This was a friendās second game job after dragging Vampire: Bloodlines out the door.
This studio and this project was fubarād beyond belief, his stories are incredible. The studio was more potemkin than functional
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I wanna hear about bloodlines
I remember being weirdly excited that something was using the Source engine. I guess tfc had made me something of a valve fan
I donāt remember much else about it, even though I played at least some of it
If you can play through to the expansion Mask of the Betrayer. Itās the New Vegas to BD2ās Fallout 3.
Edit: Totally wrong. Thanks for the correction Raziel.
The expansion for BG2 is very good though. Itās called Throne of Baal