Katamari Damacy is what you say your favorite game is when your actual favorite isn’t cool enough. It’s perfect.
5 Likes
DooM, but there are other reasons to choose katamari that aren’t it being an adorable game you can show to people who aren’t horribly obsessed with video games.
The first thing that comes to mind is that scaling isn’t always that satisfying in DooM, especially when there’s a decent amount of attrition. If there’s a throughline between the 2 it’s speed over precision, Katamari does 2 things that make speed more enjoyable though: it’s better suited for floor height variation and the boundaries are more interesting in general, the only key is your size and you can also climb up walls for short durations.
The grabbing is good in katamari, but there’s not enough avoiding. I know I’m probably alone in this, my fav part of katamari was catching kintaro in the bear infested town. Avoiding in DooM can be intense, glomping the universe isn’t as fun in comparison. Katamari doesn’t have enough pac man dna IMO, I love the particle demons: pinky, caco, and archvile
5 Likes
I also think Katamari suits my temperament better than doom. The immediate tasks are less concerning than the overall arc, and that’s generally the stuff I find interesting.
I’ve been playing more shmups recently (a horrible one called Hurricane of Varstray, and also Crimzon Clover) and it feels very similar. I’m doing the stuff in front of me because it’s there, but I’m balancing that with a larger strategy to get a higher score. I’m thinking about the big picture while my hands carry out the small picture.
Katamari is about making a plan, carrying out that plan, then making another plan now that your situation has changed. The Line of Teapots are now a part of my Katamari, and I am now going to get that Circle of Bananas. While I’m doing that, I’m estimating how big I’ll be after the bananas, and if that will be large enough to get the traffic cones. etc. etc.
I like that more than the more spatially-oriented planning of Doom, since I’m not tremendously good at mapping out areas in my head. The moment-to-moment of Doom is more engaging than Katamari, but the bigger picture of Katamari is far more exciting to me.
It just keeps coming back to scale for me. It tickles the same part of my brain as thinking about multipliers in shmups, or belt throughput in Factorio, or leveling in Disgaea. How can I most efficiently go from 1 to 10, and 10 to 100, and 100 to 1000? That’s an interesting question to me.
6 Likes
It also gets at the part of my brain that enjoys just barely achieving something. Calculating and testing against the absolute bare minimum required to pick up an object is similar to pushing up against level limits in Dragon Quest. How can I do this by the skin of my teeth? What’s the minimum amount of time and resources needed to reach a certain level/scale?
The reward is very similar as well - jumping the curve significantly.
It really is the Most Video Game Video Game to me because it gets at everything I love about games.
6 Likes
DOOM is almost certainly the better game. And I love the hell out of it.
I can’t get past this being Takahashi v. Carmack though, I just can’t. And as such, it’s Katamari.
5 Likes
katamari is more stressful than doom because it’s against the clock, so that’s another chip on the doom pile
5 Likes
Nah I would argue Hall, Romero and Peterson are more important.
Carmack just made the engine, the other guys made that engine into Doom.
Edit: Also Adrian carmack, the unrelated art guy.
4 Likes
I mean, Quake and Quake 2 really underline your point very well.
It’s just hard to move past the optics of it.
2 Likes
a useful point of comparison here would be between Ken’s Labyrinth and Duke Nukem 3D
the same guy (Ken Silverman) programmed the engine for both of those games
what would John’s Labyrinth have been like? the world will never know…
6 Likes
i think you might mean the Build engine demo, which is a different thing from Ken’s Labyrinth (which is a separate game he made earlier). that’s a lot closer to the kind of things you’d see in Build engine games.
that said Ken Silverman was way more of a like… fascinating weirdo outsider artist than Carmack. from what i recall Carmack hated the Build engine. he said it was held together by twigs and glue or something similar. i also know Monolith famously hated working with the Build engine for Blood. i think it’s because things were kind of… uh “unprofessional” we’ll just say with Silverman providing spotty support for fixing stuff when he felt like it vs. the more well-oiled machine of Carmack and id (at that point). also Apogee was generally a shitshow. i think that’s kinda why the Build engine feels slightly like a miracle in retrospect. so i don’t think that’s a great point of comparison.
but i do agree that the designers really were what gave id its personality and like…tone. when all the “name” designers left id their games got noticeably more boring. i personally always found John Carmack to be overrated in general as a game industry figure and kind of an antagonist but i understand how important he was to its development.
7 Likes
katamari is better but i am a goblin and i love the slidey controller, the ridiculously complex levels, the super generous aim, and the surreal ugly graphics, so doom gets my vote.
5 Likes
I really struggled with this matchup. I enjoy playing Katamari more. I like its cheerful vibe more than Doom’s. And that amazing Shibuya-Kei soundtrack really opened my mind to a lot of cool music.
But I really just have to cast my vote for Doom for one reason: it was set up in a way that made it possible for players to create their own maps, and the creators encouraged it. Over the decades, this has led to extrapolations on the original game that have completely blown my mind.
I mean, a few months ago I randomly stumbled into one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen in games: an active fishing/roleplaying mini-MMO called Community Hotel running on a Doom multiplayer fan server. Just check this out, seriously: DooM - #930 by OneSecondBefore
It is just incredible to me that something like Doom could transform into something like that.
10 Likes
To me these games represent the two best aspects of videogames. In the case of Doom it’s space. And with Katamari it’s tactile feeling. And in that sense they are extremely important games even to this day - especially today, maybe, because many games are being made that don’t really seem to get or care that deeply for the wonders of crafting a place out of virtual space like Doom encouraged, or the sweaty frictive feeling of touching virtual things with your senses like Katamari so happily indulges in. This is really an impossible matchup for me, I’d rather let them be together like some biblical adam (Katamari) eve (Doom), but if I really had to cast my vote for one…
It’s Doom baby.
8 Likes
This match up got me asking myself why a katamari never got a level editor (at least as far as I can tell) or at least a way to drop items onto an existing map.
1 Like
There is this Garry’s Mod gamemode called Jazztronauts where the objective is to raid custom maps for all their special brushes and props, meaning you jump through “portals” into other dimensions where you have to steal all the office materials from like cs_office or just specifically the light fixtures in an urban map like gm_bigcity. Surprisingly there is a story wrapped around all of this, a social hub area with NPCs and fun account-based trackers of your progress and accomplishments, but I always thought it would be cool to see a Katamari gamemode work like this in source engine because of just how many levels you could roll around in.
7 Likes
only 2hrs left and it’s so close 
Whoever wins, we made the right decisions.
1 vote, hopy shit
Wow! The ultimate “step to one side” line.
Blue skies > red skies
2 Likes