Uncle Orson Revews Everything

Well, I was surfing the web for a bit today and ended up on a website I haven't been to for a couple months. www.hatrack.com So I went and checked on Orson's recent essays and found a good one from late last year. It's about how we need to exercise caution with modern medicine. I liked it, maybe you will to.

http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2005-12-25.shtml

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I love Katamari Damacy... I'm so glad that I'm not alone. >^.^<
Below is an excert from Orson's Yours, Mine, and Aeon Flux; Videogames posted at hatrack.com

Another game I saw recently is called Katamari Damacy (Playstation), which has taken Japan by storm. When I describe it, it will sound so weird you'll wonder how it could be fun. But I promise, it is.

It reminds me of nothing so much as a great scene from Robert Stoddard's classic musical Giraffe Story, in which one of the characters says, "I had a terrible dream last night. I dreamed that somebody had cut me into little pieces, and I had to go around and pick them all up."

That's Katamari. What you do is you move through the world rolling things into an ever-larger ball. You start with little things -- scraps of paper, clips, pens. They simply stick to your katamari ball as you roll over them. You bounce off anything too big to pick up. But as the ball gets bigger, you can pick up bigger things. So if you move through a school, for instance, you start with scraps but end up rolling over (and picking up) desks, chairs, students.

The designer of Katamari, Keita Takahashi, made the game as a kind of parody of or rebellion against videogames. It feels far more like play than most videogames. Videogames, after all, are about solving the problems the designer has laid out for you. Essentially, the game trains you. And while Katamari has a bit of that, too, it mostly consists of garbage strewn about and it's your job to pick it all up.

It really is like a kind of nightmare -- only you're the monster.