Katamari Damacy

Final score: A+ (100/100)
Published by Namco for the PlayStation2

If "Halo 2" and "Half-Life 2" are the 300-pound gorillas of the video game world, then "Katamari Damacy" is the friendly puppy who greets you with a big smile and wagging tail when you come down the stairs in the morning. It is a simple, happy game that children and adults will love equally.

"Katamari Damacy" is, according to the web, a Japanese pun that can be loosely translated as "sticky ball of different things." In the game, you play the role of a little on-screen character who is pushing around a ball in front of him. Using the two joysticks, you can steer the ball forward, left, right, or at an angle. Steering the ball is easy. There are no tricky twitches you need to practice, no subtle moves or exact timing to master, no button combos to learn, and no new skills you pick up along the way. You simply learn how to steer the ball in a two-minute tutorial at the start of the game, and then you're good to go for the duration.

Standing behind your ball, the world in front of you is littered with stuff. In the first phase of the game, you're inside a house. On the ground are thumbtacks, paper clips, and other little everyday objects. As you push the ball around, you roll over the objects. Anything smaller than the ball sticks to it and makes the ball a little larger. As you push around this growing collection of junk stuck to your ball, you can naturally pick up bigger things. Your goal in each round is to get the ball larger than a certain size within a given time limit.

That's it! Nobody dies. Nobody even gets hurt. You just roll around and watch stuff stick to your ball.

The game is a pure delight. The world is full of all kinds of goofy stuff to pick up, from little pieces of sushi to giant squids. The motion of the ball is perfectly tuned to the controller and thus easy to master. This is a game that's all in the doing - it's just a ton of fun to play.

The aesthetics are very Japanese. The graphics are as simple as can be: basic polygonal objects without textures. But the style is consistent and it works, plus the simple graphics make it easy to spot objects you want to go after. The sound is minimal but spot-on, and the music is provided by a collection of Japanese songs that are unusual, varied, and a joy to listen to.

Short cut-scenes that appear between the different levels of the game tell a little story, and they are so weird and bizarre and inexplicably odd that I came to look forward to each one with great anticipation. Each level begins and ends with a very odd king who gives you instructions, and then offers either praise or a bizarre reprimand when you're done. The entire experience feels a little like a visit from a strange but wonderful uncle.

Katamari Damacy is utterly and enjoyably addictive. Each round is short - usually just a few minutes - and you definitely get better with experience. It was great fun to start some levels by picking up little toys and staplers and then eventually roll up football stadia and skyscrapers. As your ball gets larger, the smaller items become less frequent and bigger objects are available for rolling up. The world scales around you as you play so beautifully and gracefully that the technology is almost completely hidden. All that you see is a simple game that is a pure joy to play.

As an extra bonus, the game costs under $20. You hear this kind of marketing line all the time, but truly this game is great for all ages. It's unlike any other game that's out there, but perfectly suited to the video game medium. It's a small game, which you can complete in a few days, though it has lots of replay value.

I've given this game my first 100/100 score. It's a simple little jewel, and I wouldn't change a bit of it. Enthusiastically recommended.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Final score: A (90/100)
Published by Rockstar for the PlayStation2

For video games, this is the season of blockbuster sequels. "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" is the third in the "Grand Theft Auto III" series.

GTA:SA is a remarkable game. It has a lot to offer, and I have many positive things to say about it. But the story and characters that occupy much of your time are violent and abusive, making the game extremely inappropriate for children. Let's look at the game itself first, and then the story.

The world of GTA:SA covers three different islands, each containing a large city and a vast area of adjoining land. Every geographic space has its own distinct look and feel. You start on one island, and bridges to the others open up as you progress through the story.

The three cities are clearly versions of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. They're all beautifully realized and huge in scale. The cities aren't exact replicas of the originals, but are more like smaller-scale impressions that have the same feel, and some of the same landmarks. Each city is enormous by video game standards. They're beautifully modelled and textured, and though you'll never think you're looking at photographs, they have the realism of a good cartoon: because the world is detailed and consistent, it becomes believable. It is a tremendous achievement in art direction: each environment has its own feel, different from the others, reflected in everything from the style of the architecture to the way fog rolls in to San Fiero (San Francisco) during morning hours. Everywhere the game is populated with cars, trucks, pedestrians, police, and other people going about their lives, in clothing and vehicles appropriate for their locale.

The game is consistent, but not realistic. For example, if you throw a grenade at a helicopter or a car, the target explodes in a fireball. If you aim at a store window, the grenade explodes with no effect at all. But once you learn the way the world works, it sticks to those rules, and so you quickly come to feel at home in the game's world.

There are dozens of different vehicles in the game, from all kinds of cars and motorcycles to airplanes and boats. Most are a lot of fun to travel around in, because they perform the way you wish they would, rather than how they actually do. For example, motorcycles are pretty bouncy, and if you drive into a wall you kind of climb the wall a bit and then drop back down to the ground, wheels down, ready to get going again.

The game is not only physically huge, but long. Between carrying out missions, doing odd jobs, and just exploring, you can easily spend 100 hours in this game. Yes, 100 hours. The game is BIG.

But that assumes you ever get into the game. And that's a big assumption.

You may have heard that that GTA games are violent, and they are. I personally have nothing against cartoon violence: from Tom and Jerry to The Three Stooges, play violence can be harmless and funny. The first two GTA games were set in a 1980's mafia world, and the mafia barons and underlings were such stereotyped characters that they were easy to laugh at. The violence they inflicted on each other was of the cartoon sort. Sure, you shot people and blew up their cars, but it never felt real.

The characters in GTA:SA are very different. You play a young black man who lives in a poor, gang-riddled, drug-infested area of East Los Santos (Los Angeles). In fact, you're part of a gang, and at different times in the game you even incite turf wars against rival gangs, taking over their territory by killing lots of other gang members. Your character has the trademark lack of empathy that characterizes the sociopath: if anything happens to his own family, that becomes a serious issue for revenge. Killing members of other gangs, though, is casual and causes no introspection or remorse.

Your character, and the non-player characters he lives and works with, speak to each other in abusive, angry, coarse language, even when displaying affection. The dialog is filled with anger, misanthropy, and frequent use of the strongest swearing. The language alone makes the game a terrible idea for anyone under 18. The overall sense of anger and pain, which does after all fit the character and his situation, is hardly pleasant or enjoyable, and is also unsuitable for children. Although the character you play is motivated by positive desires to support his family and friends, he lives in a world of violence, gangs, and drugs, and these shape everything he does and says.

For adults who can tolerate this gritty storyline, the game offers an enormous wealth of activities and adventures. The game truly has created a coherent, richly interactive world that pays off in surprises every time you look around somewhere you haven't closely inspected before.

Many of the missions that appear to require brute force can also be solved using some thinking and planning. This is one of the best qualities of the game: you know what to do, but how you accomplish the task is entirely up to you. The world is there at your disposal, and you can invent whatever strategy works for you to accomplish a goal. Sometimes brute-force is fun and pays off, and sometimes a slower and more thoughtful approach is safer and even more fun. For example, if you need to steal a particular car, you can rush up to the driver's door and try to carjack it, or you can steal other cars and create a roadblock, or you can shoot out the tires so the driver abandons it, or you can even shoot the driver and grab the car when it crashes up against something.

The game is not without problems. There are some glitches and bugs, and some missions are very hard to complete and can take many attempts. But you can generally learn some shortcuts and tricks on each pass that make it a little easier the next time.

The programs that play on the in-car radios are above-average for video games (though they fall short of the excellent radio stations in previous GTA installments). Sound design is generally good, and the voice acting is usually very good and sometimes excellent, though all of the characters in the game are familiar cliches and stereotypes.

In sum, GTA:SA is a remarkable game. It offers you a rich and rewarding world of enormous size and activity. There are almost 100 interesting missions in the main story line, and dozens of fun, optional odd jobs to take on along the way. It is huge in scope and gameplay time and diversity.

For its excellent production values and terrific gameplay, I recommend this game to adults. Due to its extremely coarse and violent language and behavior, and the fact that you play a character who has good motivations but sociopathic behavior, I strongly urge parents to avoid this game for children under 18.