Continuing my Mario nerd-a-thon I thought I’d just post a video I found of these two guys racing each other on the original Mario Bros. game. There’s nothing particularly deep about it, but if you ever played the original, it’s quite amazing to watch, especially the ending. So here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRY6vTsnNjA

Now on to more important things, it was interesting for me to watch Katamari Damacy in action for the first time. A friend of mine had said he played it and it was a lot of fun and I have seen plenty of references of it on the internet, never really got the chance to see it played though. The first thing I noticed was that it really brings out a certain “craziness” of Japanese culture. As we had discussed earlier with Okami, one of the potential problems with it not selling so well was that strong drive of Japanese culture throughout the game that tends to only appeal to a certain type of gamer. However, as I said before, it focuses less on the serious and more on the wacky side of things. It reminded me of other strange Japanese games like the Wario Ware series or even a game that was made on Playstation where you would control a guy’s nose hairs to fight off enemies. In a way it’s like that parody that The Simpsons had done a while ago with Mr. Sparkle.

Katamari really tends to embrace its own craziness and it’s this stereotypical craziness of Japanese culture that makes me wonder if that’s the reason these games only become cult favorites. Katamari follows the usual feeling of videogames becoming a collection-fest but on a higher level that most people once they give the chance to play it, enjoy it. Or even in Okami’s case, it was compared to the likes of Zelda which is very popular with Western culture, yet once again it only appealed to a select few. The same can be said for American based games like Halo which do poorly in Japan. It’s rather interesting to see how much culture influences the selling and accepting of videogames world wide.