The Null Device

Keita Takahashi, the sculptor turned video game designer responsible for Katamari Damacy, is working on a new game. Details are scant, other than it being named "Nobi Nobi Boy" (which translates as either "Stretchy Stretchy Boy" or "Unrestricted Boy"). There are three images (which may be from the game or merely mockups) on this page (which is in Japanese), from which it appears that this game will retain the superflat aesthetic of Katamari Damacy.

Meanwhile, Namco Bandai are busy preparing a new Katamari game for the XBox 360 (and, some say, the Nintendo Wii), to be titled "Beautiful Katamari". There is A video of the game's gameplay here; judging by it, it appears to be the same concept, only enhanced for a more powerful machine (the graphics may be smoother, and the worlds scale up to larger ones, going all the way to rolling up continents on an Earth). Takahashi has no involvement with this project (and it's not clear how much of the original Katamari team is involved), so it's probably a good thing that they've been fairly conservative with the formula rather than, say, going wild and putting in photorealistic graphics. There's probably something to be said about throwing more processing power, memory and storage space at the Katamari formula as is (as evidenced by the result of going the other way and scaling it down to fit on a PSP; once you get up to the eternal modes, you notice the limitations). Having said that, given that the XBox 360 is considerably more powerful than the Wii, if they do both versions, I wonder whether the Wii version will be noticeably inferior to the 360 version.

¶ katamari damacy keita takahashi nobi nobi boy ps3 video games wii xbox 360 0