2023 has been a bumper yr for followers of Keita Takahashi’s Katamari, some of the singular sport sequence ever made, which just lately noticed the perfect entry launched on Steam. Katamari is about rolling stuff up right into a ball because the Prince of All Cosmos underneath the watchful eye of disapproving daddy The King of All Cosmos, and begins small-scale with you rolling up paperclips and erasers and fruit, earlier than scaling into automobiles and bushes and finally complete metropolis blocks. Could sound a bit bizarre however what this all provides as much as can solely be described as a honest and touching ode to the thrill of play and childhood innocence (actually).
It is a particular sport, and somebody at Google clearly loves it as a lot as I do.
Google has included a Katamari minigame into its omnipresent search engine: you can begin rolling a ball across the search outcomes web page, regularly growing the ball’s dimension with textual content and buttons earlier than sticking on issues like the pictures. It is a little bit little bit of an OCD magnet really, as a result of as soon as you have began rolling I do not actually see how one may stroll away until the web page is delightfully clean and every part’s a part of your ball.
To entry the sport sort ‘Katamari’ into Google search, and the outcomes web page will seem wanting because it normally does. However within the high proper there is a colourful ball which begins to wobble, begging for a click on, and whenever you do the sport begins: you information the ball round with the arrow keys, and scale it up with all Google’s choices and widgets.
“Katamari is a nostalgic sport for many people and has a big fan following,” Google engineer Lucas Bullen informed Kotaku. “The recognizable sport mechanic of things getting hooked up to the rolling Katamari is so enjoyable and distinctive that we needed to see it work together with the Search web page and provides followers a possibility to play with the Katamari outdoors of simply the video games”.
Bullen says Google has different gaming Easter Eggs for gamers to seek out, and suggests looking out Star Fox and The Final of Us.
We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie is the latest Steam launch of the second sport within the sequence, and my favorite (the primary sport, Katamari Damacy, was launched on PC in 2018). “Namco made a number of extra Katamari video games after this with out the involvement of sequence creator Keita Takahashi, however this was positively the height,” stated our personal Wes Fenlon, appropriately. “It provides extra mission selection and different playable characters and has a humorous meta story about Katamari being so fashionable they needed to do it once more.”
These video games are a delight, and Google’s little tribute is a pleasant workplace diversion. Plus, you get to think about the Prince rolling throughout the US and finally schlooping-up the Googleplex on the ultimate degree, saving us all from the inevitable near-future the place AI-generated web sites destroy what little worth Google search nonetheless has left.
