Keita Takahashi’s playground designs revealed

KEITA TAKAHASHI, creator of the Katamari titles and Noby Noby Boy, has revealed some of the designs he has drawn for a playground he is creating in Nottingham. Yeah, he’s really doing that.

Okay, so we’ve been sitting on these for a while. Since GameCity in October. I forgot. And yeah, this isn’t strictly videogames related. Big whoop. We’re showing you, anyway. Jeez. Get over it.

Mostly I’m just putting these up for future reference. Because pictures of kids running around impossibly treacherous obstacles is always funny.

Disclaimo muy importante: a lot of these plans haven’t been approved by Nottingham’s council and many of Keita’s designs have been outright rejected for blatant health and safety reasons or high cost. So these are all technically “what if…?” drawings. Still fun to look at though.

Brendan Caldwell

Katamari Damacy creator leaves Namco-Bandai

THE CREATOR of the lovely Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, Keita Takahashi, has quit his creative position at Namco-Bandai, Play.tm report.

Takahashi has been interested in other artistic endeavours for some time and has expressed a certain amount of restlessness for his job, even calling Namco-Bandai a “so-so” company to work for.

“I’m actually not thinking about a future in games,” he told OPM earlier this year. “It’s not that I’m not interested in them, but I want to try lots of different things.”

It shows. He’s currently been involved in designing a playground in Nottingham. That’s a bit different, right?

(Via Edge)

Brendan Caldwell

Katamari creator judging play-doh competition for playground design

Keita Takahashi, the creator of the delightfully mad Katamari series and Noby Noby Boy will be judging a plasticine modelling competition as part of an event run by Nottingham gaming festival GameCity.

The contest involves moulding plasticine into objects that could be included in Takahashi’s playground design at Nottingham’s Woodthorpe Park.

He’s making a playground, don’t you know. This dream has been alive within him apparently from as far back as 2006 when he revealed his perfect playground in an interview with Gamasutra:

“One that’s soft, and with lots of big blocky shapes, and a place [kids] can’t really get hurt – very colorful – where kids can roll around and be free. But it’s probably okay if they occasionally get hurt too.”

The competition takes place on Friday June 25 at Antenna in Nottingham, 7pm and is followed by a videogame pub quiz. Attendees are asked to bring ID as the event is 18+ only.

Brendan Caldwell

Through all the big-name, big-budget titles of the past 12 months, it’s primarily a heap of indie games that Fraser remembers most fondly from 2009. And so, in our week of reminiscing, he sits down to explain why a £3 PSN sandbox is the finest the medium had to offer this year.

We knew it was going to come to this: Noby Noby Boy has emerged as my game of the year in pretty unambigous terms. Demon’s Souls came along and so nearly stole BOY’s thunder, but that such a fantastic retail release couldn’t quite trump the £3 PlayStation Network title is testament to the unhinged brilliance of my pick.

Keita Takahashi’s most ingenious creation yet has had me captivated for countless hours since its release in February. Its sheer goofiness is what strikes you first. A big long snake thing with a dumb grin, flailing around and crapping out clowns with chicken heads riding pogo sticks. It’s had me roaring with laughter for minutes on end because the situation produced by my play was so utterly bizarre that it merited no other reaction. If someone sees it, they want to try it out, to discover the madness for themselves. Its appeal lies in an inherent, unpredictable insanity. No two people will have the same experience.

It’s a simple enough concept. It may be the simplest concept in gaming: mess around. The controls are deliberately counter-intuitive to begin with. Play for thirty minutes and they begin to feel more natural and tactile than almost any other system. As you slime around, gobbling and floating and spinning and twanging and tying and flopping and farting and digesting and stretching, each action’s purpose makes itself clearer. For something that uses so few buttons, it has a remerkably long list of functions.

If art is meant to provoke and inflame, there are few games that have so starkly divided opinion. To pan it as a mildly-interesting distraction or quirky but ultimately worthless curio is to miss the point entirely. Noby Noby Boy takes the rule book, eats it, and then shits it into space. It’s part of a trend I’ve taken to, which is to place in the player’s hands a set of tools with which to drive their own experience and express themselves within a game’s designed constraints. Far Cry 2, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Trine and to an extent LittleBigPlanet are, intentionally or not, part of a loosely defined movement alongside Namco-Bandai’s freeform wonder.

There are people out there who are uncomfortable with it, who dislike this lack of direction and prefer more rigidly traditional experiences. But you know what? They’re boring. Failure to appreciate Noby Noby Boy is evidence of an inability to get creative, to dive into the sandpit head-first with a bucket of paint and some baloons and goof around. It is, almost uniquely, a game that both passes and fails the Ebert test, sticking a big middle finger up to his definition of art in the process. Takahashi’s greasy fingerprints are all over it, but it is nothing without interaction. If that isn’t playing up to the strengths of the medium, I don’t know what is.

Maybe it requires a bit of work to appreciate, but if you’re willing to give it that time, to let it open up your cynical, jaded old self and funnel your artistic juices into something unique, then not only will it help you rediscover your inner child, it’ll tap into what you loved about games in the first place – in the most unorthodox and unlikely way.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

//Demon’s Souls (Import – not yet reviewed)
“Pipped to the post” doesn’t come close. Demon’s Souls was, for a few days at the start of this very month, going to be my game of the year. It just misses out, but that this came within a heartbeat of a game that has attracted so much of my 2009 hyperbole is not to be sniffed at. It’s a fantastically dark experience, both literally and figuratively, but the one aspect that defines it most is its concillatory nature. That’s in no way a negative – From Software and Sony have masterfully fused Werstern and Japanese design philosophies, visual cultures and narrative structure. It hits several other sweet spots between old-school and modern, traditional and progressive, challenge and candid playability, co-operation and competition, reserved atmosphere and unhinged insanity, and so much more. It’s the kind of game everyone can get behind.

//Glum Buster (Coverage)
Glum Buster is a towering achievement, the product of one very talented man’s vision and hard work. Justin Leingang has shaped an experience unlike any other. It’s one underscored by a brutal sense of melancholy, and each element works in tandem to perpetuate this crushing tone for its full two or three hours. It may be short, but it’s a deep, meditative piece with a spectacular sense of pacing. Indeed, the experience evokes Portal’s philosophy, keeping things as tight and concise as possible in order to craft a work composed solely of memorable moments and entirely free of filler. A deserving runner-up, and if you haven’t already, play it and donate to a good cause.

//Street Fighter IV (Review – 9/10)
For those of us with memories of Street Fighter II, IV is comfortably familiar. The roster, the combos, the stages and the slick versus play all either directly ape or evoke those of their grandfather, allowing us to slip straight into Arcade Mode like Saved By the Bell is still on TV. The low-level back-and-forth easily surpasses all other fighting games as it almost always has, but it’s the subtle touches that make Street Fighter IV the genre’s crown jewel. Focus attacks and Ultra combos, the biggest new mechanical additions, fit surprisingly well, adding another dimension to the combat and allowing for some more multifaceted battles. With the right opponent the fighting truly comes into its own, and Capcom’s assured display of balance shines brightest. Beautiful, stunning, and very nearly perfectly suited to all challengers. Also, that theme tune. That theme tune!

It’s true that “game” is, and has been for some time, an antiquated and inadequate descriptor for the modern interactive experience.

Then again, we’re stuck with it. For every non-game game out there, a dozen “gritty” first person shooters or “visceral” hack and slashers emerge from the pipeline, and the history behind the term is too long and detailed to shake off. Noby Noby Boy, as I’ve outlined previously, is the arch-non-game-game. It’s not a game in that there are virtually no rules besides the designed boundaries, but it is a game in that it’s played with a control pad and has what we can loosely define as (I’m aware Lewis dislikes the term, and I’m with him on that one) gameplay.

Since its release in February it’s a title to which I’ve returned on a semi-regular basis. Upon finishing the overblown-to-the-point-of-ridicule Uncharted 2: Among Thieves [Dan would disagree - Ed.], for example, I tapped the PS button and fired up Keita Takahashi’s masterpiece, letting out a sigh of relief as I lost myself in this world without any arbitrary barriers, irritating dialogue, explosions at five second intervals or dishearteningly tight scripting. Just messing around in this colourful sandpit – chewing on things, farting, chasing animals, hopping and tumbling around – afforded me all the joy and freedom I’d been searching for through the duration of Naughty Dog’s much lauded sequel.

I’m not here to knock Uncharted, though, I’m here to show some love to Takahashi. Gamasutra usually interview developers whose games are hitting the final stretch or have just been released, but this may be the first time they’ve chatted to someone because of a recently received playpark commission. Read Simon Parkin’s excellent piece here – maybe you’ll be compelled to write something as well.

By Fraser McMillan

During a recent episode of the Idle Thumbs podcast, Gamasutra’s Chris Remo drew a comparison between the trailers for Noby Noby Boy and Blueberry Garden.

Though he pointed out that the pair are leagues apart in concept and execution, the analogy came in the form of his astonishment and confusion at each game’s video previews. These revealed scant details on exactly what the games entailed, but were all the more intriguing for their mystery.

He hit the nail on the head by saying that, upon playing, his puzzlement was converted into a knowing “aha!” moment in each case. The realisation that it is possible to replicate the craziness of the trailers in-game is wonderful, and that the developers managed to disguise the nature of their games’ respective mechanical groundings – even within apparent gameplay footage – is nothing short of spectacular. But where I agree less with Remo is in his claim that there are few similarities beyond this experience. Scratching the surface would prove his summation correct, but digging a little deeper, it’s possible find some surprising parallels between the two in terms of their design approach.

//Berry picking
Erik Svedäng’s Blueberry Garden – the new golden boy of independent development, having scooped the prestigious Seumas McNally Grand Prize at this year’s Independent Games Festival – is a marvellous little chunk of exploration and discovery purveyed using the conventions and restraints of a two-dimensional platform game. Its expansive, malleable setting is complemented by an aesthetic that could only be described as beautiful; a milky white background blooms hazily around the terrain’s stark black lines, various inanimate objects and obstacles providing the near-ethereal surroundings with a subdued smattering of colour. The player assumes control of a flying bird-like avatar whose only purpose, in purely objective terms, is to make a big pile of objects and see what’s at the top. Its controls are simple, and it’s a short, relaxing piece of artware with some limitations that work in its favour. So far, so unique.

Noby Noby Boy, on the other hand, is a non-game from the same cracked mind behind Katamari Damacy. It would appear to break convention to the point that it abandons it completely, but in actual fact the experience is built upon two of gaming’s most prized flagstones. It takes player input and the on-screen interpretation of said actions – in effect “gameplay” and “graphics” – and exaggerates them. In its outright rejection of traditional structural tropes, it becomes a toy rather than videogame. There is a meta-goal in the form of Girl, but other than that, incidental tasks and the micro-objectives formed around these are performed at the player’s will. Leave Boy sitting for an hour and there are no consequences. Do nothing other than seek out each and every vegetable on the play area and eat it and there’s no reward. In a way it’s a brave experiment; Noby Noby Boy snatches the safe blanket of clearly defined goals from the player, asking questions of them rather than laying bare the answers. It’s a touch too esoteric for some, and that’s fine, but those prepared for a game whose capacity to entertain is contingent upon their own ability to create will find an experience unlike any other.

Except, I daresay, Blueberry Garden.

//Same difference
Okay, there are innumerable differences. It’s hardly as clear-cut a correlation as, say, the one for which Banjo-Kazooie is indebted to Mario 64, so first, we must identify why Noby Noby Boy is nothing like Blueberry Garden. The first reason – and it’s not inconsiderable – is that the former is a three dimensional game and the latter a whole plane of existence short of that. Secondly, Svedäng’s creation is simple to handle. Left, right, jump, grab, eat. Takahashi and his team, conversely, have squeezed every possible action that Boy might want to perform onto the PlayStation pad. Each intricacy in movement is catered for by an unwieldy button combination of some sort, and even then precision is not something one can reasonably expect from Boy and his stretchy exterior. Thirdly, Noby Noby Boy is as much about inventing comedic scenarios in compact areas filled with junk as it is flying to new planets by proxy of everyone’s length contributions to Girl. Blueberry Garden is of the more minimalist, understated stock, and is far less exuberant in the expression of its driving concepts.

[Continues...]