GF! Weekly Wrap-Up #7

Intro

Hey there gamers! Welcome to the GamesFirst! Weekly Wrap-Up for Friday, September 30, 2005. I’m Val Townsend, the Atomic Goddess, and this week we’re taking the podcast worldwide: We’ve got a slew of news with an international focus, a review of We Love K atamari, and a Preview of Capcom’s water-colored adventure epic, Okami. So let’s kick things off with some good news for those brand new European PSP owners:

News

SonyXTeam has announced a working firmware downgrader for the Sony PSP. This utility allows gamers to downgrade their PSPs to the version 1.5 (one-point-five) firmware. This gives new PSP owners access to a quickly growing library of homebrew utilities, i ndy games, and game system emulators. The SNES emulator makes a PSP feel a lot like a GBA, and the Commodore 64 emulator should hit big overseas. Of course, Sony has so far been less than thrilled with the idea of people playing old Genesis games on their PSPs, but it’s unclear what if anything can be done to stop the massive flood of interest in PSP hacking and homebrew.

In other international news, the OrigenXbox360.com countdown has come to an end. Since a month ago, when OrigenXbox360 was first noticed by gaming media, many gamers and journalists speculated as to what the site was counting down. TeamXbox.com had the od ds-on favorite guess with a good case that the countdown marked time to the announcement of Halo 3, which would have been sort of unspectacular, but newsworthy nonetheless. Unfortunately, the truth is even less spectacular: The countdown ended on September 27th, announcing a contest or challenge of some sort for the European Xbox 360 Launch Party. So Euro-gamers who dig Xbox 360 might want to check it out.

Developer of games for mobile phones, I-Play, recently completed a survey of gamers in both Europe and the US about mobile gaming. As might be expected, American gamers said most often that they play games to win, while Europeans thought winning was les s important. American gamers also preferred casual games over their Euro counterparts, and had a greater tendency to show off their games to their friends. What does it all mean" We were going to come up with something, but then we got distracted playing Bejeweled.

And finally, we end with a downer from way out East: According to BBC reports, Sony will lay off some 10 thousand workers before 2008. The layoffs represent seven percent of their current workforce. Sony’s stock has dropped two-thirds in the past five yea rs. Although they remain the dominant force in videogames, and make money on movies, Sony’s other divisions have not been doing well. This news comes alongside announcements that Sony plans to post losses of 90 million dollars for this fiscal year.

REVIEWS (pronounced katamari=cat-uh-marr-eye damacy=dah-may-see)

Now that we’ve bummed you out a bit about old man Sony, Shawn takes a look at one of the reasons they remain on top of the home console market: Great games like We Love Katamari. The sequel to 2004’s cult hit, Katamari Damacy, We Love Katamari puts gamers back in the shoes of that cute little boombox-headed Prince. This time around, the Prince spends his time doing favors for fans. The fans sweet talk is father, the King of All Cosmos, who commands him to go roll stuff up. Once the Prince has a nice big b all of stuff, the King of All Cosmos turns it into a star or planet.

Of course, that’s the most normal way to describe Katamari. The rolling gameplay is incredibly satsifying as you roll up everything from the smallest thumb tacks to the largest typhoons and volcanoes. The visuals are like children’s book illustrations, an d the background music is some of the most amazing tunes we’ve ever heard in a game.

The standout new feature of We Love Katamari is a co-operative multiplayer mode, which puts you and a friend in charge of the same Katamari. This requires much more cooperative effort than any other game, and can be a real ball if you can get in sync wi th your friend. The new multiplayer mode also gives We Love Katamari more replay value than its predecessor.

It looks like Namco couldn’t have chosen a better title for this one, because we have to agree: We’re happy to roll up We Love Katamari with an impressive four stars out of five.

PREVIEWS (pronounce: Okami=Oh-commie, Orochi=Oh-row-chee)

Moving from the hustle and bustle of intergalactic star-rolling, we take a zen-like moment to pause and reflect upon Capcom’s upcoming Okami, an adventure game that plunges the player deep into a world of Japanese mythology. Fortunately, resident GamesFir st! Academic Gamer, Laurie Taylor, got to spend some quality time with Okami in LA, where she was amazed by the game’s unique visual style. The entire game is rendered like a Japanese watercolor scroll, and we cannot stress enough Okami’s beauty. The calli graphy theme is carried out in the gameplay, too. Okami centers around the title character, a wolf who is trying to save the world from Orochi, a legendary monster who has come back to life. Okami is actually the wolf embodiment of the sun god, and he must use his godly abilities to defeat the minions of Orochi. In order to earn new abilities players must solve puzzles, using the wolf’s tail to paint on the screen.

If this all sounds a bit bizarre, it’s because it is: Okami is an epic effort of visionary game-making. A deep storyline, steeped in Japanese mythology, and innovative gameplay hit certain key attractors that likely will lead to cult status at worst, and megahit status at best. All of that, combined with the stunning visual style, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, should put Okami on every discriminating gamer’s watchlist for 2006. Okami will be one good reason to keep your PlayStation 2 out of the c loset next year.

Conclusion

And that wraps up this very globally-aware edition of the GamesFirst! Weekly Wrap-Up. Remember, all of these stories and more can be found on GamesFirst.com: News, Reviews and Previews are posted daily for your game-themed enjoyment. I’m Val Townsend, The Atomic Goddess, and you can catch me right here, every week, world-wide.