Katamari-san is mental

The Gamecity Festival finishes tonight in Nottingham, UK (in fact as I type this, Team UDLR should be romping home in the Official Gamecity Pub Quiz). It's been a really enjoyable experience having a video game festival on your doorstep, with some standout moments, the biggest of which was the Keynote speech by Kata Takahashi, creator of the awesome Katamari Damacy games.

After a long delay it finally started with an intro by... some... woman who liked Katamari (I didn't catch if she was part of Bandai, Namco, or just ran a fansite of some such) who showed some entertaining fan pics, including that of some mental who ran the San Francisco Marathon dressed as Prince and pushing a giant Katamari! Then Takahashi came on stage. He came over as a really nice guy, he had to speak through an interpreter which kinda slowed the flow of the talk, but he was a cool guy to listen to. He explained where a lot of his ideas came from, a lot of his pet hates about games and the world (especially the people who live in the flat underneath his who are noisy, so he's growing his plants over his balcony to cover their windows), and he finished the talk with an early-stage playable demo of his new game Nobi Nobi BOY (nobi is japanese for stretchy apparently, insert joke here---->). The game is absolutely bizarre. He gave a controller to a guy near me so I got to see the controls at work. Basically your 'BOY' is controlled with your two nipple buttons, one controls each half of his body. And you can stretch your body to round up animals and travel about, and you can eat the animals and... well that's about it really! It's not even on Namco's official launch spread yet, it's basically a premise he's created and he hasn't actually worked out what the goal of the game is, he just likes the idea of stretching a character to do stuff. Thankfully someone recorded the demo footage and put it on the web, so you can see for yourself here