If only I had a few bales of money... it appears that The catbus is (was?) for sale.

Damn.

This makes me want to run screaming.

Screaming-mad-insane, or screaming 'KAWAIIIIII' and running to the store to get some... I am not sure.

This game has come out ages ago, but I am still rock-living-under-guy, so, I have only just recently got to play it. Katamari Damacy is an amazingly simple, game. It is like Pac-Man plus, and just as groundbreaking. The story is, that the King of all Cosmos has gotten inebriated, and smashed all of the stars in the sky. You play the prince, whos job it is, is to make new stars. How do you do that? You are given a ball, the so-called Katamari Damacy that you can use to pick up stuff. What kind of stuff? Oh, you start off with ants, tacks, push pins, and work your way up to cards, pots, pans, toys, children, people, cows, cars, trucks, trees, giant squid, buildings, skyscrapers, islands, the land itself, until you are picking up Godzilla, rainbows and cruise liners.

There is something resembling a storyline here, but it really is secondary to the game, instead of being a driving force like say, Final Fantasy. There is a two player mode, but it really seems like an afterthought, thrown into the game so that you won't bore your friends to death. However, the cool part of the game is that to play in the 2 player mode, you fly to the gigantic Space Mushroom. When you want to play a one player game, you fly back to earth, and move around until you find the kind of star or constellation you want to build. Finally, you can fly to your home planet where you can save and load your games, change your settings, and view things like: all the items you have collected, the rare items, places you have gone, special gifts you have received (and put them on!) The game really is one big cohesive unit in this way, you are always controlling the little prince, and any meta action (saving, loading, settings, etc.) is done by an in game action (visiting your house, going to the woodpecker to turn vibration on, etc.).

The game itself, as you can imagine, gets quite insane. I mean, you can pick up cows, people, giant squids... expect tonnes of maniacal laughter. On top of that, the King of All Cosmos speaks in something akin to both a riddle, and horribly translated Japanese. From what I understand this was done on purpose. The king is supposed to be a little insane. On top of that, the intro of the game is good for a barrel of larfs. Look for the pot leafs and mushrooms falling on the happy pandas.

The pacing of the game is right on target. Its lots of fun, and easy to pick up, but not too easy. Very fun, without getting too hard. I bet it has excellent replayability, but I have only been playing it for a day or so. I love it. Obsessive Goodness.

There is also quite a fan club happening. Check out delicious tags katamari, katamaridamacy for all kinds of goodness. Including Beads, Hats and Obsessive Fan Art.

Interstella 5555: 5ecrets of the 5tellar 5tar 5ystem has become my latest of obsessions. Now lets get one thing right out on the table. I don't really dig daft punk. I hated "Around the World". I mean HATED it. Part of it was the instant dislike for anything that achieves that level of popularity, but part of it is that the track itself, wasn't really all that interesting. It just wasn't that good. (now Rollin and Scratchin was cool.) It spawned an entire genre of talkboxy tracks, culminating in everyone believing in life after love. (or was it love after love? who cares?)

Pretty much after that, I lost track of daft punk. So when 2001 came and went, and their Discovery album was released, along with "One more Time", I was blissfully unaware of its saturation, as a result of my rock-living-under-ness, I can truly enjoy that song.

Add to that a particularly good pair of Hoffman Lenses, and some good friends, and you have a movie worth watching, and music worth listening too. So what is Interstella 5555? It is a Music Video of the entire Discovery album, or it is Anime without any dialog. The basic plot is that 4 Musician Aliens (Octave, Stella, Arpegius and Baryl) are abducted by an evil record company executive (The Earl of Darkwood) and taken back to earth, and a 5th alien (Shep) must save them from their fate. The story has a Final Fantasy-like mood. I am not sure if that is just part of Japanese storytelling in general or what, but I dig it. Lots. In fact, there could be (and should be!) an Interstella 5555 video game.

There are some other interesting elements to this story. Lotsa numerology here such as: '5555' Where the band features 4 members but Shep makes a 5th. I'll leave it to you to figure out the rest. Remember "Everything is directly, or indirectly related to the number 5" is an Erisian Mystery. The Invasion during "One More Time" and "Aerodynamic", and the scene during "Harder Better Stronger Faster" are worth seeing if you are CyberFetishists.

The animation is full on 80's style Anime. Its both bad (The lypsyncing is horrible) and well done. It is 00's anime doing 80's anime. Baryl the drummer is done entirely in the mouth 'Real tiny when it's closed; ridiculously huge when it's open' style. There are some very cute characters in here, espceially at the very end (my favorite part).

Watch for the cameo appearance of Daft Punk during "High Life". Quite funny. Even funnier if you can catch what they are 'saying' You might have to use your pause button for that. There is also a great little football (soccer) game between Japan and France (being the nationalities of the 2 contributors of this film).

In short, plenty of eye candy and funny references, inside jokes, and goodness. Get your Hoffman Lenses on and give it a watch.

OS-tans are character personifications of various OSes. They mostly centre around the Windows group (including MS-DOS, no less!) but Linux and MacOS are represented as well. Check here for some more images. There is also some hentai images in there. Personification of OS porn. Wow.

The 'movement' isn't limited to operating systems either, there are also tans for programs as well. Norton Anti-virus and McAffee are represented, but so is Outlook and her mortal enemy Thunderbird. Firefox gets representation as well. Whute!

This is just so damn cool on so many levels. I can't exactly verbalize why I dig this so much.