Katamari Damacy makes my thumbs hurt. And my brain hurt. And my stomach uneasy. I don't know how I'm going to handle riding rides at Valleyfair with Eryn when pushing a digital ball around on a screen and rolling people up makes my stomach churn. Kyle bought Eryn the game for her birthday, and she loves it. She particularly likes to play head to head and gets excited when someone rolls over her katamari and forces her to try to wiggle loose. Usually, right after that, she demands that the controllers exchange hands so that she's in the lead. I don't know where all that competitiveness comes from...not me.
Christopher Crowhurst has a post up about Silverlight. I was trying to explain this to a developer yesterday. Apparently Microsoft has delivered, and if you're a developer, you should be looking at Silverlight (WPF) as it's the way of the web. Drop your javascript inside the Silverlight "applet"...a magnitude faster. Use AJAX with your javascript...ditto. Like Ruby or another language better? Works with Silverlight. Code away in whatever language you please. Pissed that it's Microsoft, so it's not Mac compatible? Wrong. So what...downloading some MS "applet" through your browser will take forever? Nope - footprint is about 4 megs. Chump change in the high bandwidth world. Sandboxing will make any "applet" of limited use? It reaches outside the applet to use the browser DOM. Microsoft said they were going to focus on performance with WPF, and they did.
Just think of Katamari Damacy as a de-sensitizer for your future Valley Fair rides. Or maybe as a tune-up of your thumbs, brain and stomach for "We Love Katamari!". I just purchased a copy of it on Amazon. It's a sequel (if you hadn't already guessed) with more blobs of stuff and a 2 player cooperative mode.
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