More Katamari!

Ah, too much Katamari! Yes, I have been playing it a bit, and the level of cuteness gets to you after a while.

I finally worked out the Japanese in 'Me and My Katamari' on the PSP and was able to save some of the pictures I have taken in it.

Everyone knows Chameleons like collecting things. Yep. Everyone.

The Prince on his Island, with a very disturbing statue of the King of All Cosmos. I think the power has gone to his head!

All hail the King! King of All Cosmos checks out what the Prince is rolling up.

Ahhh! Teh Cute! The Prince goes swimming with a dolphin!

AHHH! Teh Cute x 2! The Prince and Monty pose before another round of rolling Katamari!

I could be reading the property section of the newspaper, or learning how to trade shares, but this is MUCH more useful! KA-TA-MA-RI!

KATAMARI DAMACY!

Na naa, na na na na na na naa, na na-na na-na-na!

Where have games like this been? (Ok, yes, Nintendo)

Ok, so you are this Prince. 5cm tall. A Little Prince. Your Dad is the King of All Cosmos. He got drunk, and smashed all the stars. Quite enjoyed it at the time too.
As Prince, you get to fix it all, by rolling things up... into... balls... of stuff... (stop laughing!) called 'Katamari'. OK, keep laughing, it is brilliant. Only the Japanese can do stuff like this and pull it off. Well, maybe His Yakiness Jeff Minter, but no-one else!

The sheer simplicity of this game conceals a romp through worlds wierder than most of my dreams, chasing swans and fish, avoiding bears and cows, and running over guys who sound suspiciously like Crazy Frog. Animated interludes keep you up to date with the Hoshino family, and their efforts to go and see their dad at work.

The metaphors for life are amazing - a tiny person rolling around a big ball of stuff that keeps growing.
Rolling up ratties goes 'Eeeeeeee!'. Rolling up cats goes "Mrowr!" Rolling up people goes "Yaaargh!", "What's happening?" "OH MY GOD!" or "Detention for you! Detention!"

Syn & Bear gave me this for Xmass (and the tip-off to mod my PS2) and I have played it a LOT since then. I also had a look at Ebay, and purchased the soundtrack to the game - a surreal blend of lounge, jazz and j-pop. Since Sony in All Their Wisdom haven't really seen fit to release KD in Australia (we might get the PSP and We ♥ Katamari release 'some time' in 2006) I exercised my RIGHTS as an Australian to purchase them overseas, so I have been sharing my rolling this weekend between 'Me and My Katamari' on the PSP and KD on the PS2.

The PSP version suffers a bit from the controls - it isn't quite as slick as the PS2 to roll around, but the sound and graphics really make up for that. It is amazing what the PSP can do - it should get even better when people have had more time to really wring out the hardware.

Today at work 'We ♥ Katamari' turned up, along with 'Shadows of the Collossos' from the makers of the artwork 'Ico'. (The later, I might add cost me AUS$30 brand new; it is due for release here in March for AUS$100! Talk about gouging!)

Now, to be fair, some people won't like it. Bear's brother got mighty disturbed by it, and fair enough. For those of us who have their heads wired in that weird way that makes you want to roll up clouds and giant octopi; then this game is for you!

The Mighty Box of Cool

I wasn't expecting a bonus this year. Hey, I'm an architect; our definition of a bonus is "not being fired at X-mass".

So getting one was a pleasant surprise. Now what to do with it?

Half went into my "maybe afford my own house/flat/cardboard box in 20 years" fund, the other half went into my wallet. Briefly.

As it happens, my then-extant PC was going reasonably well; it had been reliable for nigh on 3 years, though in mid 2005 the drives started playing up. The usual reformat-test-drive-reformat-test-drive-junk-drive-buy-new-drive-reformat festival took place. Which worked. For about 4 months, and the problems came back. Bugger. Check power supply, which I should have done FIRST - the 5V was putting out somewhat less than 4V. OK, new PS. Nice new Antec Neo 480W. Quiet. Amazingly the PC perked up nicely; it seems the old 4-year old one was on it's way out for a while. So now I have 2 spare 120GB drives laying around, and talk of a games day after Xmas. Time to put those drives into the SpareBox then!

SpareBox consisted of an Athlon XP1600 in a MB with a dodgy secondary IDE port. Or maybe it had dodgy drives, or a dodgy PS. Anyway, I had an even older (though reliable) PS hooked up to it, and it was used at the last GamezDaze. It worked OK for about 2/3rd of the day when it just stopped wanting to play anymore. We figured it got too hot, which in Chris' garage was not unlikely.

In went the two new drives, turn it on and... BAD CPU. Not an error you like to see. Looks like the XP1600 was the cause then. It did have a tiny chip on the oh-so-delicate exposed core, which happened when being moved out of one MB to another, so that might have been the problem. As it turned out, XPs are hard to find in the lower speeds this MB would take. I couldn't use my main XP2300 to test the MB - it was not supported (luckily, as it turned out). So I found an XP2000 (the quickest this MB could take) on Ebay, and parted with $30 for it. Plugged in, turned on, and it worked! Yippee! Set the time and date in BIOS, set boot order, reboot... black screen. Oh. Reboot again. Black screen. Something smells hot. Touch processor heatsink - ouch! CPU fan is going, but now I can smell the magic smoke... Hmm... looks like the MB was the problem after all. Bugger.

So now I have an empty box, a dead MB and two Athlon XPs which will make nice bathroom tiles.

And a bonus.

Well, I could have spent it on a Lego Star Destroyer, but instead it went on this:

This is an Antec P180 qiuet case. It's large & heavy.
I didn't get the whole thing at once, mind you.

Part one was a socket 939 MB with dual AGP and PCIE slots. And an Athlon 64 to stick in it. This was good, though the stock Athlon cooler was rather noisy. So I bought a better Thermaltake heatsink, which made it much quieter.

But this A64 was lumbered with a mere 1.5GB ram, and an aging Nvidia5900 GPU. That had to be fixed! it was fixed with 4GB RAM, running dual channel. Fast. I though long and hard about a GPU, then bit the bullet and went for an Nvidia7800GTX. Very fast.

This all went into my heavily modified windowed case, with extra sound deadening using mainly bitumen (!) - actually a product called 'Brownbread' that works very well, although not exactly pleasing to the eye. That case also has a custom paintjob whose effect was completely disproportionate to the amount of time it took to do it.

GamezDaze 2006 was the last outing for that case. Too big, too heavy, too noisy, and with the 7800GTX in it, too darn hot. The day before GamezDaze, it was trying to run in ambient heat of close to 45C (well, 44.7C, but who's counting?) and it was NOT happy. The CPU was idling at 65C and the GPU at a whopping 85C. The GPU cooler also sounded a lot like a medium-size airliner. Hmmm. Mod time.

I have two, no three, requirements for a PC - fast, cool, quiet. Why anyone would want slow, noisy and hot is beyond me. Fast I had; what I lacked was cool & quiet. This all came down to - the case. And the GPU fan.

The Leadtek 'afterburner' fan and heatsink got removed, and replaced with a much smaller and lighter Zalman copper finned thingy. I think 'better designed' would be an excellent description, as the massive Nvidia-standard 4-heat-pipes 2-heat-sinks 1-mother-of-all-fans idea was heavier, larger and less efficient. Instantly the GPU idled at about 47C and maxed out at 57C. Better. The CPU was still cooking though - the old case has crap air supply. So I got an antec P180!

Erm, smaller, lighter? No. No, no, no, no and no with a side order of no. It's big. It weighs enough to seriously distort gravity. It is also extremely well designed, slick-looking and as close to silent as I could wish for. I did get a fanbus unit to control the abundance of fans in it (5 - 3 case fans, CPU and GPU), but now I have a machine that keeps all components at under 60C in all conditions. The highest ambient I have yet to test has been 37C, but I think this case will work well even under high temps. If it does get hot, I can sacrifice some of my silence and put the fans up to 50%. Even at 100% it is no louder than my old case.

Hopefully this thing should last a similar 4 years as most of the previous Ahtlon did.