I did not get much sleep last night, because Clark is in a "Night Terrors" phase right now, which would be amusing if it wasn't 2am. He also managed to wake up over an hour ahead of the usual time, so I went to work on about four hours' sleep. Which isn't all Clark's fault. I was up late anyway.

So, scrambling for weblog fodder... how about Katamari?

I ordered the third Katamari soundtrack from Play Asia, after I made the logical leap that since they released soundtrack albums for Damacy and We Love, they probably did one for Me & My Katamari. M&MK is likely the Katamari game I'll never own, since it's a PSP title. I say PSPs are still too expensive, but that seems to be Sony's thing these days.

Anyway, "Katamari Damacy: Complete Sounds" is a two disc set that really isn't just a M&MK soundtrack. About half of the first disc is from M&MK, and the rest of the set is previously unreleased tracks from We Love Katamari. Furthermore, I believe the entirety of the second disc is taken from the King of All Cosmos cutscenes, so it's mostly classical score and not especially Katamaresque. So I'm largely focusing my attention on the first disc. And the CD artwork. Here's Fujio on the cover:

No kidding! Fujio is the cover! No Prince! No King! Not even Jumboman! It's Fujio, bitch!

And Colombo is the back cover (or is this Lalala?):

Miso - one of my favorites - makes the back cover of the liner notes:

And, inexplicably, a non-cousin panda is the image that sits inside the jewelbox under the CDs.

These are just destined to become forum avatars and buddy icons.

I know I bring this up all the damn time, but when iTunes grabbed the CD track info from GraceNote CDDB, the second disc was spelled "Katamary." Freaking hell, can't anybody get anything right? This is the problem with user-controlled databases.

Ooh ooh, excellent topic fusion coming up.

While perusing the Wikipedia entry for We Love Katamari, I noticed something stupid in the "Secrets & Easter Eggs" section. The entry was gamely attempting to point out how the crazy assortment of in-game items allowed the designers to create little "hidden" scenes that you could stumble upon. Now, this is an Easter Egg only by the longest stretch of the term, since scenes like that are found in every corner of the game. But I'll play along.

What bothered me was this section: "Some objects or situations lend their origins to pop culture. For example, in the schoolhouse level, a ghost character is seen rising from a toilet, which was inspired by J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, where the character Moaning Myrtle is the ghost of a former student who was killed in a Hogwarts bathroom."

I'm paraphrasing a bit, because I fucking changed that right away.

First of all, who is Anonymous Wikipedia Editor #4883208984 to suggest that a ghost in a toilet is somehow exclusively a Harry Potter ref? Maybe it's just a ghost coming out of a toilet because it's funny. Maybe there's a famous Japanese myth involving spirits and plumbing. If the game had a little block person on a broomstick with thick glasses and a scar on his forehead, THAT would be a Harry Potter ref. This Myrtle bit is pure conjecture. And naturally, every noun in that sentence was cross-linked to the Harry Potter Wiki entries.

And of course the phrase "...situations lend their origins to..." That doesn't even make any sense. How does something (that came after) lend its origin to something else (that came before)? Clumsy, confusing grammar.

So it became: "Being highly non linear, We Love Katamari lends itself easily to numerous easter eggs, in this case, the deliberate placement of in-game items to create humorous scenes. Since the environments are typically very large, and a player's current katamari size determines what objects a player can physically see, these "hidden" situations can be found literally anywhere. For example, in one level, the player can find the Prince sitting on a photocopier, with Slip (the Cousin who is a flat 2D clone of the Prince) emerging from the paper tray. Other combinations of objects or situations derive their origins from pop culture. For example, in one of the outdoor levels, there is a female ghost that rises up and down out of a well, which is reminiscent of the character Sadako in the Japanese horror movie Ringu."

The first half of the first sentence was already there. Everything after "numerous easter eggs" is all me. I managed to more thoroughly define what the eggs actually are... included a comic sample... and even came up with a far more plausible pop culture example, softened with "which is reminiscent of".

So we'll see if Moaning Myrtle returns should our Kata-Potter fan come back to check his work.