We Love Katamari Hacking Part 2
Hello! Turns out while making the previous entry, I came across a thread on Katamari on the Web that dealt with size modifications that I hadn't heard before. I recommend reading that thread, it contains some pretty neat stuff. They played around with a size mod they found, and they pinpointed it to a single address. I had to freeze 200 addresses. Atleast now, it's less annoying to play with.
One thing I forgot to do was to play around with the load screen at a very small size. The Prince got stuck rolling on the m for a while before going over it, no prompt either.
I played with the idea of playing with sizes smaller than the starting size. I got it to be insanely small to the point where I kept falling through the floor. It also looked like I was just running around the stage.
I wanted to become bigger, so I locked myself to a random high value, 162546 meters! It unloaded me but I took the time to wait until the end. I made the Katamari into stardust, but it didn't give me a billion stardust. Lame!
You can see some duplicate islands on the sides of that image. The skybox actually follows you to give you the illusion of endless islands. How cute.
You know what would be fun? Challenges using hacks.
I tried ALAP1 with a smaller size than usual. This caused some problems, as the starting size is the lowest size the game with work with. Any smaller than 5cm and certain moves will not work correctly. Going back and side-rolling will be all screwy, so they were the biggest hurdles in this run, but after 5cm, it went pretty okay.
I started at 3cm5mm because the smallest thing in that room, the puzzle pieces, requires that size to be rolled up. Also of note is that any smaller Katamari and then I would start going through the floor, so that's not fun. This was an alright challenge, maybe if the map had less stuff, this would've gone harder.
Then I realized, AFAP stages usually don't have as many things as ALAP stages do. After checking each one out, I decided the best one to do a challenge in was the cousin stage. It is a stage only unlockable once you have every single cousin in the game. Each cousin is out and about in the flower field and you have to roll them up quickly! This stage starts you off at 1m, I started off at 40cm.
At this size, I cannot roll up cousins straight away, I will have to work my way up to a size that can knock them out. There's barely anything to work with, I only have the plates and mushrooms near Nik & the flowers around the boxing ring. Once I pick these up to end up at around 70cm, which is enough to pick up the flowers surrounding Fujio. After that, I reach 80cm and can finally start rolling up cousins that share the same body shape as Prince. This goes on just fine and I end up at 1m10cm.
Next, there are two long cousins that require a bit extra work to roll up. Beyond and Odeko require somewhere near 1m20cm to knock them over. This is easily achievable from the 1m starting point, but starting at 40cm where everything is almost gone will require a bit of planning. I would have to go to the swamp in the center of the stage and roll up practically everything I can down there to reach 1m20cm. If I'm lucky, it's barely enough to knock 'em out. In my run, I had to roll up a couple of sunflowers to reach the minimum.
I tried a stardust-only run of the Roll up the Sun stage. I had to add the Katamari Damacy constellations to the mix due to the possibility of not being able to pass the stage without some kind of help. I used hacks to tell me the size of the Katamari before going through with it, which makes this an invalid run, but now I know it's possible.
As I stated previously, this stage starts off with an Earth Katamari that is 1m big. With a bit of testing, I found out you need atleast 2m to roll up the Sun. This size is very difficult to reach if you don't have a lot of stardust, they don't add a lot of size to the Katamari, which is why I also threw in Katamari Damacy constellations.
Another thing I want to point out is this is also very tense if you have every single thing in your solar system. The driving planets go super fast, there's meteors all around, planets are just dancing around, a good chunk of your view is blocked by the sun, there's a large room for error here. It doesn't end there, the final roll at the end of the stage still let's you pick up things, which means it could be a perfect run until the very last second. In my run, I accidentally rolled up a Katamari Damacy star...
This entire bout took me 5 minutes to complete, but it's only cause I knew how big the Katamari was the entire time. I probably will do this legitimately on a real console later. Here's the video of my run.
I might be able to do this without needing a few constellations but stardust isn't that big...