Dressed to Impress: Eternal Sonata and Beautiful Katamari

So, today marks the first edition of "Dressed to Impress", the new weekly feature where I highlight the videos or screenshots that caught my attention because they were, well, impressive. This week, unfortunately, was a very slow one for videos and screenshots, so I didn't have much to choose from, but I still managed to pick two games that were impressive in different ways than the normal games would be.

The first impressive video that I stumbled upon was the prologue from Eternal Sonata. This game has nothing on today's games in terms of graphics. In fact, this could probably work on the PS2, but it's not the realism that would make this game impressive anyways. Instead, it's the different approach to graphics, portraying this title as more of an art than a simulation. The cel shading looks beautiful in its own way, and I'm always happy to see that some games are trying to go elsewhere with video games.



The second impressive video also does not rely on photorealistic graphics to hold its ground, but rather the incredible scale that some of the levels are versus the small amount of space that the game will be using. As most of you know by now, Beautiful Katamari will not be released as a retail game, but rather as an XBOX Live Arcade (and hopefully and Playstation Network) title.

It's easy to see that the game looks just as good if not better than its predecessors on the PS2, but the really impressive part of the title is around the middle of the clip, where the katamari is about 5,000 kilometers long and it starts to pick up entire countries. That's right, countries! While this may not seem like a large accomplishment to most, I certainly think that this is a wonderful sight, especially when I think of the possibility of a level where you start with a 5 centimeter katamari and roll it until it reaches the 10,000 kilometer katamari, the goal at the end of the country-swallowing level. Put this all together with the fact that this game will most likely be under 1 gigabyte and the game proves to be very impressive.