looking at this i think katamari more than any game ive yet seen justifies 1080p as a rendering resolution on current consoles.
The reason : Scale
in most instances 1080p is purely cosmetic, in katamari i feel it offers a subtle gameplay improvement. 1080p is a strain on precious memory and fillrate resources, the extra sharpness hardly seems worth it with the reduction in edge aliasing being the only perceivable benefit; but when rendering small items of geometry at large distances - pixel structure becomes an issue. I first noticed this issue playing psp katamari where the reduced resolution made discerning small objects at large distances impossible without the item geometry coalescing into an indistinct blob of pixels. the higher pixel density at 1080p means you can resolve more items of geometry within a single scene than would be possible otherwise or alternatively a greater range of item sizes eg an ant and a car being visible on a single scene without zooming in to the ant required to see the ant clearly
At the very least this subtly changes level design and very possibly the gameplay of katamari 1080p over its predecessors and its the only game i can think off the top of my head which benefits in this way from the extra pixels. i haven't actually seen a 1080p video but if katamari forever is as big a leap as beautiful katamari was over the ps2 version then it should be noticeable.
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All comments (3)
Commented on 2009-07-23 01:27:14
Commented on 2009-07-23 15:02:00
Commented on 2009-07-25 22:17:04The reason : Scale
in most instances 1080p is purely cosmetic, in katamari i feel it offers a subtle gameplay improvement. 1080p is a strain on precious memory and fillrate resources, the extra sharpness hardly seems worth it with the reduction in edge aliasing being the only perceivable benefit; but when rendering small items of geometry at large distances - pixel structure becomes an issue. I first noticed this issue playing psp katamari where the reduced resolution made discerning small objects at large distances impossible without the item geometry coalescing into an indistinct blob of pixels. the higher pixel density at 1080p means you can resolve more items of geometry within a single scene than would be possible otherwise or alternatively a greater range of item sizes eg an ant and a car being visible on a single scene without zooming in to the ant required to see the ant clearly
At the very least this subtly changes level design and very possibly the gameplay of katamari 1080p over its predecessors and its the only game i can think off the top of my head which benefits in this way from the extra pixels. i haven't actually seen a 1080p video but if katamari forever is as big a leap as beautiful katamari was over the ps2 version then it should be noticeable.