katamari damacy, sick and twisted

[Nick Bensema <nickb@xxxxxx>]

I just bought Katamari Damacy for the Playstation 2.  Very good game, 
very original.

For those not in the know, it's a game where you push around this ball 
and stuff sticks to it, and as more stuff sticks, it grows bigger.  So 
you can start out the level getting beaten up by mice and picking up 
thumbtacks, and end the level picking up a parking garage and a soccer 
team.  http://katamaridamacy.jp/ is the original site, and there's an 
English-language review here: http://game-science.com/reviews/ps2_kd.html

After playing it all day today, I already think I might be able to make 
a 2600 version.

OK, I can't create an immersive 3D world with thousands of objects, but 
I can make a game like this:

* The player can push and steer a ball.  It'll probably look like River 
Raid, though closer to Journey Escape.
* Items that are small enough will stick to the ball, causing it to grow 
in size.
* Smaller items will cause the ball to grow more slowly than larger items.
* Hard collisions with items that are too large will cause items to 
break off the ball, causing it to gradually shrink.
* Items appear to shrink relative to the ball as it grows.
* Some kind of rule regarding awkward items changing the way the ball 
rolls.

Graphically, it would look something like this:
* Items too large to pick up, like furniture, houses, mountains and 
cliffs, would be represented on the playfield.  There might be 
16-pixel-wide versions of the 8-pixel-wide bitmaps, to make them proper 
obstacles.
* Items small enough to pick up would be represented by player graphics, 
of varying widths.
* The katamari ball is, well, the ball.
* If there's enough memory, we would have a cache of two or four objects 
that appear to orbit the ball as it rolls.  But that means that missed 
objects would disappear as they passed.  OTOH, it would give us a way to 
graphically represent objects flying off when things collide.

so, how crazy am I?