Alex Navarro Associate Editor

Current Project: Sorting through all of my music trying to fit as much of it as possible onto my new 40GB iPod. Technology I no longer have any use for: Audio CDs.

...And then things got weird.

Amid the endless hype surrounding all the biggest games at E3 (of which there were more than plenty), sometimes smaller, more-bizarre gems get lost in the shuffle. These are the games that I most often try to seek out--the weird diamonds in the rough that look completely insane and often turn out to be pretty cool. E3 2004 had plenty of these strange titles--perhaps more than in recent years past. Interestingly enough, all of the games that really caught my fancy happened to be foreign games that seemed like they would have absolutely no business getting North American releases, yet apparently they will be. Some of these games are already out in their respective regions, and some are still a ways away from any sort of release. Whatever the situation, foreign developers brought me the crazy at E3 2004 in spades, and I couldn't be happier. Here are some of the quirkiest, most bizarre games that stood out to me at this year's E3.

Whatever the people who made this game are on... I want some.

Katamari Damacy
Publisher: Namco
Developer: Namco

Your father is the king of space, but he's also a wicked drunk. At some point during one of his more tumultuous drinking sessions, he manages to lose every star in the sky. Whoops! Now you, as his son (the prince), have to replace all the stars. How do you go about such a task? Simple! By rolling a ball around a metropolitan environment, picking up as many objects as possible--including living creatures--and ultimately trying to make the biggest ball of junk you can. While this could easily be the kind of game where the wildly insane premise could be enough to help it skate by on charm alone, the game is also really fun. It has a strange, quirky look to it, and the music is so bizarrely good that I can't help but hope for some kind of official release for its soundtrack (as far-fetched as that idea may be). This game is totally bananas, and the fact that Namco is bringing it to the US is a completely awesome move. Kudos, Namco.

It's a Doggy Dogg world.

Dog's Life
Publisher: Hip Games
Developer: Frontier Dev.

Ever had the desire to see the world through the eyes of a dog? Well, now's your chance. Dog's Life is, for all intents and purposes, a pretty standard action adventure game--except you just happen to be a dog. You can do all the typical dog things, like barking, performing tricks, using your extra-special olfactory abilities to scope out different scents via a mode called "smellovision," and marking your territory. In fact, a big part of the gameplay is challenging other dogs, often by trying to mark your territory over theirs. Though less integral to the gameplay but along the same lines, you can actually poop in the game as well. Yes, polygonal pooping. Finally! Dog's Life is already out in Europe, and the game's style of humor and general quirkiness definitely comes across as decisively Euro in nature. Younger audiences especially ought to find this one right up their alleys when it comes out stateside.

Thanks, Europe. I wasn't getting nearly enough tawdry sex in my daily gaming diet.

Singles: Flirt Up Your Life
Publisher: Eidos Interactive
Developer: Rotobee

By the time you read this column, we will have already reviewed Singles, and it will already be available for purchase online. However, it was at E3, and it is still completely crazy. Singles is essentially like The Sims, but it's not quite as good. However, it does have full-frontal nudity and sex. More than anything else, this game's clinical approach to sexuality is almost a little too much for my atypical American sensibilities to process correctly. Sure, nudity isn't really that big of a deal, but Singles is so nonchalant about it that you can't help but find it hysterical. Though the game itself isn't really that good, it wins points with me just for being weird.

Since there aren't actually any screenshots of Yoot Saito's Odama yet, here's a picture of a person rolling a bowling ball into an army of samurai warriors.

Yoot Saito's Odama
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Vivarium

Not to be confused with Peter Molyneux's Odama or Larry Hagman's Odama (I am officially the billionth person to make this joke), Yoot Saito's Odama is easily the best Samurai-themed strategy pinball game I've ever seen. You have your own fleet of samurai warriors, and you're up against an opposing army. To clear a path past your enemy's defenses and to give your army access to the opposing warlord, you have to roll a giant, metallic ball, called an odama, to bowl your way through. Why nobody thought of this before, we'll never know. Why anyone did think of this I'm not sure I actually want to know. But, hey, it's from the same guy who brought you SimTower and Seaman, so, really, weird for Yoot Saito is just par for the course.

There were plenty of other utterly strange games at E3 that caught my eye, such as Bandai's frog-golfing game Ribbit King, Digital Spray's ultracreepy and ultra-Russian You Are Empty, and the world's first tango-based rhythm game, XTango: Shuffling Roses (which was buried so deeply within the darklands of Kentia Hall that I'm almost positive it will never come out in the US). Each and every one of these games showed me something different, something cool, or just something flat-out bizarre. It just goes to show that if you don't look past the monolithic franchises that tend to dominate E3, you can miss out on some pretty interesting stuff.