Katamari Damacy

Both thumbs on the sticks, and nothing else. No jump, no attack, no camera control worth the name. Push forward to roll, pull back to reverse, shove them opposite ways to pivot in place like a bulldozer. It takes about five minutes to stop fighting the scheme and maybe an hour to realise that the awkwardness is the point: you are not a person, you are a ball, and a ball turns badly.

The premise is that the King of All Cosmos, an enormous preening figure with a lightning-bolt head, has destroyed every star in the sky and would rather not discuss how. His son, roughly a centimetre tall, is sent down to Earth with a sticky sphere to fix it. Anything smaller than the katamari adheres to it. Thumbtacks, then dice, then mice, then cats, then children, then cows, then police cars, then buildings. The scale ratchets up inside a single timed run, so a garden that felt like a continent becomes a footnote you roll straight over four minutes later.

What makes the whole thing work is that the world is built with consistent physical logic rather than as a series of set pieces. Every object has a size value and a shape, and shape matters: a bicycle sticking out of your ball makes it wobble and thump, and you can feel that wobble through the controller. Bumping something too large scrapes items loose. Progress is not scored on cleverness but on greed managed under a clock, which is a rare and honest kind of pressure.

Namco released it cheap in 2004 with no expectation attached, and it arrived looking like nothing else on a console then obsessed with brown realism and cinematic bombast. Flat colours, blocky models, a soundtrack of scat singing and lounge jazz and a children's chorus that has outlived most of the era's orchestral scores. Keita Takahashi's design school project became the sixth generation's proof that a good idea needs almost no technology behind it.

It is short, the later stages lean on trial and error, and the camera will betray you at least once per level. None of that has dented it. Two decades on, the sight of a hundred-metre ball dragging a screaming crowd and a skyscraper through the clouds is still the funniest image the PS2 ever produced.