The votes are in: this morning's Top Story is the fact you can destroy any webpage with your very own browser-based Katamari.
An anonymous coder has put together a clever little piece of Javascript which can be run via Google Chrome and used to summon a Katamari in your browser. This Katamari can be made to roll around using the mouse, and it takes any pieces of web page it rolls over with it. As it increases in size, it's able to pick up larger and larger elements from the page, including images.
The hack can be played in either single or multiplayer mode. In single-player mode, loading a webpage then pasting a short piece of JavaScript into Chrome's address bar activates the "game", allowing you to systematically destroy the beautiful (or not so beautiful) design of any web page that has been irritating you recently. In multiplayer mode, a game session is created and listed on the main site, allowing other people to come and join in on the same site. No personally-identifying information is collected by the code.
The hack works by reloading the webpage and inserting some of its own code before the existing content. Among other things, this code puts "span" HTML tags around every word on the page to separate them out into individual units for the Katamari to grab. The same happens with pictures. As the Katamari increases in size, larger and larger elements can be collected.
The creator has seemingly taken great pains to remain anonymous. The main page for the "game" is hosted on an anonymous Amazon Web Services site, and the only clue to his identity is in the game's JavaScript source code, where a stray comment refers to his computer's username as "alex." It also looks like he is either a Mac or Linux user. Presumably he has chosen to remain anonymous in order to avoid any copyright issues, as the hack makes use of music and sound effects taken directly from the Katamari games.
We take no responsibility for any loss of productivity owing to playing with this oddly-entertaining Internet toy. But Facebook has lots of text on it. Just saying.
STAT CHECK -- 7:25AM PST, Mar. 11, 2011
Chances You Saw This Story: 10%
Calculated by number of times we saw it divided by the number of sites we visited today.
GamePro Forum Views: 354
GamePro Comments: 1
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