So rainman bought sunshine and I a copy of We Love Katamari for Christmas. I waited a while to get started (until I knocked out a good portion of God Of War). I finally picked it up and I couldn’t put it down once I did.

The concept is simple. You are the Prince of all the Cosmos and it is your job to roll up…. well, everything. You are charged with pushing (sliding and pulling) a Katamari. A Katamari is a ball of various sizes and when anything of generally the same size or smaller touches it, the item sticks to the Katamari.

The basic feel of the game is very strange. The animation looks like something straight out of the bowels of Japan’s weirdest. The people are all blocky and square looking. The between sequences are even stranger. The text is usually difficult to want to continue reading. There’s also an annoying DJ scratching sound that is played while the text very slowly appears in the word bubbles. After a handful of times trying to keep up with the oddball nature of the dialog, I eventually just started skipping all of it. Once I knew the objective, I just started playing.

The thing that makes Katamari the most interesting is that everything that you see can be rolled up into your Katamari. If you get large enough, you can even collect islands, mountains, clouds, Godzilla sized pandas, strange spaceships the size of continents, and even rainbows. The stuff you collect seems randomly generated as well. I recall collecting an invisible person (only the clothes were visible), bears on bikes, partially constructed buildings, bears sleeping in beds on top of trees, policemen walking on the sides of buildings, trumpets stacked 2 stories high, and even cats wearing snorkeling masks swimming underwater. Like I said, it was strange.

There are two things that really hold the game back from superb. The most annoying is the controller scheme. You have to move both analog sticks forward to roll forward or backwards. The scheme is so unintuitive that it’s ridiculous. It has to be the worst scheme ever designed. If you ask me, they should make it control like Gran Turismo; the left side is forward direction and the right side is lateral direction.

The other major flaw is the camera. The camera tries its best to find the best place to be but, more often than not, it ends up behind something which blocks your view. They should take a clue from God Of War. The camera is the one thing that kept sunshine from loving it; she said it was reminiscent of the early 3D games.

The two-player game modes are fun but can be extremely frustrating due to the controller issue. I actually don’t think I ever really learned the two-player controls. My favorite level was the snowman level; the person with the biggest snowball, when each players touch each others’ Katamari, wins.

Overall, this game was incredibly addictive. There is something incredible about a game as simple as this and was able to capture my attention. My largest Katamari started at 10cm and grew to 1001m and lasted 17 minutes. The level variety was worth the time but I simply wish there were more free-style level play. This game would be very interesting with internet play support. If you haven’t played this game yet, do so. It took me 20 hours to start growing bored and the game only cost $30! That’s a pretty good rate; movies cost about $4 an hour while We Love Katamari cost about $1.33 an hour!

[rate 4]