Beautiful Katamari

Written by Ashley Coomer  on August 15, 2007

Hands-On Preview: I'm having a ball

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Innocence is a rare thing in video games these days. It seems that for every game that portrays an innocent image, there will be ten which involve terrorists, killing sprees and the sound of snapping necks, and it's getting to the point where many of us see nothing deranged about going all Hitman on our lesser friends, locking them in the closet and then hiding the keys in the ocean. Fear not though, Beautiful Katamari is rolling its way to the Xbox 360 and it's going to be exclusive too.

For those of you wondering what on earth a Katamari is, witness this lesson. Beautiful Katamari is a simple and original, yet fantastic creation. That's right, Сcreation', not game Ц Beautiful Katamari is a series host to a great visual style and soundtrack, not to forget the awesome gameplay concept. Speaking of which, the Katamari series revolves around two things: a ball and objects. No, really, that's it Ц you spend the game rolling a ball around Ц which starts off small in scale Ц and collecting objects by essentially running over them. The long and short of it is, you can only collect objects smaller than the ball itself, and so you can probably guess that the core idea is to make a huge ball so you can collect bigger items, a bit like a snowball rolling down a hill at great speed.

Now that the brief history lesson over, let's get back to the case at hand. The actual visuals aren't just a reworking of those in the PlayStation 2 gamesЕ that becomes apparent at first sight, yet the big change this time round is that the game is running in high definition, which obviously makes it look sweet and really does the colorful artistic style justice. The next thing which becomes obvious is that it's more of the same gameplay. You take your katamari and you roll up bigger and bigger items until your katamari expands and the King is pleased. No more, no less. That's not to say there's anything wrong with that, and in fact, for those who missed out on the series on the PS2 and PSP, Beautiful Katamari will be the game to welcome them with its arms open.

There will be at or around 50 playable characters in the latest game, and along with that, a brand new soundtrack. That's all in the single player story mode though. The real changes Katamari has taken by moving to the Xbox 360 are in its multiplayer and online modes. On the same console two players will be able to battle it out trying to create the largest ball in the time limit or cooperatively control one side of the ball each. The latter sounds promising but the former unfortunately doesn't; it is great fun, sure, but anyone who has played any of the other titles on splitscreen multiplayer will know how bad the camera is, especially as balls are becoming bigger than the screen's sectors. It just really didn't work, but as long as the co-op isn't splitscreen, it will be a pile of fun wrapped up in a box of joy.



Online multiplayer will be near-identical with the versus mode on offer, and allowing up to four players in a game session. There are always people willing to complain about something or other Ц as it stands, any more than four players online would limit the collection of items greatly while also failing to deliver room to move in the map. Leaderboards will be supported, thank god, and will feature the sizes of balls created by players, among other things such as the amount of online wins in the game modes.

Storylines have never been Katamari's main focus for obvious reasons and were more used to stick the game together instead of it saying СHere's your playground Ц go roll around', but for the hell of it this time round The King of All Cosmos has been playing tennis and clearly serving incorrectlyЕ it was enough to create a giant black hole in the universe which must be closed with, would you believe it, your katamari ball. Something which is nice to hear is that as well as having the overall objective of creating a large ball, the specialty rounds return as well. For example, you'll be assigned other objectives such as collecting a certain amount of a specific type of item. This will lead to more skill than just rolling over everything in sight and will again make the game even more fun that it's already destined to be.

Thanks to the wonderful micro-transactions world that is the Xbox Live Marketplace, Namco Bandai have said they are likely to be producing additional online downloadable content. God only knows what this could consist of, but for a game as weird and wonderful as Beautiful Katamari, the possibilities are endlessЕ new levels (because damn, the games aren't that long) and characters to more online modes.

With the amount of triple-A titles being released in the latter part of 2007 it's fearful that Beautiful Katamari will be massively overlooked and forgotten about in the company of Halo 3, Mass Effect, BioShock and others. Either way, it's a game I and other staff members at Gaming Target are looking forward to, and to me that's all that really matters.