“Ah good, you’re here. We wondered when you were going to show up. We just got back from our holiday, you know. Sand, sand, sand, is there any other thing that makes your feet feel all dreamy? Lovely sand, we found. Now where’s Prince, he’s meant to be helping out more of our fans. We do love to please our fans, yes we do. Almost as much as we love sweets.”
If you have never played Katamari Damacy, you’re really missing out. There truly is nothing more absorbing than rolling up the entire world into a huge ball of crap. The first game never made it to Western shores – Namco felt that it really wouldn’t appeal to our tastes, yet felt the backlash when word on the (import) street spread across to gamers all over the country.
So, via EA, the sequel was released internationally on the PlayStation 2, as ‘We Love Katamari’, and so entranced we were by it at the SPOnG office that we went straight down to Mothercare to buy some of those stubby balls in an attempt to roll paperclips and staplers to it. It never worked. Several of us broke down in tears, never to recover and others ended up humming the insane theme tune most hours a day. In short, we all got funny looks in public, all thanks to the drug that is Katamari.
The drug in question spawned a handheld version for the PSP, called ‘Me & My Katamari’, which according to the doctor responsible, Keita Takahashi, is to be the last in the series. The aim is the same as previous iterations – roll a ball around a real-world environment collecting items to make it grow. The larger your ball (known as a Katamari) becomes, the bigger the items you can collect. And so it begins, an ever-lasting race against the clock to become the biggest damn Katamari the world has ever seen! Starting with pencils and sharpeners, you grow on to pick up cups and books, then small chairs, then big chairs, then cats and tables and street signs, then people (and policemen)! And then trains! Houses! Airplanes! You are the Omega, and you must consume the world!
...Ahem. Previous Katamari games have seen you play as the Prince, a strange green little fellow that has what looks like a short, double-ended cigar for a head, rolling up things in an attempt to please your daddy, the King of all Cosmos. No pressure, then. In ‘Me & My Katamari’ the situation is no different – the setting is a beach, and the King, Queen and Prince are enjoying a holiday until many animals lose their homes in a tidal wave. Your objective is to recreate islands instead of planets this time, and the objectives you come across in each level are pretty much identical in style to the PS2 release before it.
As much as the portable version lends itself to its console brother, the immediate difference is the PSP control system. Lacking two analogue sticks, rolling your ball of mass around a stage is down to the D-pad and face buttons – the D-pad controlling your left hand side and the Square, Circle, Cross and Triangle buttons the right hand side of the Katamari. The digital method of controlling makes playing this a much more awkward experience than on the PlayStation 2, and as has been mentioned before, playing a game that requires a lot of action with your thumbs on a PSP is likely to render you with some kind of advanced arthritis. Not essential really.
