Beautiful Katamari - Colossal Katamari

"All we need is a star of unimaginable size and all Cosmos is home free. Otherwise, squishville. Hm. Wow It's not easy being you, is it?"

The King of All Cosmos

I won't try to explain the Katamari series to you. It is inexplicable. My sister, not a gamer in any but the most casual of senses, got hooked on it after watching me play for just a few minutes. We took turns rolling up the world until she had to leave and on her way out I told her, "Here's a challenge: go home and try to explain this game to your husband." She did and came back the next day--with her husband. She brought him to my XBox, had me load up Beautiful Katamari, and said, "See, you roll things up. Because there is a black hole. The King wants you to plug it." She tripped over her words, he laughed. Ten minutes later he was hooked too.

And that's the beauty of the inexplicable. It can only be experienced. This is why I have followed the tradition of Beautiful Katamari reviewers to relate a "tale of the first time" with the game. So, yes, in a way it's like sex. Doesn't sound great, but don't try to knock it until you've played it and probably woken up hours later in a puddle of your own fluids having tangled yourself in countless strangers, animals, ring-shaped objects, and whatever else the King of Cosmos has directed you to stick in your katamari.

Image via Wikipedia

Beautiful Katamari is not the best of the series by a longshot, but by the virtue of all the games being essentially the same it is comparable to any of them. The main missions won't take but a single session to conquer, maybe providing four hours of gameplay. But the replay value is as colossal as the ball of stuff you'll roll up on the final level. By doing so, incidentally, you'll earn this achievement, and be able to plug the massive Cosmos-devouring black hole that has led the King to recruit you and your katamari in the first place. A nice wave of surreal irony sweeps over around the time you are completing this stage: in order to plug the black hole and save the Cosmos from its dense belly, you must roll up most of the Cosmos into a ball big enough to plug the black hole... saving whom exactly? In the course of your rolling, the Earth, its continents, and all of its inhabitants have been sacrificed. Even the planets you had previously created to replace the ones eaten by the black hole becoming stuffing for your katamari plug.

The best part of earning this achievement, by the way, is that the credits follow. And that's not meant as a backhanded compliment because the credits are accompanied by a katamari mini-game that has you rolling up objects in pseudo 2D from an overhead perspective. This is a lot of fun, and its the kind of twist on the gameplay that you, if you were a fan of the previous games, had been looking for in the main game modes. And as you direct your little character over to the Collections room to load up the mini-game for a second go you find yourself asking, "Why did the developers save their best new stuff for a tacked-on bonus feature meant to keep you entertained as the credits rolled?" Sadly, there is no answer. But for a silver lining, you do have a Katamari game on the XBox 360; which means that only Metal Gear Solid 4 and Little Big Planet are the only items left on your list of reasons to buy a PS3, unless you want a really expensive Blu-Ray player or have need of a browser that won't allow you to watch Hulu videos.

Next:
Katamari-like antics from Dejobaan Games, the makers of the sublime AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! has appeared on Steam in the form of The Wonderful End of the World and is highly recommended as a PC gamers alternative or even for fans of the console originals. I think once I roll up a few more achievements on Beautiful Katamari I'll spend some time with that.

Grind Update:
As of this writing my gamerscore stands at 3815, another thousand point leap since my last achievement update. That tells me two things: 1) I should have plenty of material for this blog; 2) I should probably write more often for this blog. Once a week is not cutting it. Hence, this smaller-than-usual post only two days since my last (maybe three days by the time it's actually published).

I have left two friends in my wake since blowing past koolkamel last week. I have another in my sights. Gathering steam...

• Get This Game: Katamari creator's Noby Noby Boy stretches onto iPhone (boingboing.net)
• Judging The Covers Of Games, And How To Make Them Better [Feature] (kotaku.com)
• Video: Project Natal hands-on goes round two with Katamari Damacy, Space Invaders (engadget.com)