I nearly hyperventilated when I received this month’s issue of Official Xbox Magazine in the mail.  Right there, smack dab on the front cover sitting on piles of Xbox 360 hardware was the little green-shirted pill-shaped silly head we all refer to as Katamari…well actually, we refer to him as the Prince, but he and his ball go hand in hand.  I first met Katamari about a year ago, and it was love at first sight.  I was this close (you can’t see it, but I’m barely holding my index finger and thumb apart) to wanting to buy a PS2 (yes, I said ‘close to wanting’) just so I could play Katamari.  I love collecting junk (in video games, not real life… but kinda in real life, too), and this game provides a digital heaven for the ultimate junk collector.

The Katamari game developers aren’t changing too much while bringing it to the Xbox 360, but the few changes they are making will add to the peculiar little game instead of taking away from its simplistic awesomeness/addictiveness.  Here are some of the changes you can look forward to in the new installment of Katamari on the Xbox 360:

Online Play: You’ll be able to play online across any combination of 10 different tasks (which in regular games would be called ‘stages’). Like DOA4, you can hang out in a lobby where you’ll have the ability to “cute-ify” your friends’ and opponents’ faces with features like Katamari emoticons, word bubbles, and manually created graffiti murals.

Piles of Junk: “We’ve gone from around 1,486 objects in the previous Katamaris to nearly 5,000 in the new game.” That’s 236% more stuff!  Are your toes tingling with excitement, too?

Fashion: In My Beautiful Katamari, there are 15 different gifts, or pieces of clothing, for each of the Prince’s three body parts: head, face and body.  You must roll these up with your katamari to make them accessible in your virtual closet.

Characters: “Cousins”, or playable characters, can also be accumulated during the game by rolling the little fellas up with your katamari.  There are 8 new cousins in the game. Yay!

Load times: “Each of the game’s environments is massive. And guess what? Everything is instant: no load times like in the days of yore.”

Calyber’s Concern: For those of you who indulged yourself in collecting things in Oblivion, but found when you piled your things up in an incredible heap the frame rate dropped to 3 FPS, be comforted in knowing that I, too, worry about such a problem in Katamari.  But since the exact purpose of Katamari is to collect huge masses of things, I trust Namco and Xbox to work out any possible lag issues before the game is released. 

Interesting Fact: Translated directly from Japanese, Katamari Damacy means “clump of souls.”

AndnowIhavenoneedtobuyaPS2(or3)!