We Love Katamari is the sequel to the cultish and cracked out Katamari Damacy. The character's father, the King of All Cosmos, got drunk in the first one, and knocked all the stars out of the sky. To fix this, he sent his son down to Earth to do the dirty work of making replacement stars. In the sequel, the King of All Cosmos has garnered a fanbase thanks to your efforts in the first game, and it's your job to create fan requested Katamaris. For this purpose, you get a Katamari, a little ball that stuff gets stuck to as you roll over it. As you go, the Katamari gets larger, and it'll roll differently depending on where stuff gets stuck to it. That's pretty much the point of the game. It's just great fun. Unless you're trying to set records, it's a low pressure, easy to get into game. And it's crazy. You can roll up almost anything imaginable, and if it's in the game, eventually you will be able to roll it up. Your Katamari grows from something that can pick up pins, on through snacks, then pets, then people, car, then elephants, to buildings, to monuments (I rolled up the Great Wall of China) on up to islands and storms and landmasses and just about anything else you can imagine. There's even a bonus map where you roll up entire countries to make a Katamari large enough to roll up a meteor. The final level is to roll up all the planets you made into a Katamari large enough to roll up the sun. A few levels mix it up, with a Katamari on fire that goes out if you don't roll over stuff fast enough, or a snowball that grows bigger as you go. The levels are great fun to explore. I haven't seen places this crazy since the last time I tried to find Waldo. It's not just the random poison dart frogs in people's houses, or the giant dinosaurs you find once you can roll up islands, or the ninja running along the walls, or the trumpeting fish, or the screams of the innocent as you roll them up, or the paper cranes that try to escape, but when you combine them all, it's just a crazy world. The other game I rented wasn't nearly so positive an experience. Star Wars Battlefront II reminded me rather definitively why I don't play shooters. The dual analog shooter control scheme is enough to drive me nuts. Having to keep track of two axis of movement of my own, having to hit three buttons at once to fire with any sort of accuracy, and having to keep track of the locations of all your enemies drives me nuts. And considering that they outnumber you twenty to one, get infinite respawn, and hit a lot harder than you do, it's not exactly fun. Especially when your character is all too mortal, which is great for multiplayer game balance, but an absolute pain the rear for a single player game. There are a wide variety of modes and playable characters, but without an easy mode of play, these really can't be enjoyed by anyone who isn't already skilled at shooters. Getting the chance to play as Yoda or boarding a capital ship shouldn't be this much of a chore. I'll admit that shooters aren't my area of strength, but it's kind of ridiculous to die seventeen times on the levels that I actually manage to pass. The game is balanced, but at the cost of any sort of friendliness to inexperienced players. And then for added sadism, when I turned the game off, and turned it back on, all my hard-won bonuses had disappeared. The plus side is that just about any character or vehicle that has appeared in the Star Wars universe appears to be playable, with an emphasis on Clone Troopers and Jedi in the story mode. And it's a neat story mode to be certain, taking a look at Palpatine's rise to power through the eyes of the foot soldiers that put him there. You get a wide variety of clone trooper types that each play different roles in combat, which can be useful to a skilled player, but most of them are just going to be so much cannon fodder in the hands of a newbie. It cannot be repeated enough that this game is not friendly to people inexperienced with shooters. The learning curve is far too sharp. I guess it comes down to a matter of taste, but I found it entirely too punishing. I'll stick to Metroid and Ratchet and Clank.

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Text Copyright © 2006 Matt Hill