Let the Good Times Roll, Literally

Not that I'm ungrateful or anything, but this obscenely long holiday obviously has its downside too. I was direly in need of something to kill time, lots of it. I'm tired of watching the same episode of American Idol again and again, tired of channel-flipping only to settle on the same thing day after day. I also don't feel like playing the Wii, don't know why. You might thing that with so many things available, boredom is so passé. Apparently not. I had to resort to multitasking: channel-and-website flipping.

Then come my savior in the form of a PSP game. I'm saved by a tiny alien prince, the son of King of All Cosmos who rolls around with an all-sticking ball. Yup, Me & My Katamari is an excellent sequel game to its PS2 predecessors, Kamary Damacy and We Love Katamari.

This time, our funky Royal Family decided to go on a tropical vacation on "Earth". It was all fun and games until the giant King sweeps islands off with a tsunami. To redeem his mistake, he promised to rebuild all of the islands so the animals can live happily again. As in previous games, the task was delegated to none other than our lovable diminutive green prince. Talk about a responsible king...

The gameplay still follows the same formula. That's why it's called Katamari, duh. Roll around, grow, roll around some more, grow even bigger, so on and so forth until you reach the target size. Start off from thumbtacks and dices, later you get to roll people, buildings, and finally islands and rainbows. These lumps will then be transformed by the King into showy islands. The whole thing seems repetitive, but wackiness is never boring, trust me: rolling a group of innocent children feels really great. The game also created variety by changing seasons and times of the day.

Until now, I'm still amazed by how the creator got the idea of this Katamari. Let's imagine if sometime in the future, we can build such a ball. It'd be great for cleaning purposes. No one'll buy vacuum cleaner anymore, they just roll their Katamari Cleaner. On the other hand, it'll also be one annoying weapon. Turn off those nuclear bombs, we'll roll those terrorists off with a giant Katamari. Now that's what you call a weapon of mass destruction.