Mine's Bigger - The Games I've Played

This game goes under the category of amazing invention in the world of gaming that will never be reproduced ever by anyone else. It is such a weird quirky puzzle game that nothing could ever come close to it ever again. It is a one of a kind game, with innovative game play, one of a kind levels, and memorable ear worms of music blasting through every level.

This game. . . oh this game is a weird one. Let's get some of the infamous tuneage to get this post rolling. Yup, I did the dad pun with rolling. Here's one of my favorite tracks.

So this game is supposed to be a social commentary about consumerism and the desire to always need something bigger and more, but who cares about what the producer says it's about, it's about being awesome and rolling up a ball of junk!

For those that have never played this acid trip of a game, you play as the Prince of all of the Cosmos.

Your dad, the king of the cosmos (or the giant floating head)

 did some stupid stuff, and now you have to remake the cosmos by rolling up katamari. Katamari's are little sticky balls that pick things up that they run into. The more stuff that you run into, the bigger your Katamari gets and the bigger things you can pick up. You start picking up paper clips and push pins, and then you grow bigger and bigger finally eating up entire planets in your goal to get a bigger and bigger Katamari.

This sounds like an easy enough concept, run over stuff, make a bigger thing, and run over even more stuff, but most levels are no where close to that easy to tackle. For example, there's the money level. Everything you run into has a cost, and you have a budget that you have to stay under to make the largest katamari you can. You pick up expensive items, you're screwed and you have to start over again looking for toilet paper and ramen to make your ball bigger. There's hot/cold levels where you have to keep your ball on fire, cow level where you can only pick up things that have cows on them, or avoid anything that has cows on them, or sumo-wrestler levels where your katamari isn't a ball, but a super hungry sumo that needs to beef up so you can knock the other sumo out of the ring.

That just covers single player, then there's two player games. In two player, you and your partner can either compete against each other and try to make bigger katamari's than each other to destroy each other, or you can work together on the same Katamari.

I've tried to play co-op on this game, and the amount of communication and cordination requried between the two people playing is silly complex. Then I saw two friends play it that knew the game and had some weird telepathy thing going with each other, and I was amazed.

It's sort of along the ideas of a two headed ogre. If the heads fight against each other or don't agree with each other, then the ogre just stands there arguing with himself, but if the two heads are in perfect sync with each other, the monster keeps on going without any problems. That's how it was with these two.


To do something as easy as a quick direction switch both people have to press down on both r3 and l3 (the control sticks on the ps3, pushing them physically down into the controller, not just directionally down). They managed to coordinate jumps like that without hardly talking to each other, and other even more complicated stuff like getting speed boosts and even controlling the ball of junk they were picking up, they did with a crazy telepathic link. Anyways, I digress, the game is difficult, but it's deceptively simple. That's what makes it such a great game.



It's cute. It's overly Japanese. It's artistic and production direction is so over the top that you can't take it serious . . . and then you're forced to take it very serious because the game just ate you alive and told you to start the level again because you had no clue what you were doing and requires you to suck it up and stop treating it like a kid's game.


This is one of those games that I enjoy playing, and could easily pick it back up again and play a few levels at any point and be just as addicted as when I first played it. It's a fun game and thanks to high scores always gives you something to compete against, even if it is just yourself that you're playing with. Given, it's not a perfect game, this particular one is only a remix of all of the previous Katamari games picking out the best levels and best songs, so if you've played any of the others, it's nothing new, but if you've never played before, or only played a bit, then it's a great place to come back and see some of the best of the best.