We Love Katamari E3 2005 Preshow Hands-On

At a recent pre-E3 press event hosted by Namco, we had the opportunity to play through a one-level demo of We Love Katamari, the sequel to one of 2004's quirkiest games. The level on show was set inside a small portion of a school building that comprised a couple of classrooms, a storage room, and a busy corridor connecting them all.

We Love Katamari plays almost identically to its predecessor. Your goal is to roll a small katamari (think of it as an adhesive ball) around a level picking up objects that make it bigger and, as a result, capable of picking up increasingly larger objects. We started the school level, for example, with a katamari that was only big enough to pick up small objects such as pencils and erasers, but it wasn't long before we were rolling up soccer balls, schoolbags, and small pieces of furniture. By the time our katamari was approaching the size required by The King of All Cosmos to beat the level, we were able to add students and their desks to the vaguely spherical mass. The students weren't overly enthusiastic about being rolled into a ball, though, and we noticed that many of them were actively trying to avoid us by moving toward one corner of their classroom.

The game's storyline is a continuation of that from the first Katamari Damacy game, which required you, as the prince, to replace the stars from the sky (which were somehow lost by your father) with increasingly larger katamari. The stars in the sky around Earth were all replaced in the first game, but to finish the job you'll need to sort out the rest of the solar system as well. Fortunately, the prince won't be on his own this time around, since he'll have help from a number of his cousins (other playable characters with slightly different abilities, perhaps) and, to quote Namco's game description, "many fans that grew to love the prince and the king."

Since the prince won't be alone, it only seems fair that you won't have to be either, which is where We Love Katamari's all-new cooperative mode comes in. We've not had an opportunity to check out the cooperative play at this time, but we're told that it'll see two players assuming control of a single katamari. It's not yet clear whether certain objectives in the game will only be possible to complete with two players (using their combined strength to push the katamari up a particularly steep incline, for example), but given the nature of the game's controls, you can bet that working and communicating well together will be the only way to get anything done.

If you're playing We Love Katamari with a friend, you'll also have the option to go against each other in a split-screen battle mode where the player with the largest katamari at the final whistle is declared the winner. The battle mode will purportedly feature battlegrounds much larger than those in the original game, though hopefully not so enormous that you won't have plenty of opportunities to roll into your opponents in an attempt to dislodge objects from their ball.

Further information on We Love Katamari is scarce at present, save for the fact that there will be at least one underwater level and a level (presumably toward the end of the game) in which you'll get to add the Eiffel Tower to your katamari. Namco plans to have a two-level demo of the game available at E3, so be sure to check back for additional information as we report live from the show floor.