E3 2007: Hands-on with Beautiful Katamari
Hooray! More Katamari! I demoed the Xbox 360 version of Beautiful Katamari, and it is indeed beautiful running in 1080p on these here E3 flat screens. The art style remains the same as previous iterations, it just looks a bit sharper. The play controls on the Xbox feel like they could get a little crampy after a while, with the two analog sticks slightly offset, unlike the Playstation dual analog, which is side by side. The soundtrack is supposed to be comprised of 80's-sounding J-Pop, which I found kind of disheartening. I loved the original Katamari soundtrack for its diversity, and the We <3 Katamari soundtrack kind of felt like it was trying too hard. The soundtrack is really important to the series, people! I was informed that there are online battle modes, but no online co-op, only offline. WHYYYYYY. Co-op in We <3 Katamari was OK, but online co-op would have been much better. Oh well. We will see what happens when it is finally released sometime in the near future.
