28Oct05 (Monthenor): Is it possible to have a crossover with a comic that doesn't even exist yet? I couldn't resist the lure of another Don Katamari appearance, and Trady...well. You'll just have to wait and see.

I'm being a jerk about this "52 Yo Mama and Bloot" thing, aren't I?

We <3 Katamari: Do you know how long I tried to get the Unicode "heart" character ♥ to render in the title there? Firefox just can't handle it.

Another week, another great sequel. While X-Men Legends 2 has a definite subset of people that can enjoy it, We <3 Katamari is for everyone. Everything that made the first one great is back (roll up the planet!), and now everything exterior to the rolling is more tightly integrated into the game itself. Menus and level selection flow from one to the other, with you controlling the Prince through it all. This is one of those games that you'd want your parents and grandparents to see, and they'd probably want to play it.

Two complaints: the soundtrack is not quite as compelling as the last one. We <3 Katamari branches out from its weird jazz origins into weird rock, weird ambient techno, and a 26-minute Japanese a capella beatbox. There are just more irritating tunes this time around, ones that I would skip in the game itself so they didn't sour my five-minute paper crane hunt.

The second complaint is outlined in the comic; you receive your mission objectives from people in the Long Meadow. When somebody new shows up, or a new level is unlocked with a previous person, they shout at you to get your attention. The problem is, they also shout at you when you've ignored them for a while, so by the end I had the avatars of the first three or four levels shouting at me constantly every time I walked by. "Hey!" "Prince!!" "Yoohoo!" "HEY!" I just wanted to roll them up in a big ball and dump them in the ocean...and I'm pretty sure I did at some point.