Beautiful Katamari Member Review for the Xbox360

I am dead tired from a cerebral mind**** on learning about the entanglement of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan in 72 hours, meaning from 8:30 AM  to 5:00 PM for the past 3 days, so I won't be doing a normal review. In all honesty, I have little to say about the game here.

Beautiful Katamari is the third game in the Katamari Damnacy series, a crazy game that is widely popular in the U.S because of addicting gameplay and quirky extra bits that make the Otaku fans clamor for more. The entire story deals with the worst dad in all the cosmos, the very king of all cosmos, making a mess of things and expecting his son the prince to clean it up by making stars,  planets, constellations, and the like by cooping things up in Japan and shooting it off into the stars.

The game is very simple, fun, addicting and a great time waster, but is slowly starting to show it's age. First and foremost, the game is graphically now inferior to current technology standards. While it is not supposed to be a graphic powerhouse, it should get an upgrade of some some sorts, maybe crisper, more clear looking graphics instead of the blocky, coarse edges were used to seeing. The game also has slowdown now, something that never really happened in the past games but for some reason on the 360 disk is a bit choppy.

Control wise, the controls are the same as the Playstation 2, which is both good and bad. Good because players from the past games won't see too many changes, with the exception of some minor button changes to cater to the 360 controls. This is also bad because the same problems with the controls, the poor camera system, the charge up system and the slow moving analog sticks are also brought back. The controls are starting to become archaic, mainly because of the change of format.

One aspect that is still thankfully intact is the crazy J-pop music and the hilariously callous dialogue the King of All Cosmos supplies. Also the game still retains the same tongue in cheek humor with it's collectables, cousins, and presents, and the vast amount of challenges you need to accomplish are also a nice touch.

So all in the all, the game is a nice but unecessary addition to a franchise that Americans go ga-ga for because of the sole humor and simplicity of the controls. Despite this, it also needs an overhaul. In all honesty I think the game will preform better on the Nintendo Wii, motion controls controlling the Katamari with the simplified graphics seems like a perfect fit for the machine to me, so there may be a few more tricks up this clump of stuffs sleeve in the future, but for now, the magic from the first game is slowly slipping off.

And as a P.S, I need to proctor our exam for this course next week (thank god for grad school and going for a PhD, eh?) as well as finish the course next weekend, so expect mini-reviews like this for a while now.

final score- B-