Katamari Forever

Platform:  Playstation 3
Developer:  Namco Bandai
Publisher:  Namco Bandai

The story, as ever, is completely off-the-wall.  This time, The King of the Cosmos has lapsed into a coma and has been replaced by a Robo-King doppleganger who suffers from anxiety.  This splits the various stages in two:  The King levels are thematically linked around getting larger and larger items to wake up The King by dropping them on his head.  The Robo-King levels mix things up a bit by mixing up the objective of the level, with stages where you are tasked with watering a dessert or avoiding items that are bear or cow themed (its all very strange).

Its been a few years since I played a Katamari game (We Love Katamari for PS2) and it was fun revisiting this franchise.  The gameplay is mostly the same but I loved the sharp and stylized graphics and playful presentation in Katamari Forever. The game also pushes its mechanic to its most logical extreme which made me happy:  in one of the final levels, you start out picking up small tennis-ball sized items and by the end, you are literally collecting stars, planets and entire galaxies.