Beautiful Katamari Damacy goes online on PS3 and Xbox 360, Wii release delayed

18 April 2007

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Posted by:Ferry

We reported a month ago that American retailers set Beautiful Katamari for release on October 17th for $39.99 on the PS3 and Xbox 360 and will feature Sixaxis support for the PS3 version. The Wii version will arrive shortly after on November 14th on the Wii for $29.99, skip to the bottom to see why the Wii version might get delayed.

Today Japanese magazine Weekly Famitsu officially confirmed Namco Bandai’s Beautiful Katamari Damacy. In the new game stages are larger and include more junk to add to your growing katamari. As you can see from the above screenshot the katamari can grow to a size where it picks up entire continents as it rolls over Earth. The catchy background music will be back and be sung by new performers.

Bandai Namco is also taking advantage of the online capabilities of the PS3 and Xbox 360 for online play. No online play details were given, but Famitsu speculates that we can expect cooperative and competitive play.

The control scheme is the same as in the PS2 versions. The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions make use of dual analogue controls for all movement. If you’re used to the PS2 controls you might have some difficulty with the Xbox 360 controls at first, as the system’s analogue triggers aren’t horizontally aligned, but players should get used to the change quickly.

Jun Moriwaki, the director of this game (and worked on the PSP game) comments: “The Wii is also one of our platform choices. We would like to challenge with different interfaces such as the keyboard on a PC, or the touch pad on the DS. However, the controller for Wii is quite unique so being able to overcome the different issues will be the key.”

Beautiful Katamari is currently 50% complete, is the last translation from Japanese that IGN made.