Me & My Katamari [PSP]

Who wouldn't want to hold a Katamari in the palm of his hand? Imagine yourself as the King of All Cosmos after His little prince has presented Him with one of his rolled up little creations. Your fingers, curled around your PSP, have rolled up candy, monkeys, kids, bicycles, kimonos, polar bears, giant squids, and skyscrapers. And now here they are, weighed, measured, and recorded according to "color plus size minus love over dream...plus spirit."

If you've played one of the Katamari games, you'll be pleased to know the spirit is alive and well and as rounded out as ever on Sony's handheld system. There's a fantastic new intro, with more inspired dialogue and splashes of color and lunacy. The King of All Cosmos has wiped the islands out of the sea with an accidental tsunami (are we the only ones who winced at this?). It falls to you to give the animals new islands by rolling up katamaris for them.

As you play, you'll fill your own little islands with happy animals. You can tour the seas in a hot air balloon to see what you've accomplished. There's even a battle mode in which four players roll around and bang into each other to roll up the biggest katamari. Ad hoc only, however, which is disappointing when so many handheld games are allowing internet connections.

One of the unique strengths of this handheld version is the way each katamari is scored by several different criteria. Many of the missions require a certain size within a certain time limit, which is a staple of the Katamari series. But there's also an island full of side missions with unique requirements, such as total sweetness or energy. And there's a scoreboard with exhaustive stats that lends Me and My Katamari a bit of old-school replayability, just for the sake of getting a better score, collecting more specific kinds of thing, or trying to beat your best time. There are also plenty of costume accessories to find and playable "cousins" to collect.

Unfortunately, this PSP version leans a bit too much on scoring and collecting. There aren't that many areas and they're all reused regularly, with just a few changes. The small number of levels robs Me and My Katamari of one of the best things about the previous games: a sense of discovery. Instead, there's a frequent sense of "oh, it's this level again."