I've been looking forward to We Love Katamari for a long time. Like, since 1987 or so. I've already damn near burned the soundtrack into my iPod from repeated playings.

After playing it most of the night, I can confidently claim I am not disappointed. It is, as expected, more of Katamari Damacy. The controls are the same, the graphics are the same. The menu structure is wildly different this time around, and unfortunately it is not a change for the better. This original game had a pleasant simplicity to choosing levels and browsing options. This one annoyingly makes level selection a pain because - unless you have a great memory - there's no way to tell what level you're choosing. In KD, they had this great little icon-and-number system that instantly reminded you what the levels contain... the basic levels were all numbered so you had an idea as to the difficulty, and the special levels used the icon to indicate "Oh, this is the one where I have to collect the largest bear I can find," or "This is the one where you collect fish under the time limit." Choosing replays was easy. Nothing like that in WLK. Levels are all held by human characters - fans of the first game, in a self-aware touch - but they never indicate whether they hold a short level or a long level, a basic level or a special goal level. You have to talk to them each time to figure out which levels you want to replay. Very poor presentation choice.

Also, there's about twice as much talking in this one. Which may be a cute and charming thing or may be a dull and obnoxious thing depending on where you stand on clicking through text conversations in video games.

Being a sequel, the trippy design and far-out Japanese asthetics don't shock and amaze as much as they did in the original, because we've already seen that and, quite frankly, expected nothing less in this one. The opener movie is another stunningly hilarious random color-and-clip art explosion. In place of the astronaut family story, WLK presents the life story of the King of All Cosmos... and there better be an unlockable movie gallery hidden somewhere along the line because from what I've seen so far, it is a riot and deserves to be viewed again.

WLK even lets you load your starfield data from your Katamari Damacy save file, so keep that old memory card handy.

Once you get through that fair amount of fluff, the sticky ball mechanics are just as satisfying as they were last year. The biggest complaint about Katamari Damacy is that it's really only three levels long, polygonally speaking. We Love Katamari has many more environments to roll around in. Tonight I did a snow-filled one and an underwater one that were rather limited in size... but a house / city one just kept getting bigger every time I found a corner to turn.

And I didn't even get to the 2P stuff yet. It's gonna be a fun weekend.