Beautiful Katamari’s downloadable digs

If the 10+ stages in Beautiful Katamari are not enough for you there are going to be seven downloadable stages to purchase over the Xbox Live Marketplace. Unlike the basic Katamari premise these stages aren’t about rolling up the biggest Katamari possible. They are more like the Mars stage where you need to roll up “hot” objects and avoid cold ones. I got to check out a stage where the king gives you a limited amount of money and the goal was to roll up lots of items, but each time you rolled something up you would “spend” some of the cash. The trick was to roll up cheap items like apple and avoid expensive things like fish.

In this level I rolled up one of the eight new cousins, Harvest, who looks like she was wearing an apple costume. Some of the new cousins will be available in the retail game, others will need to be found by playing the extra levels on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Namco Bandai plans to release the downloadable levels “shortly after” Beautiful Katamari hits store shelves. There are also has plans to release additional picture packs and themes.

After trying out one of the new stages I went online with Beautiful Katamari’s versus mode against three of the team members. The game starts with the host picking the size of the level s/he wants to compete in. I chose the world, the largest level, where the king instructed us to roll up houses. The online multiplayer mode is rather bare. All you have is the target object, a few empty Katamaris to add to your sticky ball size. There were a few laggy moments where the game hung for a second or two during my hands on time. I was told this was because I picked the largest level, but be aware that Beautiful Katamari is not lag free.

Since this mode is competitive you can dash into other players by rapidly shifting the left and right analog sticks to knock objects off of their katamari. Once the five minute match ends everyone is awarded cookies. The winner gets the most, but even fourth place earns a few. Cookies don’t actually do anything though, they’re just away to show how many online games you’ve played.