Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Remember the rumor that Beautiful Katamari was going to roll onto the Wii? It won't die. It's come back again, this time with psychotic reasoning behind it.

IGN's Matt Casamassina has "100 percent reliable" word from mysterious, anonymous sources that Bandai Namco is planning a version of the game on Wii. As the story goes, they encountered difficulty porting Beautiful Katamari to the PS3, so Namco decided to scrap it and create a new Wii version instead.

This is really the part that arouses our suspicion. A port is too hard, so they switch over to an all-new game? It just sounds like an excuse to troll the PS3 and make the Wii look better at the same time. It may be true, but we're not taking that reasoning as an explanation for anything.

We still aren't sure we should even care, with no Keita Takahashi involvement, but we can't help but become wistful when we think about a new Katamari. We wish we could hear some final word about this. We're tired of the emotional rollercoaster!

[Via GayGamer]

There's a beautiful set of scans on Beautiful Katamari from the most recent Famitsu, but there's no sign of anything Wii-related; all the news is about the PS3 and the 360. It's enough to make a Nintendo fan weep. We want to roll up big balls and hear the screams of the city folk. We want to roll our big balls online, and we want to use our Wii remotes. What gives? Throw us a bone here, people!

Does this mean the rumors are dead? Not at all; the game is only half-completed, after all, and from the scans, we can't pick out any reason to avoid the Wii and we don't seem to be alone in that sentiment; many of the comments at Jeux France seem to share that view. Let's hope that, as Beautiful Katamari nears completion, the folks at Namco Bandai figure out that there is extraordinary demand for a Wii Katamari.

[Update 1: That was fast! Looks like we were tossed a bone after all 1UP has the following quote from Jun Moriwaki, director of Beautiful Katamari. "The Wii is also one of our platform choices .... However, the controller for Wii is quite unique so being able to overcome the different issues will be the key." That'll do, director. You go work on that, and we'll be waiting.]

While there's still no official, announcement-style confirmation that Beautiful Katamari is coming to the Wii, we're tentatively jumping up and down with glee around the Wii Fanboy offices. The rumors have been glomming together into a beautiful, spherical whole, we're almost convinced that the King of All Cosmos will be decrying our lack of rolling skill this winter.

Several sites are reporting that references to the Wii title are popping up everywhere -- most recently on GameFly, showing a release date in November. Blogosphere detectives also stumbled across a listing for Namco Museum Remix on the Wii, a title that seems somewhat superfluous considering we have the Virtual Console ... unless something special is done to update the collection. That's definitely something to watch.

On the Katamari front, however, and we must stress this "however" quite strongly -- this latest "confirmation" could simply be a matter of GameFly picking up other rumors. We've seen retail slip-ups and placeholders spawn rumors before, and they often come to naught. But with so much buzz around it, we hope to hear something one way or another from Namco on the possibility of a Wii Katamari title. Creator Keita Takahashi hasn't hesitated to speak up before ... but perhaps the smashing success of the Wii has changed a few minds? We'll keep you posted.