Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Katamari Damacy rolled onto the gaming scene in 2004, bristling with the unanticipated fury of a budget title with mass-market appeal. Damacy's success and popularity in the United States, where it has quickly achieved a devoted cult following, is remarkable for a game that's so distinctly ... Japanese. However, anyone who's played the game can instantly grasp the appeal -- a delicious layer of charm coats the inner goodness of straightforward, addictive gameplay, and that's why Katamari Damacy is this week's game that is Born for Wii.

When the irresistibly alluring, slightly fruity King of All Cosmos accidentally destroys the heavens, his solution is a novel one -- roll up piles of junk and send them skyward to replace the fallen stars. Fortunately for us, he's far too lazy to do the grunt work himself. And that's where we come in as the tiny Prince, charged with the daunting task of restoring the stars to the sky with the aid of a magical ball (a katamari, of course) that sticks to damn near everything.

It's been a very long time since we've heard anything about Beautiful Katamari and the Wii. And, seeing as how the game has been out on Xbox 360 for quite some time now, we were done thinking that it would ever grace Nintendo's console. Thanks to select retailers' online shops, however, hope is slowly being restored.

Major retail chains Target and Wal-Mart are both listing the game on their respective websites, while Buy.com lists the game with the same price ($29.99), but states it's "temporarily sold out." Even rental service Gamefly has a section up for a Wii and PS3 version of the game.

So, what's the deal? Who knows at this point, but the Wal-Mart page points to an August 29th release, so perhaps we'll hear something soon? We're not going to get our hopes up like before, but we'd be lying if we said we didn't want this to happen.

[Thanks, Zack!]

Read - Wal-Mart listing
Read - Target listing
Read - Buy.com listing
Read - Gamefly listing

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]

Garakuta Studio's Graffiti Kingdom allows players to make their own 3D characters for use in a platforming adventure. Someone went to the trouble of making a Mario that is almost dead-on. We say "almost" because the movements are slightly weird, but for something made in-game this is quite an achievement. It's good enough for a Graffiti Kingdom character, right? Check out the video of "Mario" doing some adventuring and some basically 3D Mario moves after the break.

And while we're talking about Graffiti Kingdom, we can't help but link to these fanmade versions of the King of All Cosmos and a weirdly accurate Razor Ramon HG-- how disturbing, as the King would say.

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.

According to a report over at Rumor Reporter, we could be seeing an installment in the Katamari franchise on the Wii. Apparently, they got their hands on a list during a corporate meeting for a major retail chain, which they fail to name, listing several of the titles that Wii owners could be enjoying this year, the most notable of which is a game titled Beautiful Katamari.

We've posted the full list past the break.

[Via Go Nintendo]

For how quirky and unique a game Katamari Damacy is, I find it odd that its creator is not interested in the Revolution at all. When conversing with Gamasutra's sister-publication Game Developer at GDC, Keita Takahashi claimed "So, there's nothing I really want to do with it right now." He went on further to say "I'm not really interested in it. I don't think a controller should have that much influence on the enjoyment of games."

Don't you think he's kind of missing the point? Isn't it not so much that the remote influences the game, but more that it adds a whole new dimension to the gameplay? Red Steel isn't a brand new type of game forced to compromise to the remote's characteristics, it takes the unique properties of the remote and aims to mix it with conventional first-person gameplay to create something new. How can you possibly not be interested in that?! Of course, comparisons to Red Steel aren't all that valid since noone has tried it, but you get the point, right?