This week I purchased one of the craziest, funniest, most addictive video games I’ve ever played. It’s called Katamari Damacy, available on Playstation 2 from Namco, and it’s all about things. The wacky story involves the King of the Cosmos accidentally destroying all the stars in the universe. His son is sent to Earth and must use these big spherical objects called Katamari to collect, well, things! These Katamari are then sent into the sky to become stars.

The goal of the game is to roll up as many things as possible onto your Katamari so that it reaches a certain size within the time allotted. At first, only small things can stick to your Katamari, but as your Katamari gets larger, you can get bigger things to stick to it. Early levels have you starting with things like thumbtacks and buttons, but eventually you can move all the way up to getting dogs and cats. As you progress through the game, you start larger and can work your way up to rolling over people, even Sumo wrestlers! You play the game using both of the analog sticks, and you don’t need to use the 4 face buttons during gameplay at all.

What really makes the game shine is just how weird it is! There’s a lot of Japanese-style absurd humor. The characters look very silly, the text is hilarious, and some of the objects you’ll find to roll over are very strange. As you play, a story unfolds involving a family of block-looking people with cheesy dialoge. This is one of those obscure Japanese games that wouldn’t normally be released internationally, but when people in North America caught wind of it, they demanded its release. And with good reason, it’s just too crazy to resist. Best of all is that it’s an inexpensive purchase.

Honestly, I haven’t had this much fun with a game in a long time. I’m the kind of person who gets frustrated when I can’t passed a level of a game, but in this case when I don’t win I’m eager to try again, because it’s just that much fun. It’s the strangest, most charming game since Pikmin on the GameCube. Check it out for yourself and see how much fun rolling over things can be!

Sayonara.