Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

I’m a fan of the Katamari Damacy series for the PlayStation 2, so it would come as no surprise that I would at least rent the first PlayStation Portable version of the game to appear, Me & My Katamari. I only recently received it as a rental and took roughly an hour or so to try out the game.

The graphics are vibrant and colorful on the PSP’s screen, and the low-polygon engine comes across very nicely on the handheld machine. The sound is magnificent and perfectly fits the series, with the first couple of levels I played using music from the previous games. The King looks a little different in this game, and his speech is even more over the top than usual, but it all works very nicely to keep you in the Katamari Damacy world.

The premise, you may remember from reading reviews, is that the King, Queen, and Prince take a vacation on Earth an in the process of their vacation end up flooding out a large number of tropical islands, leaving various animals homeless and begging for help. The King is, after all, very big, so his actual cavorting in the surf is shown causing tidal waves that wipe out these islands. It falls to the Prince to roll up Katamari of different types that will become an island, with the type of items to collect into the Katamari dictated by the animal who will live on the island. For example, the first island is for a turtle, so he needs a “hard” island. The second is for an ant and his queen ant, so they need an island made up of sweets.

These kinds of challenges aren’t new to the series. The previous games had a minority of levels with similar challenges, but they seem to be front-and-center here. What is new to the series with Me and My Katamari is not being able to control the Katamari as well as you used to.

The biggest problem with this game on the PSP is that it doesn’t have a second analog nub or stick, so the developers compromised by making the D-pad and the face buttons (square, circle, x, and triangle) work together as the two sticks did on the PS2′s Dual Shock 2 controller. I spent a couple of levels using it, and found that the difficulty in maneuvering the katamari around in that way made overcoming even the routine challenges in early levels harder than it should be.

Recently I’ve started taking a hard look at PSP games in my collection or games that I rent due to just this sort of problem. If the game is made unnecessarily harder to play due to control limitations of the handheld, the developer hasn’t done their job and the game probably shouldn’t be bought. It’s quite nice to have something as cheery as Me & My Katamari on the PSP, but there’s no getting around the fact that it doesn’t fully work.

Even on the PlayStation 2 I would occasionally fail challenging levels, and that was with both sticks available for moving the Katamari around. When I failed to pass the second level on the first try, having struggled with the buttons trying to push the Katamari around, I knew this game wasn’t going to be worth digging deeper with.

It’s too bad really, because someone at Namco basically made the wrong decision when they tied up developer resources porting Katamary Damacy to the PSP. What they should have done is taken the colorful world of Katamari Damacy and created something specific to the PSP, fitting the device in the best possible ways. Maybe it would be a more diverse game with simpler rolling as just part of the fun. Maybe it would have been great. And maybe, just maybe they’ll try again and whip up something unique and portable using the fun world they’ve already built for themselves with the first two Katamari games.

One can always hope.