Katamari Damacy was one of those games I heard about, but never got around to playing. The basic premise is that you roll a ball around picking up anything in the world smaller than you, and try to reach a certain size in a certain time. The bigger you get, the more items in the world you can pick up, and this leads to a very interesting type of gameplay.

At E3 Namco had the latest incarnation, We Love Katamari, which now includes a two-player cooperative mode. In theory, you should be working together to build a bigger ball, but in actuality you end up spending most of the time trying to compromise and decide which direction to go. The two-player mode requires that both players perform the same action, or at least two similar actions. If you want to go left, the other person has to want to go left. Want to turn around quickly by pushing both analog sticks at the same time? Well, just convince your partner to do it too, and do it at the same time, and it will work great.

I could tell there was going to be a problem when I saw they gave more time for two people to reach the same size ball as the single player mode. They realized it was a lot harder for two people to agree on what to do. I would have preferred some sort of split-screen mode where each person finds items to add to a larger ball, so that movement could be independent, but the two worked together.

The sequel to one of the weirdest concepts to actually make it to the U.S., Katamari should have avoiding rolling over this two-player mode.