It’s an almost perfect tag line for the Katamari Damacy games, given that they’re filled to the brim with all sorts of items. In fact they’re so littered with random stuff that it’d put a student house to shame. There’s just about everything you can think of from the smallest buttons and thumb tacks to the tallest skyscrapers or even whole planets. Then there’s the more unconventional, like bouffant-sporting men using each other as hand carts, Super Sentai heroes wrestling Godzilla-esque monsters, flying pyramids or clouds shaped like bananas. Every single one of them and a load more are there for the collecting because in Beautiful Katamari it’s once again down to the pint-sized Prince of All Cosmos to roll them up into one big clump (the Katamari of the title) as replacement planets for our solar system. It’s his way of making amends since the originals were sucked into oblivion by a black hole created by a powerful overhead smash during a tennis match by his father, The King of All Cosmos.

Although this is episode three in the series (episode four if you count the PSP handheld release) essentially very little has changed. Players control the Prince who guides the sticky Katamari around each level, gathering up an abundance of things as he goes. The more the Katamari collects, the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets, the more it collects... and so on until it reaches the desired radius to create the replacement interstellar object. Collecting enough to create the item is done against the clock and doing so within the time limit sees it being judged by the King, before he finally places it among the stars for all to see. Failure sees the Prince issued with a stern reprimand, with the King firing large billiard balls at him in a bid to teach a harsh lesson.

To anyone who’s not experienced it before, this will all sound totally off the wall and that’s pretty much the point. The original game was a cult classic amongst those who discovered it thanks to all of its heartfelt quirkiness and novelty value. Beautiful Katamari has certainly not lost any of that underlying appeal. No matter how many times you do it, there’s something wonderfully timeless about watching your Katamari take shape as it grows in size, taking slightly evil satisfaction in rolling up objects you couldn’t previously, watching as people panic and try to flee from the massive sphere rapidly bearing down on them before they too are absorbed into the collective muddle. By the time your Katamari reaches the size where it’s able to roll up entire continents and then constellations, there’s a real sense of joy and satisfaction about the destructive capability of it all. It is for the good of the universe, after all.

Since nothing much has changed with Beautiful Katamari, the question is what is there to the 360 version to make it stand out? One thing that isn’t brought into question is how the game's controls have transferred across from the PlayStation’s DualShock pad to the 360’s. If anything the responsiveness of the 360’s sticks makes it slightly easier to control and allows the player to pull off moves such as the speed dash a lot quicker and with greater ease.

The previous games were running on an older generation of hardware, but Katamari Damacy’s distinct visual style means there isn’t much scope to improve things. Naturally there’s a vast jump in the resolution and crispness of everything in the world with some extra benefit from depth of field and motion blur effects, but overall it doesn’t look vastly different to the PS2 games (more a testament to Keita Takahashi’s original styling rather than a slight against the power of this generation's systems). The game still suffers some heavy drops in frame rate, particularly in later levels when the Katamari reaches the size where it is able to mop up larger landmasses - the struggle apparently due to a combination of the amount of items onscreen and the draw distance. While it never slows to a total crawl the loss of inertia and sudden sluggishness does make itself very apparent.

It really does feel at times that Namco have done little more than beef up the original engine in terms of resolution rather than ironing out the flaws. The game does, however, considerably reduce the loading times encountered in previous games, with the transitions between Katamari size now taking place instantaneously with no more game-stopping interruptions from the King which masked them.

Where it falls down compared to its predecessors is that it does feel like Katamari-light. Previous games had running stories about the Hoshino family and their trip to see their Dad being launched into space. We Love Katamari had the saddening tale of The Kings of All Cosmos’ troubled past. Here there is no plot in-between stages and while it isn’t absolutely necessary to the proceedings, Beautiful Katmari feels charmless without it, almost as if Takahashi’s departure from the series has left a bit of a hollow chasm at its very heart.

The game is also incredibly short, even more so than We Love Katamari which could be completed with relative speed. This feeling is enhanced by stages being reused over the course of the game and while it does create the feeling of a more seamless world rather than previous 'disjointed' levels, it can quickly give a feeling of repetition. Beautiful Katamari has been shamelessly primed for Downloadable Content (even being namechecked in the achievements) which already features additional stages, but even so the included levels can be completed at speed by veteran Katamari rollers. Newcomers will also take little time to conquer them once they become adept at collecting.

Some longevity is added by a combination of the online leaderboards which rank players by the size of their Katamari or, in time attack mode the speed which they reached the desired size. Although this won’t appeal to everyone and may be more of an aside, there’s also a multitude of hidden Cousins (odd-shaped relatives of the Prince) and various gifts which are used to decorate your chosen roller, scattered around the levels which will require multiple attempts to collect them all.

While there is still the retention of local multiplayer Verses, Beautiful Katamari is the first game in the series to incorporate online multiplayer. The game features a slick interactive lobby system, similar to that adopted in Dead or Alive 4. It suits the game well and up to four players can congregate and generally flounce about before competing to see who can get the largest amount of stuff against the clock. The five different stages are also nicely thought out varying from small- to large-sized arenas, a nice way of allowing you to pit your wits against international Katamari fans.

Ultimately all the downsides leave Beautiful Katamari in a very odd place. While it’s great to see it on the newer generation of systems (and on a Microsoft system at that), it doesn’t feel like it’s progressed very much at all since its first iteration, a problem that dogged even We Love Katamari, but which feels even more apparent here. When throwing in the short nature of the game and the lack of loving care to the little things that seemed to be lavished on its predecessors (apparent by the largely recycled soundtrack from previous games) then fans of the series may be left feeling somewhat disappointed. Newcomers will no doubt discover the reason why so many people hold the series very dear to their heart, but ultimately they may be better off tracking down the previous releases which offered a more satisfying overall experience.