I finally got around to renting Beautiful Katamari, and it turned up a couple of days ago. There are a few things that bother me about this game.

I love the quirkiness, the graphical style, even the fact that there are some weird Japanese cultural things in there that I don’t fully understand. Rolling things up is great fun, although the controls are a little non-responsive at times (moving round the katamari to change direction is painfully slow, although one seldom needs to do this).

It’s not a great game, though – despite wonderful presentation and largely rewarding gameplay, it has a few foibles that leave a bitter taste.

The key thing for me is the reward/punishment structure – maybe I’m just not very good at the game, but even with my full effort I’m barely meeting goals, and even then it’s usually after a failure or two. The game is quite unforgiving, and the time limits are harsh.

I think it’s hard, unforgiving limits like the timer that take out a lot of the fun of the game – like the concept of a finite number of lives in classic games of yore, or even non-replenishing energy bars. To make even the easiest difficulty too hard for typical gamers to pass will put off a lot of people – with Beautiful Katamari, I feel it’s only those who persevere through frustration that will ever get any satisfaction.

That’s what easy mode is for, right? Let the hardcore gamers ramp up the difficulty and challenge their own high scores – and let them duke it out online versus other worthy opponents. But gaming should be scalable, and in a time when it’s more accessible than ever, setting the bar too high is a recipe to annoy more than it is to challenge.