Father_Brain
Banned
http://ds.ign.com/articles/673/673380p1.html
The GBA and PSP versions look a lot more promising, though I haven't seen impressions of either.
Oh, and bonus BEST SCREENSHOT EVER:
Sure, you'll get some really, really bad games on consoles, but for sheer stink power, nothing comes close to what's passed off as entertainment on handheld game systems when these little machines are at their worst. When you harbor nothing but bitter resentment for a cellphone game that you charged on your buddy's borrowed account for $1.99, you can never come back from that. The Game Boy line has been the unworthy sufferer for some of the most sickening games to come along since the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality was proven a misnomer with NES bombs like Total Recall. And sadly, our plucky little Nintendo DS system has not escaped this fate. You take the good, you take the bad, and oh man, are you ever going to be taking it bad if you pick up King Kong on DS this holiday season.
Looking at the screenshots of the game, you might get the idea that this is a poor man's Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and so it might be of interest to FPS fans. Hmm, how to persuade you to ignore that thought. Well, across this game's 17 levels, I'd say I killed maybe 40-50 creatures. Even that might be generous, although I did kill a few annoying bees while trying to fight the junk-ass aiming system to shoot the hive ... and I did run past (or rather walk) a few creatures because I was so bored in fighting that I just cut out.
Either way, if you only fight off three or four critters per stage (or go through an entire stage without really having to fight because the creatures attacking are bats and little raptors, and you're freaking King Kong and can just walk over them) that's not a lot of action. And the action you do get repeats over and over. If there's a hole in the wall, a crab will crawl out of it. There may be another crab after that, or not. If you enter a clearing, a raptor will probably jump over the wall and come at you. If you see sky, there will be about six bats to shoot down. If you're Kong, there will be a T-Rex to punch either at the bottom of a ravine or behind a door you've smashed, and once you've beaten up that T-Rex (or simply walked past it), you're probably done with the stage. Enemies don't have any AI besides "get 'im!", and if you walk far enough away, they go back into their holes.
Closing Comments
Would it ruin the game for you to tell you that no gameplay in King Kong on DS actually takes place in New York? I hope so. Anything I can do to keep you away from this game, I'll do it. That screenshot on the box of Kong fighting off planes on the Empire State Building? That's just there to rope fans in, because that climatic sequence -- the one scene that everybody knows of King Kong -- is just an animation, playing out after you read a bunch of text explaining to you after the last Skull Island level that Kong came to NYC and broke his chains and picked up the girl and went for a climb. You don't get to rampage in the city, you don't get to climb the building, you don't get to fight off planes ... you don't even get to enjoy the change in visuals after playing 17 stupidly-short levels that all looked the same. You don't get to live out the one scene that makes us love King Kong.
How fun is that?
IGN's Ratings for Peter Jackson's King Kong (DS)
2.0 Presentation
It's total Amateur Hour here, from the tiny font on a big, blank screen in dialog to the Save Game selector that has a "delete" button as big as the "continue" button. Oops...
4.0 Graphics
What graphics? I can't see anything!! It's too foggy and it's too dark, and it's all too stupid-looking when I can see.
7.0 Sound
The music score from the film loops around, and your character says "Anne!" a lot. Decent is all it is.
3.5 Gameplay
The shooting stinks. The fighting stinks. The puzzles stink. The bugs problems stink. Enjoy!
0.5 Lasting Appeal
Those 17 levels would be about seven stages in any other game, and they're all on the same boring island. You also can't skip around to stages to replay the good ones ... whatever they may be.
3.0
Awful OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)
The GBA and PSP versions look a lot more promising, though I haven't seen impressions of either.
Oh, and bonus BEST SCREENSHOT EVER: