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IGN King Kong DS review

http://ds.ign.com/articles/673/673380p1.html

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:

peter-jacksons-king-kong-20051202053616360.jpg
 
Between this and Burnout, the DS is certain to own the 'Ugliest Games of 2005' category in the year-end awards. Perhaps, they should've done something a little more old-school-like, instead, with the visual design...sprite characters with 3D (or pseudo-3D) worlds, like a Doom or build engine-like title.
 
This is even worse than GBA...

At least there, they would often just go for shitty sprite based versions of console games that at least didn't want to make you gouge your eyes out...but a lot of these new DS games BASED on console/PSP games are just STUPID.

If you browse the DS sections in Japan, you see that most of the software is straight up unique and different. That's what makes the system shine. Attempting to duplicate games created for hardware from another generation is straight foolish. I feel sorry for those that get roped into owning this crap (ie - kids that receive this shit as a gift). If you buy it yourself, well, you deserve it.

I'm curious to see how the PSP version pans out. I mean, I wouldn't play it there, but the screens suggested that it looks shockingly accurate to the console games (with lower resolution textures and the like). The lighting and detail was really damn close looking.

edit - looking at the videos, it's not as bad looking as expected. I mean, yeah, it looks like an old Saturn game or something...but it doesn't have that "32x" look that the two recent racers did. It kinda looks like a shitty Saturn version of King's Field (had such a thing existed). Obviously, the gameplay is unrelated, but that's what the visuals reminded me of. The game seems entirely unrelated to the Ancel game. Did some random developer inside Ubi throw it together in a week or two?
 
MightyHedgehog said:
Between this and Burnout, the DS is certain to own the 'Ugliest Games of 2005' category in the year-end awards. Perhaps, they should've done something a little more old-school-like, instead, with the visual design...sprite characters with 3D (or pseudo-3D) worlds, like a Doom or build engine-like title.

You forgot NFS:MW, Zoo Tycoon, and Marvel Nemesis. Shovelware in every sense of the word.
 
The GBA version is much different. It's not "King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie" it's "Kong: 8th Wonder Of The World" and it's a top-down adventure game aside from the side-scrolling King Kong levels. I've only played it shortly but I plan on playing it a bit more in the not too distant future.
 
I don't get it, is the DS hard to program for or something? It varies from sub ps1 graphics to better than n64 graphics.
 
I don't understand why 3rd parties even attempt to make 3D games on this system.

Stick to 2D with 3D elements... that's what it's good at.

As for that screenshot.... :lol
 
MightyHedgehog said:
OK, but did anyone expect Zoo Tycoon to look great, anyway?

I did, I thought it was totally doable on the DS and was hoping it would turn out pretty good since you would think those type of games should be a no brainer on the DS. Totally proved me wrong though, i'm just hoping it doesn't discourage good developers from trying again. (no Age of Empires does not count either, another dissappointment for me straying far away from the original)
 
I've seen some good 3D on the DS--Tak 3 and Kim Possible both spring to mind, but they're both third person platformers that are 2.5Dish a la Crash Bandicoot.

In this case, though, fuck the Western "mature" developers. Seriously.
 
MightyHedgehog said:
Hmmm...:lol Hard to believe they could screw up Zoo Tycoon on the DS, despite the much smaller resolution. Never seen it, myself.

:lol Read this and feel my pain about ZT. Then come back and report about how your heart is heavy with sadness.
 
dark10x said:
If you browse the DS sections in Japan, you see that most of the software is straight up unique and different. That's what makes the system shine.

Matlock said:
In this case, though, fuck the Western "mature" developers. Seriously.

Western developers get banged on too much for not being as "special" and "great" as the Japanese. There's plenty of crap over there as well, it's just that we get the best of it (and we also make a big deal out of the ones that got away.) I'm sure the PS3 will have 50 anime dialog games and a half-dozen mah-jong games in its first year. Final Fight Streetwise isn't going to be hung around our necks.

Plus, this game got programmed by Ubisoft Morocco, so do you blame the Western developers for that? That's not Middle East just yet, but your regular white cheese-eaters aren't totally to blame this time.
 
Matlock said:
I've seen some good 3D on the DS--Tak 3 and Kim Possible both spring to mind, but they're both third person platformers that are 2.5Dish a la Crash Bandicoot.

Tak 3's fully 3D on DS.
 
Wow... that has to be some of the worst polygonal graphics I've ever seen... And I'm surprised cuz I think the console versions sport some nice graphics (even though the game itself kinda sucks).
 
CamHostage said:
Western developers get banged on too much for not being as "special" and "great" as the Japanese. There's plenty of crap over there as well, it's just that we get the best of it (and we also make a big deal out of the ones that got away.) I'm sure the PS3 will have 50 anime dialog games and a half-dozen mah-jong games in its first year. Final Fight Streetwise isn't going to be hung around our necks.
Oh yeah, there is crap, but it's nowhere near as bad. I was browsing the DS section last night (trying to determine if there's anything good that I've missed out on) and it really became obvious just how different the library was. It seems suprisingly devoid of total throw-away garbage, unlike the US lineup.
 
CamHostage said:
Tak 3's fully 3D on DS.

It is, but it's stuck on a rail. It's more a 2D game than a 3D game (even though there was a bit of wandering room here and there), but it's all 3D rendered--great engine, too. :)
 
Matlock said:
{TAK 3 DS} It is, but it's stuck on a rail. It's more a 2D game than a 3D game (even though there was a bit of wandering room here and there), but it's all 3D rendered--great engine, too. :)

Huh? No it's not. It's not 100% free roaming all the time because it's so linear, but I don't remember being locked onto a track at all. I remember jumping in the water for no good reason just because it was there, and running around in that room where you hit the little rhino and the big momma comes storming out (you couldn't really do that sequence on a track because you have to lead her to smash the barriers, and leading somebody in a straight line isn't that hard.) Are you thinking of the SpongeBob game maybe? Or Spider-Man?

Doesn't matter, really. But I remember this in full 3D, like Rayman, not on-rails like Kim Possible. And yeah, it was a nice looking game. Sort of on a tangent, I don't get why so many DS games are pitch-black all the time. Rayman was hard to see, and now Kong is too dark to see anything. Sure, it's in caves a lot, but bake in some lighting or crank the contrast so we can see something!
 
CamHostage said:
Western developers get banged on too much for not being as "special" and "great" as the Japanese. There's plenty of crap over there as well, it's just that we get the best of it (and we also make a big deal out of the ones that got away.) I'm sure the PS3 will have 50 anime dialog games and a half-dozen mah-jong games in its first year. Final Fight Streetwise isn't going to be hung around our necks.

Plus, this game got programmed by Ubisoft Morocco, so do you blame the Western developers for that? That's not Middle East just yet, but your regular white cheese-eaters aren't totally to blame this time.

Yeah, but when the Japanese hit it they REALLY hit it, far more than Western developers do... and the western output for the DS is unfortunately quite pitiful. Maybe it'll improve with time, but most western developers just release throwaway stuff on handhelds. Actually I think Orbital Media/Wayforward/whoever made Rebelstar... could do a sweet job on the DS, those companies probably were the top western developers on GBA.
 
Matlock said:
{Tak DS} I played it, I loved it, but I still feel that the Crash Bandicoot style 3D movement is closer to 2D. ;)

Ah, I see you there. But it did have rooms. Most was on walkways rather than architected platforms, though.

I want to bring it up again ... why are DS games sometimes just flat dark? Splinter Cell was also way too dark (even for Splinter Cell), and they totally ruined Rayman with that low brightness. I could maybe understand it on PSP a little because the PSP's contrast ratio is so different from a TV or a computer monitor or a regular development station (you basically have to throw it up on the debug to see if it looks anything like it does on your PC monitor when programming, kind of like you need a TV out-deck on the side when editing video and doing effects work.) But these are the same GBA screens, more or less, that we've had for a few years now. 3D does take some effort in lighting because you're seeing it from all sides, sometimes unnecessarily close, and because the textures repeat, but why are some DS games just several shades darker than normal sometimes? Those Kong shots, those are test unit snaps, direct-feed, not video snaps. That's what you see when you play that game. How do you not notice when you're making a game that you can't see a damned thing when you're playing?
 
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