The Blog for the Sports Gamer

So far I’ve had a few hours with NBA2k6 and King Kong for the 360. Let’s dispense with Kong. I’ll get into NBA in my next post.

It’s a pretty game. At times it’s a breathtaking game on our HDTV. It makes me wish my 360 was hooked up to our projector for the mega big screen affect. But a re-invention of the genre it clearly is not. Maybe that’s setting the bar a bit high, but so much was made of Peter Jackson’s involvement with the making of the game to ensure that it was every bit the experience that watching the movie is supposed to be that you can’t help but think it’s something of a letdown. (For the record, I’ve not seen the King Kong movie, old or new.)

For one, the game is dark. Really dark. Watch the latter half of the movie Pitch Black and you’ll get an idea of the kind of dark I’m talking about. After the first few caves I had to set my HDTV to Vivid (also called “torch”) mode to brighten the screen and make it possible to figure out where I was going. But even torched out there are places where the game is just too damned dark and that’s gotten me killed more than once. You can see enough to play and appreciate the beauty of the graphics, but I found it a significant eye strain that’s not an issue in NBA or the free stuff on the Live Marketplace.

I’m also just not a fan of the controls. It’s not uncommon to find yourself attacked from the sides or from behind and in those instances it just feels monumentally slow trying to turn around to engage your attacker. Worse, the camera is a discombobulated mess when you’re controlling Kong. One minute it’s behind Kong, then it’s to the side, then it’s straight in front of the big guy and so far I feel like I’m fighting the controller just as much as any dino-monster and that’s not good. (It is, for the record, too fracking cool for words to hulk Kong out with that chest-thumping manuever, though.)

Then there’s the save system, which gives you the initial impression you can save anywhere you want. In fact you can. Just pause the game and select Save from the menu. Just don’t expect to be restored to that point if you die. Like too many other games, it uses specific save points that determine where you’ll appear after your character has endured a few bites too many from the native inhabitants of Kong’s island. God help you if you get stuck on a challenge 2/3 of the way between save points since you’ll have to repeat that 2/3 over and over again. Now to be fair the save points are fairly frequent so it could be much worse, but I’m a PC guy who’s a proponent of the save now, save anywhere school so it just bugs the hell out of me.

Right now I’ve only played through Kong’s initial rescue of Ann from a horde of marauding dinosaurs and bizarre winged creatures and I’m just not feeling it. Kong’s not a bad game. It’s really, really pretty. And there’s a lot of inventive design to the gameplay. There’s one moment where you’ve gone racing up the stairs of some ruins where you’re a few feet away from a trapped NPC (he’s across a small chasm). When you get there another Raptor comes rushing up the steps behind him and he tosses you a gun just as the Raptor starts charging towards you, leaping across the gap. It’s a very Hollywood action moment that’s perfectly executed as you start shooting the beastie while he’s leaping right at you, jaws flashing a maw full of nasty, pointy teeth.

There’s several classic moments like that, and if you love console shooters (I miss my mouse and keyboard too much), you’ll probably take to Kong better than I have, but right now I doubt I’ll see this one through to the end.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 11:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.