I once wrote a preview about a certain game based off a certain movie in which I made the game sound amazing. I thought it would be so, I thought that I would have tons of fun playing this game once I had the chance to. If there was ever disappointment, I have now felt it tremendously. And it would never have been any worse. Not even if I had to eat what big pile of blank this game is.

There is not much to say to describe Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie. You have your nice-looking screenshots, and very little information before its release, so all you have to make your decision are these screens. And what do you do? You assume it’s good. And you buy it. What will you respond twenty years from now when someone asks you what you regret doing the most in your life? It won’t be that drunk college party that comes to your mind, and it also will not be getting married. What will stick to you for the rest of your life is the horrible, horrible feeling you will feel when you play King Kong for the Nintendo DS. You will regret this the most in your life.

So what were the chances of this happening? How was anyone to know how awful this game was going to be? You can take into consideration other games on the DS that could have given you a little clue as to what was coming. Take Goldeneye: Rogue Agent, a first-person shooter on the DS. Sure it wasn’t as horrid as King Kong, but it was still a disappointment. Case in point, FPS games just do not fare too well on Nintendo’s handheld, despite the mouse-like control of the integrated touch-screen. I’m hoping Nintendo can prove this statement wrong upon the release of Metroid Prime: Hunters this March, however. But how is it that King Kong just dies when other games have fared better?

The first obvious flaw of the game is the graphics. The game just looks and plays horribly on the DS. There’s many glitches, and the levels are created with polygons whose outline is visible in contrast to the white emptiness of what lies behind them. There is also the slow pace of the game, where you feel like you’re walking on quicksand at all times. It is as if you cannot walk correctly and are dragging your feet at all times. Truly horrific.

The music of the game tries desperately to create an ambiance and moody atmosphere, and yet fails miserably. There’s nothing good about it, and even the sound effects from the enemies and weapons are so pathetic and laughable that it seems like no work whatsoever was put into developing this department into something good. UbiSoft needs to seriously consider hiring a staff of audio specialists to turn up something better for the next game.

There are just no words to describe the torture you go through when playing this game. First off, you are forced to use one type of control set-up, and only one. You must hold the DS and walk around with the buttons while you look around and use weapons with the touch-screen. Sounds great, right? Well, it isn’t. When the game is as tedious and uninteresting as King Kong, you simply do not want to play with this set up. You will die so many times, but it won’t be your fault as the game is so poorly designed that you cannot make any sense out of any of the game and will simply die out of anger. You had better love crabs, because they are the only enemies King Kong has to offer. You would think the adventure portion of the game would be its saving grace, yet this beat-em-up portion just further drives the game deep, deep into the ground.

There are so many other things wrong with Peter Jackson’s King Kong that make it so unplayable. Characters look so distorted and colorless that they seem like monsters of the island, and not human beings. Naomi Watts scares instead of allures, and many enemies are just simply horribly created. When you have a gun equipped, you can shoot feet away from the target and still hit it! Such accuracy and attention to detail ought to earn UbiSoft an award. Seriously!

The End... Finally
There’s not much more to say about Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Words such as “disappointing,” “horrible,” and “unplayable” have already been used, and there’s nothing much else. For such a huge motion film and such a renowned icon character, this game delivers nothing short of “craptacular." And that is an understatement.

-- Agustin Olvera