Introduction

Games based upon movies are rarely any good. I'm not talking about games that are "inspired" from the movies such as the Star Wars titles, but games that try to capture the entire storyline. Most games act as pure marketing fluff, a handful of games are fun, and then there are games that have the potential to redefine gaming. Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie is one of those rare games in that third category. Even if you stripped the game of its King Kong license, and removed all the fancy voice acting and simply kept its core gameplay and storyline, it would still be an incredible game. The original Halo has been described as being "30 seconds of fun repeated over and over again." King Kong is 30 seconds of fear and adrenaline repeated over and over again. It's not scary in the sense of a horror film but scary in that you're genuinely afraid of your player dying.

Kong

You see, the story behind the development of King Kong starts with EA and Peter Jackson. Although the Lord of the Rings videogames sold well and received respectable reviews, Peter Jackson was less than enthusiastic. Officially, Peter Jackson felt that he wasn't given enough input into the games. Since the LOTR games used music and artwork from the movies, my assumption is that EA wanted to make games that sold well, whereas Peter Jackson wanted to make a game that stood out and could tell an emotional story. So for King Kong, Peter Jackson went to EA's arch-rival Ubisoft and sought out the help of Michel Ancel, of Ubisoft's Montpellier studios. Ancel heads the team behind Rayman and Beyond Good and Evil. The result is stunning and King Kong ends up being of my favorite games of the year.

For my review, I chose the Xbox 360 version of the game. The gameplay is identical between the Xbox 360 and the PC, Xbox, and PS2 versions of the game. However, the PC version that ships at retail is inferior in visual quality to the Xbox 360. There's a special 5+ GB download-only version of the game called the Gamer's Edition (not the Signature Edition) that offers a higher resolution experience than the Xbox 360 version. That said, the Gamer's Edition seems to require an Athlon64 4000+, 2GB of RAM and 7800GTX's or X1800XL's for stable frame rates. Whether those hefty requirements are due to inefficient programming or the sheer detail in the game is something we'll have to explore in a future article. The Xbox 360 game has also been a source of some drama with Ubisoft's Guillemot commenting that the Xbox 360 game was "too dark" when played with a standard definition TV. I played King Kong with a VGA CRT monitor and a Sony Grand Wega XBR LCD RPTV and felt that things were reasonable. Part of the problem involves the more dramatic lighting in the Xbox 360 version compared to the PS2/Xbox which increases the potential for problems. Of course, if Ubisoft had put in a simple calibration tool into their game like Cranky Pants Games (of THQ) did in the latest Evil Dead videogame, there wouldn't be any trouble. Kudos to Cranky Pants Games for thinking ahead and spending the extra day putting in the calibration screen for gamers. Extra kudos for putting that effort into a game that's marketed as a budget title ($20).

As is custom, we're using the VGA2USB from Epiphan for our screenshots. The capture device doesn't handle motion very well, but it's still the most cost effective solution for bringing you analog high-definition screenshots. We've only used UBisoft's press images when we were unable to capture the same image with our equipment.

True video capture

Image courtesy of Ubisoft

I’ve taken a few screenshot comparisons between the regular PC version (not the Gamer’s Edition) and the Xbox 360 version. Recall that the Xbox 360 is an analog capture, so it won’t look as sharp as screenshots of the PC version which are done digitally. As you can see, in the case of King Kong, better graphics really do change the entire mood and feel of the game:

King Kong PC

Xbox 360 King Kong

King Kong PC

Xbox 360 King Kong

King Kong PC

Xbox 360 King Kong

King Kong PC

Xbox 360 King Kong