(Source article:
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060113.gtgaming13/BNStory/Technology/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20060113.gtgaming13)
By SCOTT COLBOURNE
Friday, January 13, 2006
Posted at 8:41 AM EST
When you think King Kong, you think of a physically imposing brute,
right? A huge ape towering over wee, horrified humans? On the small
screen of the PlayStation Portable, however, he's a cute little monkey:
Here little monkey, swing on the vine, tussle with the salamander that
is supposed to be a T-Rex.
The PSP version of Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie
was released in the middle of the holidays, one of the last games to
land before the annual January lull. The title has now made an
appearance on every gaming platform currently available, with very
mixed results.
On PCs and home consoles, especially the Xbox 360, it is a hit,
impressing players with its craggy island setting and oversized, fierce
enemies. On the Nintendo DS, it is almost unplayable, a mess of a game.
And on the PSP, it is underwhelming. Squeezing graphics best viewed on
a 17-plus-inch screen onto four-plus inches of LCD was never going to
be easy, and the already short game has been further cut down to around
four hours of play. Your companions, including Jack Black's Carl
Denham, have been stripped out of the play portions. In the sequences
where you swing as Kong, the big guy and Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) no
longer solve puzzles together -- or bond, creepily.
Another recent PSP release, Prince of Persia: Revelations, also fails to impress, despite being a straight port of a good console game, 2004's Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.
It has a few extra levels and does manage to capture the feel of the
original, but the control system is wonky, the sound sporadically gives
up the ghost and each new section loads far too slowly.
The problem here is that developers are regularly pumping out PSP
games that originated on the PlayStation 2 and other consoles. It's
amazing that the PSP and its small but bright screen can even come
close to making these games work, but close is not good enough if you
have spent a few week's wages on a portable device. Often the very
essence of what made the games good on the other machines is being lost
in the translation. Even when they technically excel, these repurposed
games do not provide enough surprises or unique challenges.
Most of the small batch of quality PSP games out there are driving titles -- Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, Burnout Legends and Wipeout Pure.
It's great for those, partly because you can turn the unit like a
steering wheel when you get pulled into the racing action, but only a
few games in the system's first year have blazed anything approaching
new ground. Lumines, a puzzler, and Infected, which transfers characters from one machine to another after a multiplayer game, are the exceptions that prove the rule.
The PSP is a first-rate tool for watching movies, with more and more
films being released on the Universal Media Discs it plays. Amateur
programmers also love it, playing around with -- or hacking, if you
must -- its operating system and running all kinds of programs that
displease Sony and copyright lawyers. But as a portable gaming machine,
the PSP needs games that are made specifically to take advantage of its
potential charms.
Nintendo's DS and its much stronger lineup have proven that handheld
games work best when they are made according to the hardware's features
and inherent limitations. The two screens on the DS are so small that
they turn off some players, but its core titles -- Nintendogs, Animal Crossing: Wild World and Mario Kart -- are fun enough to make most people forget such things. And Nintendo released another oddity this week: Electroplankton
lets you make music by moving small fish around on the bottom touch
screen with a stylus. It's not really a game -- there are no goals or
competitive elements -- and you can't save your creations, but it is
charming in its bizarreness and, above all else, innovative.
Sony is still new to the portable gaming scene -- the PSP only
launched in March of last year -- and the company has not yet learned
the secret of Nintendo's handheld success: Variety is the spice of life.