How is this game so fucking good?
How is this game so fucking good?
Chase Walker
Justin Torres
Cause devs used to try when being mediocre
Zachary Harris
>more realistic ammo system than every "hyper-realistic" war shooter combined
>its a game about a big monkey fighting a t-rex multiple times and then climbing a building
Asher Clark
>old bad new good
70iq right here
Mason Reed
It was probably the atmosphere
Christian Turner
It's a movie tie in game, if you have high expectations of any movie tie in game you are sub 70IQ. I don't care what year it is, ever play Karate Kid on NES? Bet not bitch. Old games were bad too but when they were bad 15 years ago they were either just boring or bug riddled. Now they are shit and people praise them as good and spend 100s on virtual skins (you used to unlock them I know you aren't old enough to remember)
Michael Roberts
Michael Ancel is why. The thing about King Kong is that it is basically Ubisoft's take on Jurassic Park: Trespasser. Unlike Trespasser, however, King Kong is mechanically and thematically cohesive. I'm actually writing an essay on how interesting the game is, and how well put together it is for the most part.
The game uses technology in service of narrative and atmosphere. It doesn't have have technology for the sake of gimmicks. When you step into water, Jack raises whatever he is holding above his head. Why? Well, this means he keeps his gun dry. This means he keeps his flaming spear out of the water, and lit. The way creatures eat each other is fairly simple, but this means it's easy to understand. Big creature eat small creature. All creatures converge on dead or pinned creature. So if you're being chased by monsters, they'll find a wounded creature more interesting than you. And this works across the entire game. It's not just a one off. King Kong's design is very systemic in nature, although it doesn't go down the open world route like Far Cry: Primal did.
Also, King Kong's approach to first person storytelling was a far more refined version of what Far Cry: Instincts did the same year. The human NPCs in King Kong are very well done, and they behave like their characters. And they natter appropriately. Jack Black is always filming shit. Always making suggestions. It sells him as a real person and not an escort robot.
The game is amazing and it pisses me off how many Xbox kiddies were only interested in the 360 port because of its gamerscore bullshit. It's a marvel of game design with design elements Ubisoft reused in many of their later games, and literally any time you play a first person game where your character shakes hands with other characters and waves and gestures realistically in a first person perspective -- that game owes a lot to King Kong. It was a generation beyond Half-Life 2's floating camera approach to world presence.
Josiah Carter
>It's a movie tie in game, if you have high expectations of any movie tie in game you are sub 70IQ.
In 2004, we had Riddick, which remains one of the best movie tie ins ever made. GoldenEye remains the gold standard for taking a film and adapting its core themes into game mechanics. Followed by stuff like Alien: Isolation. Of course, Alien: Isolation owes a fair bit to King Kong. The systemic design, distracting monsters, etc.
You might thing this is odd, but did you ever notice that in RE7's End of Zoe DLC, you're literally wading around in the swamp throwing spears at things? I think it's pretty clear that RE7's devs used King Kong as a reference. King Kong also had an interesting design trait. You have to raise your gun, and then fire it. You can't just point and fire. Games like Alien: Isolation and Hunt: Showdown do this, too.) King Kong avoided feeling like a twitch shooter, and more like a lightweight survival horror title.
Zachary Hernandez
Its kinda insulting how people try to discredit King Kong by pointing out that it was based on Trespasser. Trespasser was BROKEN. Basically nothing worked properly. The AI was fucked, the interaction was fucked, the HUDless design was fucked. King Kong took those ideas, simplified them, and made them work. Having a good idea isn't enough. You have to actually execute it well. Chaser did slow motion FPS shootouts 2 years before FEAR, but FEAR did the concept in a coherent way against genuinely fun to fight AI.
Jeremiah Scott
where would i be able to find your essay
Ian King
4 magazines on backup
Brody Kelly
>past bad
>new good
Goes both ways fuckhead
Joshua Ramirez
Fraid I can't say, user. I might end up posting it on /r/games when it's done. I always planned on writing something about King Kong, but recently Polygon published a somewhat hyperbolic article calling it the "most innovative game of its generation" and while I wouldn't agree with that hyperbole that ignores the complexities of genre and design intent, I noticed a lot of people commenting on the article and they clearly had zero idea what made King Kong a unique game. You had people making bizarre claims like, "Once Call of Duty 4 came along we no longer needed movie tie in games." It's pretty clear a lot of people didn't read the article itself because it did explore why the game is special. polygon.com
It seems to me that a lot of gamers assume that if they haven't heard of something it mustn't be very important. Ubisoft games fall prey to this. Their games are both heavily studied by other designers and prone to massive cross-pollination within Ubisoft. For example, King Kong is the reason Far Cry games have fire propagation. If other games have fire propagation, they typically either took it from King Kong, or from Far Cry. The reason Doom 2016 has all that complex gesture acting from Doom Guy is a very distant descendant of stuff like King Kong and Far Cry: Instincts. I mean, Far Cry 3 in 2012 really pushed complex first person character animation. You go back and play stuff like Riddick and you realise it often swaps into third person for animations. But Ubisoft pushed for full first person. When you played FC: Instincts, the entire game took place through Jack's eyes. But it wasn't a floating camera. There's that scene where you break out of the shipping container and Jack holds his hands up to the camera and says something like, "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH MY HANDS?" We take this shit for granted nowdays. But a lot of it can be traced back to mid-2000s Ubisoft games.
Jaxon Fisher
>No, it was beauty killed the Peter Jackson's King Kong The Official Game of the Movie
Walked right out of the living room there.
Gabriel Roberts
the greatest movie game by a long shot
Hunter Mitchell
I think Alien: Isolation is a good contender. But in terms of actually adapting a movie directly to a videogame? Yea, I think King Kong is probably the best overall. It doesn't outstay its welcome, and it's a great rollercoaster ride. It's also surprisingly easy for casual gamers to pick up and play.
I wish Ubisoft would re-release the PC version. A not shitty version this time.
Christopher Cook
The Godfather 1 and 2 are also really good adaptions of the films they're based on.
Jeremiah Sanchez
because it wasn't
Benjamin Ramirez
Its probably my favourite game.
whats baffling about it is that a lot of people are shocked when I tell them its my favourite.
they always go "Really? King Kong?" but that never happens when I name any of my other favourites. Its so baffling.
Ryan Clark
To do that would mean the game would have to be remade. Since both PC versions are fucked up and that's without considering the piss poor support for newer hardware.
Justin Jones
>release ps2, xbox, gamecube, xbox360, and pc versions all around the same time.
>xbox 360 version with massively better graphics higher res textures and hair physics etc.
>pc release for some reason is a port of the xbox game with mediocre graphics instead of the xbox360 version.
someone explain this?
Ethan Richardson
The Signature Edition is okay. Crippled by Starforce, though. The Gamer's Edition is significantly improved by the widescreen patch that also mostly fixes the negative mouse acceleration and such. But it's not a good port. The 360 port itself was always kinda flaky compared to the PS2/GC/Xbox version. A half baked graphical overhaul. Far Cry: Instincts had the same problem.
Cameron Campbell
There are two PC ports.
Retail version was Signature Edition. Based on Xbox version. Would be the best version except it has Starforce and this fucks the game on modern Windows. More precisely, it bricks Windows 10. Nobody ever bothered to properly crack the game.
Gamer's Edition (Amazon Digital Exclusive) is based on the 360 version. Is a seriously fucked port. People thought it was fucked in 2005, which is saying something. However, there's a fan patch that irons out some of the issues. Also the mod allows you to increase the FOV, although there are some side effects. King Kong had a shockingly narrow FOV and the vanilla game is one of the few games that makes my head spin. Gamer's Edition doesn't have Starforce so it can run on modern Windows. myabandonware.com
Ideally we'd get a new PC version that lets you choose between Signature and Gamer's Edition without Starforce and with proper widescreen and such.
Aaron Perez
Something nobody ever talks about is how Gamer's Edition/360 Version removes the clips from the movie that introduce the story, and also removed the inter-mission loadscreen animations that show the group's progress across the island on a map. I feel like the Signature Edition/6th gen version is more grounded. It gives the player some introduction to the events of the story instead of just throwing them into the thick of it.
Nathan Peterson
I have not heard about starforce in a long time. Correct me if i'm wrong but wasn't starforce the drm that installed drivers on your system that ended up bricking certain brands of optical drives?
Zachary Barnes
I think the Return of the King on PS2 is up there but you're right. King Kong still blows that out of the water
Levi Myers
My understanding is that the clams about Starforce damaging optical drives were never proven. As we've seen in the years since, people will cling to claims of a DRM scheme damaging hardware. For example, there's zero evidence to suggest Denuvo could harm SSDs, but people believed that and still do believe that.
Starforce's main problem was that it directly accessed the kernel, which led to stability issues and also later OS updates disagreed with it. Sometimes Windows will simply stop Starforce operating. But on some games, like King Kong, it takes the entire OS down with it. Some later versions of Starforce do work fine on modern Windows, mind you. It went through a bunch of iterations.
Cooper Lopez
Didn't this game singlehandedly kickstart softmodding in the OG Xbox?
Nathan Gray
Removing Starforce was extremely time consuming, so the crack team who tackled King Kong Signature Edition decided that instead of removing Starforce they'd just hack around it. Their justification was that King Kong wasn't a super long game and it would take them too long to do it properly.
Nicholas Barnes
>forgetting LOTR tie in games
Shame on you.
Carter Barnes
>not the GBA version
It was a whole RPG based around the movies. Goddamn that game had tons of replay ability.
Jason Reyes
Pretty good game for an decent children's film
Jason Green
ITT: We post good kaiju games like OP and pic related
Jack Miller
This game was one of my favorite games on the 360, pretty swell to see it here.
Benjamin Baker
Honestly despite the kong sections being good themselves we really REALLY need a complete seamless survival adventure on skull island.
Ethan James
I don't think I've ever actually seen any gameplay footage of that game before
John Ramirez
>Market it as playing King Kong vs TRexs
>Actual fun part is the first person survival where a majority of the time you didn't have weapons and used spears and bones
>Ammo was so limited and bones etc were such bad weapons that you had to use distractions for running
Oliver Sullivan
HAYES
YES JACK
HAYES
YES JACK
HAYSES
YES JACK
How many of you spammed this
Jack Collins
Back when Ubisoft was based.