This may sound offbeat, but it makes perfect sense in the wacky world of "Donkey Kong Jungle Beat," where your proficiency with a bongo drum determines your success in the game.
That’s correct: Forget about your regular GameCube controller. To control Donkey Kong in "Jungle Beat," you pound on a small set of bongo drums that plugs into the controller port.
These are the same bongos Nintendo introduced last year for its "Donkey Konga" music game, but this new title is not about music. It is a classic side-scrolling platformer game, meaning you help Donkey Kong run, swing, leap and climb his way through more than 40 two-dimensional levels that are filled with obstacles and bad guys.
Tap, tap, tap on the right drum and Donkey Kong runs to the right. Pat on the left, he goes left. Hit both drums at once and he leaps. The bongos also have a sound sensor that picks up clapping. You clap to send out destructive sound waves that pop bubbles and stun baddies.
The goal in each level is to collect as many bananas as possible to earn bronze, silver and gold crests, which unlock more levels. The environments are what you’d expect in a Donkey Kong game – colorful and cartoonish – and they range from jungles to the desert to icy mountains.
A warning here to couch potatoes: Banging on those drums is work. For one thing, the cable isn’t very long, and that forced me to sit on the floor just a few feet from my television (no couch!). Banging away is easy at first, but by the end of a level, my wrists and fingers were actually sore.
You have to drum and clap constantly, swinging on vines, leaping from trees, bouncing off walls. All these moves require a tap or four. At the end of some levels, you have to pound with both hands as fast as you can in a frenzy to pick up bananas within a certain time limit.
Whew!
Unlike "Donkey Konga," there’s no multiplayer fun in this game. Sadly, the game can handle only one set of bongos.
Without that innovative controller, this would be a standard platformer. There’s nothing, really, in these levels that you haven’t seen in other games. But the bongos are, indeed, special. They mean the difference between a predictable game and one that marches to a different drummer.
"Donkey Kong Jungle Beat," $54.99 ($39.99 without bongos), www.donkeykong.com. Player: 1. Format: GameCube.
© 2005, Detroit Free Press. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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