King Kong game built to conquer

The team behind the King Kong video game, in stores next week, have tried to achieve a high level of realism.

A week from the release of King Kong, the most eagerly awaited video game of the year, it seems Peter Jackson is on the verge of doing something that this year has eluded game developers - coming up with a decent film-to-game adaptation.

King Kong, which will be released in stores next Friday on PlayStation 2 and Xbox, has already gone gold in the United States through pre-sales.

With a release also planned for Microsoft's next-generation console the Xbox 360, the game's momentum is likely to carry over into the first three months of next year, during which Microsoft expects to sell three million new 360 consoles.

But once the excitement generated by the movie wears off and with hours of free time to kill over the summer, will gamers be satisfied with the title they paid $110 for?

As I watched viewers filing out of the King Kong theatre at the E3 games expo in Los Angeles back in May, the expressions on their faces told me the game was a winner. And they were just watching a fairly rough demo with a curt introduction from Jackson.

But big-budget games supported by big-budget movies have never been ensured success, and it hasn't been a great year for film-to-game adaptations. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a garish, seemingly half-finished mess. Batman Begins was slickly made but relied too heavily on material from the movie and was relatively conventional in design. Fantastic Four was unspectacular while The Punisher attracted more attention for its level of violence than the gameplay itself.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was the big winner of the year and it was a standalone game.

While we've been told in no uncertain terms that King Kong closely follows the plot of the film and borrows some of its graphics, sound effects and character voices, its demos point to it being well-made and visually stunning.

The previews reveal that King Kong is striving for a high level of realism despite the fantasy adventure nature of the story. There is no on-screen interface imparting information such as your state of health or how much ammunition you have left.

Instead, when you are wounded in attacks by Skull Island's prehistoric inhabitants, your vision starts to blur, the screen tinged with throbbing red.

When you're running low on bullets, a verbal cue lets you know it's time to find another cartridge.

The effect is that you're never quite sure whether the next blow is going to kill you. You seem more at the mercy of the environment, where running for your life adds up to more than spears and bullets.

The game, after all, isn't the shooting fest other action titles are. Rather than blasting away at Tyrannosaurus Rex, the idea is to kill smaller dinosaurs that act as food and a distraction for your huge adversary while your comrades sneak away.

The point-of-view modes of the game introduce a unique mix.

Much of the time you'll be looking through the eyes of the hero, Jack Driscoll, who is played in the film by Adrian Brody. When playing as Kong however, the point of view switches to the third person, presumably to better capture the scale of his encounters with Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Game franchises such as Splinter Cell and Brothers in Arms have won credit for their realism, but King Kong is a different type of game, one more removed from the hard, real-world environment of the above titles. However, its M16 rating puts it firmly in the camp of core gamers who increasingly crave realism in games, such as the life-like crashes of Burnout Revenge.

If the cut-away scenes from the movie in Batman Begins didn't save that game, will the close integration of film and game prove successful for King Kong?

That will ultimately depend on how cinema-goers receive the movie, but Jackson's tie-up with games developer Ubisoft seems to have borne fruit.

Ubisoft's Michel Ancel and his team at Montpellier studio in France have had seemingly unlimited access to Jackson's Weta studios and the graphics and artwork from the movie.

"Being able to collaborate closely together from day one is of utmost importance, which is why we've given Ubisoft unlimited access to every creative aspect of our film production," Jackson has said of the relationship. "We really want the game and the film to be part of the same universe."