Cold Fear vs Peter Jackson's King Kong

How's it going? I'm Carlos and this will be my blog over the next few weeks in which I will try my best to entertain via a blogging medium in which I will write about games I like (and don't like!).

Cold Fear

Developed by French Studio, Darkworks. Apart from a few cosmetic bugs, Cold Fear is a very functional and satisfyingly terrifying venture into the rapidly-growing survival horror genre. Our hero, Jack, is an ordinary Coast Guard who decides to respond to a distress signal near his boat. What he finds is a little less than ordinary. This is a classic example of a call to adventure as the protagonist is taken out of the ordinary world and into something much more surreal, without the option to turn back.

Use your fist, and not your mouth!

The antagonists in Cold Fear are both human and monster, with the player given only one option: kill or be killed. The classic 'Hero's Journey' formula is applied very lavishly with no characters receiving more attention than the other apart from the Hero and the Villain. The only problems I had with this game was the fact that in some rooms there were obvious mistakes, such as Jack's character model being completely devoid of any facial mapping. The other being the control system that I had to get used to, although in retrospect it proved useful to me as later survival horror titles adopted a very similar control scheme. Very underrated game.

Peter Jackson's King Kong (PJKG)

Developed and published by another French developer, Ubisoft, PJKG is yet another classic example of the 'Hero's Journey' but just simply thrown into a hastily made film tie-in for a quick buck. The game ambitiously attempts to merge classic 3-d platform gameplay with a serious 1^st person shooter, what happens is that they put too many things in place that the game engine can't actually handle, so the player suffers from the results, which is criminal amounts of frame-rate dropping combined with horrible collision detection.

WARNING: Stills do not reflect how bad the game actually is.

The platforming gameplay is also reduced to a series of quick-time events in which the player has to simply mash a button to continue on with the next phase of the area, whereas the first person sequences involved the player shooting at dinosaurs at a maximum frame-rate of about 30-fps (I took the liberty of running this through an emulator). What I felt personally were the worst aspects of the game were the fact that it had to sell itself on extra content that wasn't already going to be on a DVD release of the movie itself, if a game has to market itself on 'Extra Jack Black outtakes', then in my humble opinion it seriously makes me question the developer's faith in the product itself. Avoid like the plague

The Winner:

Cold Fear