Disney's Tarzan Untamed

"Tame him...now"

Everyone, take cover! Stock up on food and water, and duct tape every crevice of your house! Raise the terror alert to code Yellow with Pink Polka Dots, for what is now upon us is truly terrifying. What disastrous occurrence has struck our blessed world: weapons of mass destruction, Al Queda? No, it's much worse than that. Such trivial problems can be solved with a soldier or two (give or take a few hundred thousand), but this may be beyond the reach of human control. This could very well drive our race out of existence. This is Tarzan; raw, relentless, UNTAMED.

Why, precisely, has Tarzan suddenly become so wild and rambunctious? Probably something in the water. However, it might have to do with the fact that yet another man with a stupid yellow coat has come to the jungle and kidnapped Jane, Tarzan's love interest. Will they never learn? Now the scraggly-haired monkey man must traverse numerous areas of the jungle in hopes of getting Jane back, saving the monkeys, yadda yadda yadda. Watch the Disney flick for a refresher course.

Jungle exploration makes up a good portion of the game. ''Exploration'' is a stretch, since the levels are so linear and cramped, the game might as well have been a sidescroller. Watch as Tarzan's uncanny sense of balance renders him unable to fall of the numerous tree branches he trounces across. This could be looked at as a positive thing, seeing as how it negates annoying drops to your doom, but it in fact makes the game mind-numbingly easy. Simply run straight ahead and press A to jump when need be. Unhelping in this aspect is the way Tarzan automatically swings from the vines he leaps to, disregarding the usual tilting physics found in swinging ropes in video games.

Enemies are few and far between. The simpler ones can be defeated with a press of the B-button, at which point Tarzan will put his gymnastic lessons to the test (yes, untamed men can take gymnastics if they wish) and somersault or cartwheel into the enemies, rendering them unconscious due to the stupidity of it all. More formidable foes will go WWF (screw E) on Tarzan and lock him into a wrestling grapple. Tap B repeatedly to boost Tarzan's strength (or the high he must be on to accept this moronic adventure) and overthrow the opponent. Besides dull hand-to-hand combat, Tarzan can also use spears, sprinkled generously throughout the levels, to overtake the most powerful enemies, namely the humans with guns. A simple tap of the Y button will have the ape man automatically lock onto the correct target and connect with it easily. Perhaps this game was made to attract the monkey demographic. Such mammals could easily handle most of Tarzan Untamed.

I imagine Ubi Soft, the creators of this holy grail to mediocrity, had a generic, unimpressive platformer on their hands with these jungle exploration levels alone. This wasn't going to sell. Nobody gave a damn about Tarzan and his crappy levels, and no one was going to. And then I'm sure someone, perhaps the lead designer on the project, perhaps the pizza delivery boy, had an ingenious idea which seemed the perfect solution to saving this turd at the time.

''Tarzan should be a skater dude!''

And so it was. Tarzan, allegedly untamed, spends half the game in levels involving extreme sports. The ape man learned at some point in his illustrious life among monkeys how to water ski, bungee jump, and water board (think snowboarding on river rapids). This was quite the moronic idea, no doubt, but I will say it's a hell of a lot more fun than the jungle exploration levels; unsurprisingly, it's not that enjoyable. While all 3 extreme sports seem somewhat fresh the first time around, they grow stale and boring by the end of the game.

Waterboarding seems to defy the laws of physics as Tarzan grabs a stray piece of wood and uses it to go surfing down a river, rocks and logs conveniently obscuring his path. Terrible enemies such as little schools of fishies attempt to stop Tarzan, and his only means of defense is to maneuver out of the way or jump over them. If he gets banged up too much and runs out of health, a quick tune will play, more annoying than melancholy, and you'll be forced to restart the level.

Bungee jumping levels are a somewhat interesting test of your reflexes as you dodge tree branches and rocks in your downward spiral. You're supposed to be ''proving'' yourself to the monkeys of the jungle by attaining the prize at the bottom of the lake (a film reel; more on that later). Why not just climb down to the lake? Where the hell did monkeys learn to bungee jump? These questions and more won't be answered in Tarzan Untamed, because crappy games always leave a lot of blanks to be filled.

Water skiing is the highest point of the game, and it's fairly low. Guide Tarzan across a large body of water, avoiding rock formations, alligators and sewage waste (or some other nasty green substance that chips away at Tarzan's health). The game gets too dark for its own good at some points, leaving you with no idea what obstacles lie ahead just before Tarzan rams his skull into a low-hanging tree branch. You're bound to die at least once in these levels, and whatever mild rush there might have been the first time around will have completely disappeared and been replaced by annoyance, frustration, and an extremely strong urge to throw your controller against the wall.

Fear not, readers, because the extreme sports fun doesn't end there! Ubi Soft went out of their way to make this game even more idiotic by including trick points. If Tarzan grinds across a log while water boarding/skiing, swings from a vine with a spectacular somersault, or uses his impeccable dancing skills to foil foes like he's Michael Jackson, he'll earn points good toward attaining extra lives. Exactly where these points come from, what with Tarzan being in the middle of a jungle lacking intelligent life, is anyone's guess. Perhaps it's a gauge of Tarzan's eroticness while doing these moves. Sadly, I wasn't in the least bit aroused.

Equally unarousing were the stupid film reels scattered about the levels. I made no drastic effort to attain the eight in each world as I started the game (I was really just gritting my teeth to get through it all), but lo and behold, Jane's bastard father pops up halfway through and tells me I need 45 of the reels to progress. I'm not sure why 45 film reels are more impressive than one, but I was forced to grudgingly replay the older levels to collect more of the reels. This is Tarzan's one and only collectible, fairly surprising for a cookie-cutter platformer, but it still managed to annoy me more than games that go to Banjo-Kazooie extremes with the fetch quests.

Good graphics can't make a bad game good, so I guess Ubi Soft's thought was ''Why bother?'' when it came to the visuals department. Perhaps this is a good thing. I'd rather not see what sort of awe-inspiring physics could be applied to Tarzan's flimsy loincloth if the GameCube was put to the test. The worlds are generally dark and bland, automatically making this quite the mature title. I tried my best to be impressed by the cut-scenes, since the backgrounds looked so great, but the ugly, blocky character models that take center stage in said scenes are too damn atrocious for me to give Untamed any real props.

The music is forgettable, aside from the quick death tune you will hear as you head to that big jungle in the sky for unbelievably stupid reasons (Tarzan once died floundering in a shallow pool of water). Sound effects include a lot of monkey grunts and screams, likely voiced by George W. Bush. The characters may or may not be sound-alikes of the Disney flick's cast, but they sound similar enough to the point that it's irrelevant.

If Tarzan were to be captured and tamed, maybe Ubi Soft could come up with a better game. As it stands, this hip, trendy, UNTAMED ape man is in no way fit for a videogame. Whip out the tranquilizer darts, boys, because Tarzan is most definitely in need of some downtime.

Don't buy. Don't rent. Burn.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/02/03, Updated 07/02/03