Donkey Konga

"Great Fun. With a little work it could be great all-around."

I have been very enthusiastic about Donkey Konga since I first played the Demo kiosk in EB back in August. In fact, I was looking forward to this game more than Fable and Halo 2, surprisingly.

After picking up the final version, speeding home with it bouncing in the passenger seat, and putting in many hours of play time, will my anticipation be justified?

Gameplay:

Here's the scoop - Symbols fly across the screen from right to left and you hit the corresponding bongo as it flies under a timing reticule. Ridiculously simple, insanely fun and addictive.

A yellow left-half circle means you hit the left bongo, a red right-half circle means you hit the right, a pink full circle means you hit both, and a little bursting start button looking thing means you clap. Not a whole lot to remember, but if it was any more complicated you'd be pulling your hair out on some of the harder difficulties (Trust me).

You score some coins for each successful timing you make, and at the end of the song these are totaled up so that you may spend them in DK Town. In DK Town, you can unlock songs for play in Gorilla (hard) mode, unlock different bongo sound sets (which I find more annoying than anything), as well as simple mini-games to play with the bongos.

Nintendo really should have thought a little bit more about the difficulty level of this game. People who are inexperienced with this type of game will find the game pretty hard, but Nintendo really didn't give those of us who have been playing a while anything to work towards. They should have included one more extremely hard difficulty or something, honestly. Sure, there's the Jam mode, which IS very hard, but all you do is play without the notes. That's a memory game, not a test of your actual playing skills.

Graphics:

Plain and simple. There's either a jungle in the background, or a cave/mine
thing. There's usually some 2D characters bouncing around on the bottom of the screen, and a 3D Donkey Kong mimics your actions in the upper left corner. The symbols float along a wooden border across the middle of the screen, which is all you really look at anyway. During drum rolls, you'll see birds or balloons fly by (speed and quantity depends on how good your drum roll is).

They're really nothing to talk about, but they're supposed to be simple. You don't want crap distracting you from watching the symbols.

Audio:

This is the second biggest thing in a game like this (first being how fun it is to play). Unfortunately, I had some major problems with the audio in this game.

Most, if not all, of the songs are done by cover bands. This doesn't hurt the songs too badly, but you can really notice in quite a few songs and it can be agitating.

I also had my discrepancies with the song list. Good God, what was Nintendo thinking? There are some great classic songs on here, but there are only 33 different songs, and 3 of them are taken up by stupid infant sing-a-longs and 2 more are filled up by the terrible theme songs to the Pokemon and Kirby television series (I thought Nintendo was trying to GET RID OF the "kiddy" image?). That's 5 songs that most people will hate, leaving you with a mere 28 songs that may or may not be good to your tastes. I just can't believe the UK got Tubthumping, and we have the friggin' Itsy Bitsy Spider...

While I, personally, did enjoy a good portion of the songs that are available, Nintendo should have picked a song list that focuses more on drums. They managed to work the bongos around songs that really shouldn't have any involvement with bongos what-so-ever pretty well, but I was disappointed that there weren't any kind of tribal super-hard drum beats to play along to.

Final Verdict:

The game is overall very fun, and extremely addictive. I found my hands hurting from over-playing this game (during a single play session, hours could go by and I wouldn't even notice).

If your a rhythm game fan looking for something new and fun, or are interested in getting started in the genre, pick up Donkey Konga. It's annoyances aside, it's a great game to have fun with (killer at parties,
too).

Final Score: 8.5/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/07/04