Who wants to work when you can just bang on the drum all day? Nintendo’s new Donkey Konga is a rhythm-based game that comes with a miniature set of bongo drums as a controller. There is no dancing to this game; it’s all about tapping out beats on the bongo drum. It’s sure to appeal to those that don’t think that dancing is very cool. Just exactly how cool Donkey Konga is depends on your level of commitment to hammer away on these bongos for hours in front of a TV screen. If you want to complete all of the challenges you’ll be in for a surprise when you find out just how difficult this game can get. The novelty of the controller could be compared to that of the lightgun. You don’t really need it but once you play with it you can’t live without it. There are three basic moves that you will perform. Icons will appear onscreen in time to various songs. The red half-circle indicates a beat on the right drum while a yellow half-circle indicates a beat on the left drum. A full pink circle requires that you hit both drums at once. There are variations such as colored bar lines that require you to continually hit a particular drum as fast as you can. There are more than 30 songs, some of which are Nintendo ditties such as the Mario Bros. theme. Other songs range from Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again to The Trogs’ Wild Thing. There are three different difficulties and six modes including a two and four-player beat battle fest. For some songs you’ll just play along to the basic beat. For other songs you’ll play along to the melody which can get more complex. You will earn gold as you successfully complete songs which you can then spend to unlock mini games and different song versions. The Jam mode is the most challenging of all and only recommended for the truly skilled and dedicated since there are no beat icons shown on the screen. You have to play the songs by memory, providing that you learned them in the Street mode first. This is good practice to see if you can make it as a professional musician. Yes, musicians are required to know more than the entire Late-Night Menu at Wendy’s by heart. Nothing would be more fun than having four players try to “beat” each other in the multi-player mode. Although it would cost a pretty penny with more than a hundred dollars worth of novelty controllers in the room at once, you don’t have to buy the entire game package at fifty bucks. Controller can be purchased separately for 30 dollars each. While they appear to be quite solid they aren’t going to last long if you swing them into walls which is what you’ll probably want to do time and time again since the game can get really competitive and ultimately frustrating. Unlike the single player mode there are different icons that appear in the multi-player mode such as the Pow which takes chunks out of your opponent’s score. I’ve seen better graphics on the Super Nintendo, seriously. Fortunately the focus of the gameplay is not on the graphics and admittedly they could have been in danger of being too distracting. It would have been nice to see more special effects, especially when there’s a break in the action. It also would have been an idea to include more tunes. As it is, the gameplay is relatively short and it’s unlikely that most players will tackle all of the modes. I almost hate to say it but, it appears as though Donkey Konga is going to be hard to “beat.” |