I had a chance to play around with a US copy of Mario Kart DS today which was absolutely excellent, and seems to be one of the best handheld games of this generation. My time was spent thrashing around the tracks in various multiplayer modes which impressed me a lot – you get a lot of options for single cart multiplayer and the battle mode is as much fun as I remember it from the N64 version. With the full complement of eight human players I’d imagine that it’s even better, but I still had fun with two people and AI racers making up the numbers. Amusingly, one of the tracks was a giant Nintendo DS that you could tear around on.

Graphically the game is very nice and smooth, and somewhere between the full 3D of the GameCube game and the sprite characters on 3D environments of the N64 game. It’s not incredibly detailed but shows that the DS really does have some graphical horsepower behind it and is more than capable of making a game like this run well. I can’t imagine anyone being disappointed with how it looks.

All that’s fine, but what has most people interested is the online play, and it works great. Setting it up is a cakewalk (annoyingly it only supports WEP encryption so I won’t be playing in my WPA2-encrypted home) and although it took a few minutes to match me up with someone – I assume that would be better at a time when there’s more Americans on as it’s not out anywhere else – when I was actually racing it worked almost completely lag free and brought me right back to the old 4-player MK64 sessions. It was especially impressive that it was running on a system which has kind of added online play as an after-market extra. Hopefully all online DS games keep the same interface.

I’m definitely going to be getting a copy of this on the UK release, and it’s another reason why the DS is starting to leave the PSP in the dust as a games system.

There was a little game from Ubisoft’s Montpellier team back in 2003 called Beyond Good & Evil. It was excellent but thanks to no marketing and an avalanche of new games, only a few people bought it. Luckily one of those few was a guy called Peter Jackson, who just happened to be working on a little trilogy of films called Lord of the Rings at the time, and had also had his fingers burnt by EA on the adaptations of those movies. This perfect storm of events has led here, with Jackson personally selecting the BG&E team to develop the game version of his upcoming King Kong remake, and what a game it is. I played the Xbox version for a good while today, and I’ll probably be grabbing the Xbox 360 version when that comes out.

Taking inspiration from the likes of the Half-Life series and Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, the game is essentially a first-person shooter that never leaves the perspective of your character, in this case Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody’s character), but takes it further by having absolutely no HUD. That means no aiming reticule, no health bar, no ammo meter, no interaction icons, no nothing. You get some prompts to tell you the controls at the beginning, but that’s it. You need to judge aim yourself, you know you’re near death when the screen starts turning red, and you can make Driscoll say how many clips or shells of ammo he has whenever you need to know. Not that you’ll have a lot of ammo, as most of the time you’ll want to rely on spears and bones that you find laying around, saving your guns for the big enemies that you’ll find occasionally. A flaming spear is usually just as good as a few bullets anyway.

Graphically King Kong is stunning, even on the vanilla Xbox. It’s atmospheric and sharp, and everything is detailed yet still manages to run at a very solid framerate. All of the previews are saying that the 360 version looks a lot better, so logic dictates that it should be something gorgeous to look at. I was impressed with the Xbox version’s graphics and certainly had no complaints about it, so this one will be worth admiring.

Overall from what I played this could go up there with the likes of GoldenEye as one of the great movie-to-game adaptations, and should hopefully give Ubisoft Montpellier some much deserved exposure and money. They should only sell King Kong in a bundle with BG&E or something.