Donkey Konga 2
Published by Nintendo. Developed by Namco. For Nintendo GameCube. Rated T for Teen.
There was a time when Donkey Kong was the stuff of nightmares, a fanged, barrel-hurling brute with an insatiable lust for the girlfriends of mustachioed Italian plumbers. But when Nintendo's oddly named simian found himself facing life as a single father, things started to change. Raising Donkey Kong Jr. pacified the big ape, transforming his heart of darkness into a heart of gold. Before long, DK was just another emasculated 1990s sitcom dad, condemned to playing straight man to spunky youngsters and wise-cracking octogenarians. With the release of last year's Donkey Konga for Nintendo GameCube, his domestication was complete. Once the undisputed king of the jungle, Donkey Kong is now nothing more than a bar-band drummer playing uninspired covers of the worst sort of soulless mall-punk ditties.
Which is not to say that Donkey Konga 2, the recently released sequel to Donkey Konga, lacks all charm. After all, society has always sought to subjugate its darkest fears to the realm of the juvenile. (It's hard to believe the beast slain by St. George was of the same species as Puff the Magic Dragon, and Bram Stoker's Dracula – a symbol of relentless pestilence and decay – eventually turned his efforts away from sucking the blood of young virgins and toward tallying items in his environment.) But given how toothless and antiseptic the experience of playing Donkey Konga 2 turns out to be, it's hard not to yearn for the days when Donkey Kong would rend the flesh from your bones just for looking at him the wrong way.
Donkey Konga 2 is another entry in the surprisingly robust genre of rhythm- and music-based games, which has produced standouts such as PaRappa the Rapper and the Karaoke Revolution series. But whereas those games provided hilarious original songs (PaRappa) and a good mix of contemporary hits and old favorites (Karaoke), Donkey Konga instead plumbs the depths of MTV Hits' most brain-numbing fare. There are not one but two songs from Good Charlotte (the game's commercial pitchmen), and a distressing number of tracks that have the same titles as other, better songs (if you're looking at the tracklist, that's not "Trouble" by Coldplay and not "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd). In such company, the presence of two songs by R.E.M. is more inexplicable and awkward than Tom Brady hosting Saturday Night Live.
As if that weren't bad enough, these aren't even the original studio versions of these terrible songs. They're weird, slickly processed covers that sound like something you'd hear on Radio Disney. One might even say that in some cases, that's an improvement, but be honest: Do you really want to hear Smash Mouth's "All Star" ever again, in any form?
And if you think savaging the music in Donkey Konga 2 rather than discussing the gameplay is unfair, well, the music is the gameplay. You don't get to stop listening to this crap. Though there are several modes to choose from, all of them center around keeping the beat to these songs (except for a falling block puzzle, which mandates only hitting the drums as fast as possible – unsurprisingly, it's not very fun). You'll never notice the variety or quality of the backdrops – which include pastoral views of beaches, alps, and other landscapes inspired by past Nintendo games – because if you stop looking at the scrolling symbols indicating what beat comes next, the game will accuse you of drumming "bad" and punish you accordingly.
