Congo the Movie: The Lost City of Zinj is a first-person shooter developed by Jumpin Jack and published by Sega for the Sega Saturn in 1996. The game uses elements of the film Congo to tell a side story following the exploits of Butembo Kabalo (played by Steven Anthony Jones), the only survivor of the first Travicom expedition in search of diamonds in the Congo jungle.
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Hey, come back here. You big monkey.
With 2023 underway, it would only make the most sense that I would begin the year of the rabbit with a first-person shooter about nefarious apes chucking rocks at me from behind foliage. This act of cowardice was brought about by me finding this game on Cheddar's list of games appearing in "I'm Too Young To Die", and remembering seeing very brief footage of this title on a sampler disc that came with my Saturn many many moons ago. I decreed "I will play Saturn Congo", and thus I did. I know, go me.
Upon beginning my boot up of Congo on Saturn I was greeted by the logo for "Sega Away Team", instantly jokes of "hweh, well if this were the home team this console would've died quicker" appeared in my head; these jokes I will refuse to make officially. This was apparently the last game with this team associated with it, so I assume they were taken out back afterwards. Already this is not a great look for Saturn Congo. RIP Sega Away Team, more like...Sega Took'em Away Team...bake'em away toys.
Unfortunately, I am not a movie buff or a reader of Michael Crichton's work; so I cannot verify how close to the movie or the book this particular video game is. For all I know I could assume that Crichton's book was nothing but non-stop descriptions of being assaulted by cartoonish spiders, and the amount of ways they could narrate the protagonist getting clunked on the head by stones or having an exploding spear shot into their face.
When I began Congo I was actually slightly disappointed that it wasn't that terrible, at first. It's most troublesome problem on the onset was that the reprehensible rogues' gallery of human-hating fauna sometimes enjoyed hanging out in the unnavigable part of the jungle stage of which I could not walk in. This required me to constantly pay attention to the minimap instead of the actual gameplay screen in order to see them approaching me while stealthed behind brush and trees. This would actually be pretty good at putting more of a survival element to the game in a way, but the evil spiders inhabiting Saturn Congo are as silent as the night, and more than capable of biting me in the bum if I don't look at the minimap constantly. It's not great, and it's made even better by the piss filter they throw onto the screen every some seconds to simulate you "having a fever" at the beginning of the game. Remember that.
What lowered this quickly from a "slightly troubling experience" to a "oh god why I do bother anymore" type of game is that later these problems would only get worse once the nefarious apes began appearing. These gorillas are on a huge coke binge and are capable of withstanding many shots, and unfortunately these assholes learned the very fine art of lobbing boulders onto my cranium. The first time I encountered these apes I didn't even know that projectiles were being thrown at me, because the jungle scenery was disguising their movements on screen. Once again, the minimap was the only reliable resource. During this same stage, my protagonist was apparently bitten by something "big" while they were sleeping. How they didn't realize this until they woke up is beyond me. This was the explanation for why the developers decided to bring back the temporary piss filter, and add a "we'll reverse your controls every several seconds" challenge to that particular stage.
Fantastic, if we're doing this you may as well send an ape to my house to mongolian chop me every ten seconds while I'm trying to play your game. Absolute nonsense. How about next you turn the TV upside down, and make the composite cables to my TV loose so that the picture goes in and out at random? I love that fake-ass shit, it's about as real as this game's idea of sending the world's quietest wildlife after me.
It's amazing how fast my opinion dropped on Saturn Congo once I delved deeper into it's shithole. Needless to say, I got annoyed enough at the fifth stage once it started tasking me with finding useless trinkets to make progress, on top of the polygonal ground having an aneurysm to simulate earthquakes as gorillas gave me knife-edge chops to the throat. A miserable experience of a game, why it's visage stuck with me from that sampler video is as unexplainable as this mushroom that only grows in Texas and Japan.
Perhaps I just always had an eye for this garbage.
With 2023 underway, it would only make the most sense that I would begin the year of the rabbit with a first-person shooter about nefarious apes chucking rocks at me from behind foliage. This act of cowardice was brought about by me finding this game on Cheddar's list of games appearing in "I'm Too Young To Die", and remembering seeing very brief footage of this title on a sampler disc that came with my Saturn many many moons ago. I decreed "I will play Saturn Congo", and thus I did. I know, go me.
Upon beginning my boot up of Congo on Saturn I was greeted by the logo for "Sega Away Team", instantly jokes of "hweh, well if this were the home team this console would've died quicker" appeared in my head; these jokes I will refuse to make officially. This was apparently the last game with this team associated with it, so I assume they were taken out back afterwards. Already this is not a great look for Saturn Congo. RIP Sega Away Team, more like...Sega Took'em Away Team...bake'em away toys.
Unfortunately, I am not a movie buff or a reader of Michael Crichton's work; so I cannot verify how close to the movie or the book this particular video game is. For all I know I could assume that Crichton's book was nothing but non-stop descriptions of being assaulted by cartoonish spiders, and the amount of ways they could narrate the protagonist getting clunked on the head by stones or having an exploding spear shot into their face.
When I began Congo I was actually slightly disappointed that it wasn't that terrible, at first. It's most troublesome problem on the onset was that the reprehensible rogues' gallery of human-hating fauna sometimes enjoyed hanging out in the unnavigable part of the jungle stage of which I could not walk in. This required me to constantly pay attention to the minimap instead of the actual gameplay screen in order to see them approaching me while stealthed behind brush and trees. This would actually be pretty good at putting more of a survival element to the game in a way, but the evil spiders inhabiting Saturn Congo are as silent as the night, and more than capable of biting me in the bum if I don't look at the minimap constantly. It's not great, and it's made even better by the piss filter they throw onto the screen every some seconds to simulate you "having a fever" at the beginning of the game. Remember that.
What lowered this quickly from a "slightly troubling experience" to a "oh god why I do bother anymore" type of game is that later these problems would only get worse once the nefarious apes began appearing. These gorillas are on a huge coke binge and are capable of withstanding many shots, and unfortunately these assholes learned the very fine art of lobbing boulders onto my cranium. The first time I encountered these apes I didn't even know that projectiles were being thrown at me, because the jungle scenery was disguising their movements on screen. Once again, the minimap was the only reliable resource. During this same stage, my protagonist was apparently bitten by something "big" while they were sleeping. How they didn't realize this until they woke up is beyond me. This was the explanation for why the developers decided to bring back the temporary piss filter, and add a "we'll reverse your controls every several seconds" challenge to that particular stage.
Fantastic, if we're doing this you may as well send an ape to my house to mongolian chop me every ten seconds while I'm trying to play your game. Absolute nonsense. How about next you turn the TV upside down, and make the composite cables to my TV loose so that the picture goes in and out at random? I love that fake-ass shit, it's about as real as this game's idea of sending the world's quietest wildlife after me.
It's amazing how fast my opinion dropped on Saturn Congo once I delved deeper into it's shithole. Needless to say, I got annoyed enough at the fifth stage once it started tasking me with finding useless trinkets to make progress, on top of the polygonal ground having an aneurysm to simulate earthquakes as gorillas gave me knife-edge chops to the throat. A miserable experience of a game, why it's visage stuck with me from that sampler video is as unexplainable as this mushroom that only grows in Texas and Japan.
Perhaps I just always had an eye for this garbage.