Congo Jones Review

http://www.rainforestfoundationuk.org/Games
Deforestation is an issue that has been around for awhile. A game would seem to be the best way to get this issue across. However, The Rainforest Foundation's Congo Jones and the Loggers of Doom falls a little short. To get their agenda across the foundation mainly used messages in the game and graphics. At the start of the game, beautiful graphics of the rainforest and its inhabitants are shown with a fact about the disappearance of rainforest in large bold letters at the top. The problem is introduced on the next slide and shows a corporate logger. Finally, the next three slides asks the user to help the native people map out their land before the loggers arrive. Graphics are used also to show the beauty of the rainforest when the trees are there and the ugliness when they are chopped down. The background of the first level is a barren wasteland where the colorful birds flying overhead once roosted. Finally, the game makers tried to bank on the popularity of the movies of Indiana Jones by using a parody of the adventurer. This makes the player relate the actions they are doing in the game to something good because they are associating them with Indiana Jones (now known as Congo Jones).

Congo Jones and the Loggers of Doom is not a very successful game. I consider myself a pretty avid gamer, but I could not even get through the first part of the first level. Although I spent a lot of time trying to get further, in reality, if this wasn't a class assignment I would have given up long before. The controls were not intuitive. Once you jumped you could still move the monkey left and right making it hard to control exactly where he is going. The logs that were supposed to be the platforms seemed really hard to land on. It took me forever to realize that I could land on the alligators mouth without consequences (this may have been from playing too much Frogger though). Maybe this game got better as it went on, but most gamers would probably move to a different game before they got further in this one. To improve these things the developer should have more long platforms (like the alligators), especially if they are having this be a timed game. The player needs time to think and constantly having them jump is frustrating. Another improvement would be to have the jump be a fixed amount and not be able to move the monkey left and right once in the air. Hopefully, these improvements would allow the player to get further in the game.

As mentioned before it was hard to get very far in this game. This greatly impacted The Rainforest Foundation from accomplishing their agenda of the devastation of deforestation and solutions to the problem. The facts at the beginning of the game were short, to the point, and in large lettering. This made it so I wanted to read them unlike other games where I skipped over the messages because they were long and in small fonts. If the developer of the game had made the game more enjoyable to play I think the message would get across. I, for one, did not know that mapping out the land can help prevent deforestation. It actually made me go look up more on the website and I found out that these maps are used to prove to the government that “these forest peoples exist, and that the forest needs to be protected for their use.” As is, the game is a little bit of a dud. Also, beefing up the heroism of Congo Jones could also help. This could be done by maybe having him swing in on a rope or have a whip and just get the hero factor from the awesomeness of Indiana Jones.