Not their fault, huh?

If a Kong falls down from a game shelf and no one picks it up...

It really does feel like everyone is trying to become the new Jason Schrier these days. Typically one would have to wait several months for an expose from the man himself before learning why it is the game they just purchased was full of the same amount of artistic merit as a rotten banana stuck to a gallery wall with duct tape. These days it was hardly more than a couple of weeks before journalists were beating down the door of the Kong Skull Island developers, presumably to discover if they were actually sentient humans or just an entire studio full of half-trained monkeys on dusty typewriters. It's a development towards the positive, to be sure! I'd much rather have this become the meta of modern day journalism instead of rage-bait and listicles. At the very least it gives us something more to talk about on the active attack on good taste that was 'Skull Island'.

First off, we've heard that the state of Skull Island was: not their fault. And can I just say: that is a relief! I'm so glad that the abject concept of a King Kong game manifested itself into the real world, watched a couple minutes of a Youtube tutorial on how to use Unity and proceeded to slap together default program assets with horrendously ugly crafted models and textures in a package so horrendously sloppy that one infamous cutscene literally features an incorrectly formatted Jpeg of a pouncing dinosaur in lieu of an animation. I'm so glad we can attribute that purely to the ghost of the game and not to actual developers, because otherwise I would tremble of the state of art as a whole and probably decide to go on a holy pilgrimage to the E.T. Landfill in order to bury myself with them in that depressing pit of melted plastic and ruined industry. Oh wait, no that's not what they meant, was it?

The game, which is actually called 'Skull Island: Rise of Kong' but I couldn't be bothered to look that up until now because this game really doesn't deserve that gratis, was developed in under a year by Developer IguanaBee who did so under the whip of legendary publisher GameMill. And you might think of the name 'GameMill' and remark how you are unaware of their legend, or perchance have heard the name but fail to place it, and it would be my great pleasure to enlighten you. They published Nickelodeon: All Star Brawl in their brightest moment (even though that was a brawler which died in less than three months) and on the opposite end of that spectrum they also spat out 'Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing': a game of cataclysmic misery. A racing game where the enemy car lacked the AI to even move at launch, a game where simple track features, like the mid-map bridge, lacked any collision. A game where so little effort was put into reversing that the developers forgot to cap your top reverse speed, meaning you could keep building speed whilst reversing until you were travelling past the speed of light. A game which rewarded those that managed to reach the end of the track without throwing their entire system out of window in shock and pain, with the immortal aplomb: "You're Winner."

Now typically I'm not one for the practise of divesting all problems with games to the 'publishers' and 'higher ups' whilst lavishing all praise squarely on the development team; because that is a ridiculous double standard which is popularly upheld. However there is a common denominator present in the fact that GameMill, a company that many have noted is literally named as though it churns out this gruel as mechanically and rapidly as possible, published both Skull Island and the worst racing game of all time. There have been two decades and a bit between them, but some things never change. When Gollum was on track to win a award at least for being the worst of the year, GameMill swooped in to cement that sweet trophy for themselves. Defending the title, if you will. And under them, giving people 1 year to develop an entire game from absolute scratch sounds about right.

From there the tale is as old as time. Crunch work, tiny teams that kept getting whittled down whenever GameMill were worried about having to maintain a basic cost of living for it's staff and a budget so minimalist that professional art interpreters are still trying to decode and translate it's esoteric singular impressionism into legal tender. Basically, GameMill are a company designed purely to try and churn out slop that tricks enough curious buyers to fund their next piece of slop- and they've been this way for actual decades with no hope of stopping. It's almost like they're locked into the grind like some sort of demented episode of the Twilight Zone narrated by a condescending Transatlantic accent with some sort of pithy moral about 'Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained' or 'Nothing will come of Nothing' or some other bastardised Shakespearian witticism. IguanaBee were just the struggling wannabe Devs under their jackboot trying to make a name for themselves and instead creating... this...

So GameMill are masterminds of mayhem, no doubt- but can it really be said that this is the very best that Skull Island could have been under the circumstances? That's a bit more of a nuanced query with, honestly, no real answer at the end of the day. Afterall they rarely had even a full room of developers working on the game, the word 'senior talent' was treated as an unforgiveable curse by the Publisher, and I honestly doubt there's a single developer who can say they were there from conception to the birth of this doomed project. That being said, Skull Island is impressively amateurish. Literally one or two steps above literal bottom-of-the-barrel asset flips, there is nothing to be proud about with Skull Island. The team claim they're proud, they even claimed they had fun, and I can only chalk that up to the Human spirit's indomitable knack for making the best out of a bad situation. And crack. I assume they were on so much crack they could have cooking and eating their own feet and still have a blast throughout the process.

It's been said before but the sins are palpable. The default grass texture is the base offered in the game engine, and it's resolution straight doesn't match the other terrible assets around it. Levels are slapped together with no consideration of basic design principals or artistic forethought or any level of higher thought whatsoever. The cutscenes are clearly unfinished, but that which is there lacks any even a surface level grasp of cinematography, spacing, composition, storyboarding, non-verbal storytelling, verbal storytelling, or talent. At the end of the day that's the underlining point I'm poking at. There isn't a hint of talent on display at any point of this game. IguanaBee's report affirms that "Kong's state is not due to a lack of talent by the team", but I would append that statement to say that "Kong's state is not only due to the lack of talent displayed by the team". There, I even threw in 'displayed' for the benefit of the doubt.

At the end of it all, 'Skull Island: Rise of Kong' is a heartfelt reminder that sometimes, when we break it down, to the core of it's essence, underneath all the fluff, to the heart the matter, behind the masks, under the waterfall, within the lies, across the brambles, aside for the guff, on a serious note: GameMill should be dismantled for the good of the world. You think this game is a travesty, this made-for-the-bargain bin licensed garbage? They've done worse. That racing game! You think a developer just happens to spit out a 'racing game' more malformed than every sprog from an Alabamian paediatric ward combined? No, they orchestrated it- GameMill! They published a fighting game based on Nickelodeon properties but were too stingy to licence out any voice acting! And I rooted for that game. Oh- I shouldn't have. I wrote about them in my own blog- what was I thinking? They'll never change- they'll never change. Ever since 2003, always the same! Couldn't even cobble together enough braincells to spit out a functional truck racing game! 'But it's not GameMill's fault, must have been those nasty developer-sies!' Throwing them under the bus. And they get to stay in business? What a sick joke! We should have stopped them when we had the chance, and you, you have to stop them! You-