I hadn't played the console game before I played the PSP version, but I still could feel a big gap when I got to NYC and had just barely caught a glimpse of the T-Rex - the famous encounter in the ruins isn't in the PSP version, and other than as Kong, you only see the Rex as you escape in a short raft sequence. Sure, it's a portable version, but you're still paying the full $50 here, and even if there wasn't a console Kong, the short 4 or so hours you get on PSP doesn't feel substantial.

However, there's only so much you can excuse for a game that's left with only half of what it once was. Some cuts actually streamline the game, getting the annoying characters out of your face and putting you man-on-beast with your enemies. Instead of interactive cinemas of Jack rowing to Skull Island or being tied up as Kong steals Ann, you get FMV from the console game of the sequences - again, no big loss. Since Ann was the only character that really made a difference (all of her puzzles are either given to Jack to do alone or else trimmed out), that's no big loss either. Your shipmates have also mostly been given the boot, showing up in cutscenes but never accompanying you on the island.

Unless you've played the console game, you probably wouldn't even notice that anybody's missing - a gaggle of spiders crawling over a key have instead been replaced with a brushfire puzzle, and only one Rex chases you on the river instead of two. We get fewer of those cool minor critters, but the key creepies (the crab monsters, the megapedes, the raptors, the vampire bats, the swampcrawlers, and the rexes) are here. although I doubt it) in bringing the game to PSP, and for the most part, the trims are excusable. The Montpellier team at Ubisoft worked with Phoenix Studio (who some might recognize from the cute kid's game Winnie The Pooh's Rumbly Tumbly Adventure. The trims to the PSP version generally leave it still with a mean-looking face, with levels cut out for technical reasons as well as for time restrictions in re-fashioning a handheld version of the game.

For this handheld edition, Ubisoft has trimmed down the main Kong game (unlike the ill-fated DS version,) for a slimmer, shorter portable version of the ferocious console adventure (with some multiplayer frills thrown in for a little extra to stomp through on PSP.) Shrunk down to just a few inches instead of his usual 25 feet, Kong is still strong, but some flaws and shortcuts taken to make this port take a lot of the power out of his roar. Arriving a little bit later than the console equivalents, Kong has now taken on the PlayStation Portable. Thanks to the big-budget movie from cinema craftsman Peter Jackson and the similarly intense videogame creation by videogame auteur Michel Ancel, King Kong is everywhere.

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