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The groundbreaking part of the program is the speech recognition technology - "learn the language of the jungle" and you can navigate parts of the game using only your voice and a microphone, which comes packaged with the disc. At key junctures your monkey guide will chatter nonsense like "Ka-Kee," "Aw-Ow-Ow," and "Ja-Kee-Ta," and then challenge you to repeat his syllables (if you prefer, the sticky points can be passed using more conventional logic games like Concentration and Simon). Except for this gimmicky little trick, which does, admittedly, have exciting implications for the future, Jungle Book is just another example of a CD-ROM that has not figured out how to use multimedia. The entire adventure is live-action video, where you make occasional choices and spend a lot of time clicking on "instinct" - little flashes of light that test hand-eye coordination and play excerpts from the Jungle Book movie. The audience for Jungle Book is very young kids, fans of Jason Scott Lee's pectorals, and die-hard gamers who can't wait to see the latest voice-recognition technology. |
