Jenga: World Tour DS

The good
- The main points of Jenga are all there
- The physics programmers did their job well
- You can now play Jenga on the bus…

The bad
- It’s otherwise pointless
- The designers were also the physics programmers
- …so long as the bus has stopped.


It can’t be an easy task, porting a game that requires deft, delicate touch and complex physics onto a gaming console. It’s not too hard to imagine some die hard fan of the block stacking game witnessing the release of the Nintendo DS and its touch screen and proclaiming: “Yes! Finally, with this incredible new ‘touch screen,’ my dream can become digital reality!” Possibly while frothing at the mouth slightly.

The rest of us are going to see Jenga: World Tour sitting on the shelf at your game store of choice and simply wonder, “why?”

Perhaps, when pinholing at the smaller details, there is some justification as to why this project has gained release. After all, what better than a stylus to convey that finest of touches that determines whether your Jenga stack topples or stands tall? What better than the world’s most popular portable console to ensure that one may never go without a chance to go mano a mano in a gripping Jenga clash? The Jenga fun is no longer confined to lounge rooms, holiday homes and desks of the terminally alone! Now you can get your Jenga action in a car, on a train, even on a plane!

The concept is pretty simple as well. Hold the DS on its side, so that the screen can display the block tower at its maximum height. Holding the DS this way also has the effect of making some DS owners feel like they are doing something more intelligent than playing a game, which is either a bonus or a complete irrelevance depending on your viewpoint.

Next, all players have to do is choose from a collection of the world’s most unnappealing avatars this side of an RSL pokie and the game begins.

In game, the stylus is used to select a block, with the player motioning a straight line forward, backwards or sideways to remove the brick from the stack. The physics model is pretty accurate, with each brick reacting to those around it with a real sense of friction. If those cues aren’t enough to determine whether you’re about to cause a game ending collapse, there’s also a colour coded system and a “heat” meter. The colours are fairly basic: green for easy, yellow for medium and red for hard to impossible. The heat meter reacts while you are teasing out each block. When it’s swinging into the red, you’re courting not only a game over screen but also an obnoxious voice yelling something along the lines of, “Tiiimbeeerr!”

All sounds pretty on the level, right? But here’s the problem. After a game is released, the chance to pinhole on gaming mechanics is over. Certain things get cast in a harsher light. Aspects that at first seemed trivial, well now they seem kinda like vast oversights.

Let’s take what is ostensibly the whole point of the game: the ability to play on a bus or in a car. Okay, while it’s true that your virtual stack of blocks no longer require the services of a table in order to stay upright, Jenga is still a game that requires a steady, measured hand in order to win. Your stylus is just as prone to wobbles, shakes and checks. Bumps and shakes are detrimental to your block manouvering ability. In other words, if you try to play Jenga: World Tour on a city bus, you may as well be on horseback.

That isn’t to say there aren’t other advantages of having a digital version of Jenga. Some tables feature some interesting new advantages, such as having extra heavy “concrete” bricks that have more friction and weight, “ice” bricks that have less friction than normal and even levels where aliens or catapaults are firing at your bricks to try and cause a mistake.

In the end, what you get out of Jenga comes to this. Are you prepared to pay more than double what a Jenga set costs for a couple of extra game modes and not having to manually stack the blocks? Do you not care about bad menu design? Even if the buttons look like they were pinched from a website coded in 1993? Do you still trust a game that starts you on level 2, bizzarely locking the beginner stage until you’ve completed the game? Then you’re set to have a great, intense game of digital Jenga with your mates.

So long as they have a copy too.