Curious George

“Curiosity is coming home!”

NA release: 1st February 2006
EU release: N/A
JP release: N/A
Developer: Monkey Bar Games
Publisher: Namco
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

The original Curious George is a book about a man with a yellow hat deliberately kidnapping a chimp (although he’s incorrectly referred to as a monkey in all adaptations) and tries to keep him at home, he causes a load of trouble and his captor seems to escape punishment and responsibility every single time. This game is based on a film (which then sparked a TV show which lasted until 2022) about Curious George, which softens a lot of elements – George is abandoned by his parents (or an orphan) and chases the Man in the Yellow Hat back onto his ship then back to his home.

You get clips of the film, which actually have a really nice animation style, something which is not reflected at all in the game, which goes for something which, at the time, was a fairly standards “kids cel-shaded adaptation”. It’s still not a bad thing. With this being aimed at young kids, you get told what to do every step of the way.

Which makes one part of the game really strange: the double jump. You only have a tiny window from your initial jump to trigger the double jump (if George reaches the apex of his jump, you’re too late), so if you realise you’re slightly too short for a jump, you can no longer get the extra distance – you have to press the jump button again immediately after the first time. Even with this, it seemed temperamental and didn’t work on multiple occasions. It makes the game difficult for the completely wrong reasons.

The camera is also strange, as in some sections it’s locked to a small viewpoint in a really odd manner, sometimes obscuring where you need to go. With everything being really slow, it just fails at what it sets out to do.

Poor

This is an age group better suited to the 2D challenges of the charmingly retro-styled V-Smile system, or the free Flash games on the CBeebies website. Expecting them to master complex navigation and pixel-perfect double-jumps in virtual three-dimensional space, especially when hampered by fudged controls and rogue cameras, is more than a little unrealistic.
Dan Whitehead, Eurogamer

Remake or remaster?

Nothing for this.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get Curious George.