There’s been an increasing trend towards developers producing remakes of successful games in recent years, especially towards titles that were somewhat crippled by ageing hardware. So why remake Ape Escape? The game ran perfectly well on the PSOne, and still plays quite well to this day. However, Sony has seen fit to make even more unnecessary judgements by deciding to remake Ape Escape on a system that lacks the very thing that made the original stand out from the crowd many years ago.
The dinosaur is obviously enthused about his appearance in this remake
Ape Escape P is only really a graphical remake of Ape Escape, with the developer having only polished up the game’s dated graphics, bringing it up to the equivalent of Ape Escape 2. The plot still follows the story of Spike and the Professor’s quest to defeat Spectre, the leader of a mischievous bunch of simians, who just happens to have got hold of a time machine – and now threatens the existence and evolution of humans. It’s taken Sony an extraordinary amount of time to release Ape Escape P in PAL regions – the game was a launch title for the Japanese and North American markets! Launching the game next to the PS2’s latest simian catcher Ape Escape 3 may have seemed like a good idea to the marketing committee, but there’s a vast difference in quality which really shows just how bad a product Ape Escape P is – and to add insult to injury, Ape Escape 3 is the same price.
The basics of Ape Escape are entirely unchanged – the player (as Spike) has to catch a set number of monkeys in each level with the gadgets provided by the professor. The main problem with Ape Escape P is that all of the game’s gadgets were created with a right analogue stick in mind – something with the PSP lacks. What’s the solution? Replace the analogue stick with a single button. This setup just does not work at all, making Ape Escape P both needlessly difficult, and utterly frustrating. Without a second analogue stick, the soul of Ape Escape just isn’t there – but the replacement used in this game makes it seem like the soul was forcibly removed. Perhaps even more disheartening is the game’s extremely long load times, which clock in between 45 seconds and a minute depending on what the game is loading. We can’t seem to remember the process taking so long on the lesser PSOne hardware, and it really makes it difficult to enjoy what already feels like a crippled experience.
Attack of the Electro-carp
Should you be persistent enough to cope with the great change in control method and playability and the extremely long load times, you’ll find an enjoyable, but somewhat dated platforming experience. The game has a reasonable number of stages, with somewhere in the region of 150-200 monkeys to capture. There’s also a small selection of mini-games (boxing, snowboarding and ping-pong) that can be purchased by collecting the golden triangles that are scattered throughout the levels – they’re a fun diversion from the main game, but ultimately not a deal breaker. Expect Ape Escape P to give you about 8-10 hours of fun.
The graphics are the only area of Ape Escape P that's actually improved over the PSOne original. Ape Escape P brings the original game more in line with its PlayStation 2 sequels, with the same brighter colours, crisper textures and smoother animation seen in Ape Escape 2. The monkeys retain a lot of their charm, with their trademark silly behaviour and outrageous costumes. The game’s framerate is smooth throughout the majority of the game, with a few minor hiccups. The game’s sound isn’t quite as strong – the music is still reasonably good, and there’s not a person alive who doesn’t like the shrieking and general horseplay of the monkeys, but the dreadful, very British voice work of the original game remains. We felt like we were trapped watching a bunch of those cheap British children’s shows that ABC used to show in the mid-morning in the late 1980s.
Ultimately, Ape Escape P is a game that doesn’t really need to exist. While we can see reason for release an updated version of the game with polished graphics (given the relative popularity of the series), we just can’t see the justification behind releasing a crippled version of the game with bad load times over a year after the original release on the same day that Sony is releasing the far superior console sequel. If you need some monkey action this weekend, pick up Ape Escape 3 instead, and spend another ten bucks to snatch up a copy of the original Ape Escape off eBay (hooray for backwards compatibility).
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