I got a front row seat to a screening of Ubi Soft's next huge title. In King Kong, you will play as both human-sized Jack Driscoll and building-sized King Kong.

Driscoll is played in first-person and Kong is played third-person. The video starts with Driscoll lying in a sacrifice pit; your hands are tied but you can still look around. You see a woman hanging from leather bindings and then in the distance you can see the trees parting and hear a ground-shaking thumping. Kong bursts onto the scene and grabs the woman and then makes his ways back into the primordial jungle.

A few seconds later a character who looks and sounds an awful lot like Jack Black, probably because it is him, runs up and cuts you free. After that the game becomes your more typical first-person action. You run away from the encampment as islanders toss flaming spears at you. You can grab them and throw them back or just high-tail it. As soon as you clear the spears you get attacked by a dinosaur and then the dinosaur then gets attacked by the biggest friggin millepede I've ever seen.

The section of the game I saw, which was actual live Xbox game play, was an endless stream of running, fending off, and trying not to be eaten. It was very much like you were the smallest fish in a very dark and scary pond. But about halfway through the demo, the game switched, allowing you to control King Kong and suddenly you're at the top of the food chain.

Kong looks like he uses basic melee attacks, to take out the dinosaur trash. In the demo he did a lot of bitch-slapping, shoulder ramming and ground thumping. He also moved with this sort of muscular grace that really captured the power of the creature. It was shocking to watch him hurtling through the jungle swinging from giant trees and hanging from ivy-coated cliffs.

The graphics look like something out of a Edgar Rice Burroughs book. The jungle appears almost hand-painted, fog drifting along the ground and creatures skittering around. Sitting in the screening room looking up at the movie-like game I felt like I was 7 again watching a Saturday morning matinee of King Kong or The Land that Time Forgot. I can't wait for this to come out. It's gonna be hot.

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