Genre: Party
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Atomic Planet Entertainment
Release Date: November 13, 2007

From Risk to Monopoly, turning board games into video games isn't an uncommon practice. The few games that haven't undergone this transition are those that simply don't work when being converted to video game format, such as Hungry Hungry Hippos or Break the Ice. Jenga is one of the latter types of games, built around physical interaction, rather than rolling dice and moving pieces. For those unfamiliar with it, Jenga is a simple game that involves a tower of small wooden pieces that are stacked on top of one another, and players take turns removing a single block from somewhere in the tower and placing it on the top. The game continues until someone causes the increasingly unstable tower to fall. Jenga World Tour is an attempt to make a portable electronic version of that fun game. Unfortunately, it works about as well as one would imagine.

Jenga World Tour is played by holding the DS like a book, as seen in games like Brain Age and Hotel Dusk. The touch-screen is used to show the Jenga tower, and players take turns with a computer-controlled AI opponent to pull blocks from the tower using the stylus. The tactile sensation of being able to actually feel the Jenga blocks is replaced by each block being highlighted by a green, yellow or red aura when a player clicks on it. Green means the block is safe, yellow means that it's risky and red means dangerous. This turns the game into a joke, as players can always pull the safest blocks without any risk.

As if to make things easier, the game also has a meter showing how much stress is being put on the tower as the player pulls the block. As long as you keep this meter below the top, pulling out the block is a piece of cake. Players can even activate some sort of super-sense mode that shows the aura of every block in the tower, just in case an extra advantage is needed! Unfortunately, the AI in Jenga World Tour is such a joke that no advantage is needed at all. Regardless of which opponent you're facing in the World Tour mode, they all act exactly the same: They instantly pull a random block and have a surprising habit of pulling the wrong block incredibly often. Winning most of the World Tour stages simply involves lasting the two or three minutes it takes for the AI to make a stupid mistake, which even the most inexperienced gamer can manage without any trouble.

To be fair, Jenga World Tour does try to mix up things occasionally. Every stage has some sort of gimmick involved that couldn't be done in a normal game of Jenga. UFOs fly around and blast blocks, volcanoes erupt and try to knock the blocks from your hand, and dinosaurs pop from the sky and steal your blocks. Unfortunately, absolutely none of these matter. The "challenge" they provide is absolutely minimal, and oftentimes they cause absolutely no effect at all. The few times they do, it is so minor that it's unnoticeable. If a dinosaur steals your block, you just pull another. If the UFO blasts one of the blocks, you get to pick a different block. There is no challenge here; at best, it's like trying to play Jenga while your little brother runs around and occasionally bumps into the table or steals the block from your hand. Sure, it's something different, but that doesn't exactly make it fun.

Once you've complete the World Tour mode, there isn't much left to be offered in Jenga. You could play a single-player Arcade mode, where the challenge is to play Jenga by yourself and see how long you can last before you make the tower fall. If you happen to have friends who also have a copy of the game, you can play multiplayer against them. The final mode, Quick Play, lets you play against up to four AI opponents or to pass the DS around round-robin style to play against your friends in the same room. None of these modes are particularly inspiring. The multiplayer assumes the unlikely event that you'll find another gamer with Jenga World Tour, and both single-player modes are something that would be more fun with an actual physical copy of Jenga.

Jenga World Tour is a surprisingly ugly game. The entire Jenga tower is rendered in 3-D, but that is perhaps the best thing one can say about it. The blocks themselves are horrifying blocks of pixels, the backgrounds range from bland and boring to the few levels that actively hurt to view. The hardest stage was the volcano level, not because of the AI or the gimmick, but because the stage's blindingly bright yellow and red caused my eyes to water after a few minutes of playing. The Nintendo DS isn't exactly known for top-of-the-line 3-D graphics, but Jenga World Tour somehow manages to take that to a new low.

Perhaps even worse than the graphics is the terrible audio that Jenga World Tour inflicts upon the player. At best, the music is boring, and at worst, actively annoying. There isn't a single good song in the bunch, and most of the tunes will quickly drive gamers to mute their DSes. Besides the music, there isn't much to the audio. There is a handful of sound effects that don't sound much better than the terrible music, and sometimes, it's difficult to identify exactly what the noises are supposed to be. Worst of all is the annoying announcer who appears at the end of every round of Jenga to shout "Timber!" and various other annoying phrases in a poorly digitized voice. If the terrible music doesn't inspire you to turn off the sound, the announcer will.

There is absolutely no reason to purchase Jenga World Tour over a copy of the physical game. The latter is cheaper, less painful on your eyes, and significantly more fun. The few changes that Jenga World Tour make to the overall formula are effectively pointless and in a few cases, serve to make the game overall less, not more, enjoyable. Even the fact that Jenga World Tour is portable does little to justify purchasing a copy, as trying to play Jenga on the go isn't remotely enjoyable. If you've really got the hankering to play Jenga, get some friends together, pick up the $10 physical game, and leave Jenga World Tour on the shelf.

Score: 3.5/10