Together Retro: Licensed to Thrill (Licensed 2D Platformers)

[Sarge]

Oh, wow, that is a lot of changes. Sounds like it might be worth giving the Genesis version a go a few years from now.

[Xeogred]

Knocked out Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse.

Probably been 20 some years since I played this one at a friends. There's a reason I remember the fireman powerup the most, you use it for like half the game haha.

My biggest pet peeve when I go back to old games is the lack of a dedicated run button/function. Here Mickey will eventually run with enough momentum and holding down Y did seem to help... however you quickly get a few power ups along the way and how do you use them? The Y button. The second world was kind of annoying because of the platforming with a bunch of pits and these bouncing branches you had to be pixel perfect on to get the boosted jump. I only found two heart power ups (for a total of five health) and found the secret shop once... haha. Secrets must be hidden pretty good in this. The bosses were fun and the one boss in the ice level that skated on a ramp cracked me up because he looked like such an obvious sprite redesign of the later Ghouls n Ghousts boss at the end.



Overall a fun quick run. Not nearly as good as Aladdin, for me though.

[Exhuminator]

Well I beat another licensed platformer. This time it was...


Appleseed: Oracle of Prometheus

Tis a Super Famicom action-platformer, based on the excellent Appleseed manga and anime.
Appleseed the SFC game was, uh, not excellent. Really bad level designs ruin it. Nice OST though!
Full review here.

[ZeroAX]

I tried out Donald Duck / Maui Mallard in cold shadow on the SNES yesterday. The game is gorgeous but I didn't really like the gameplay since it's more of a treasure hunt game than a platformer. Also I find it very strange that all Donald Duck references were omitted from the USA version.

Then I tried out Magical Quest 3 and I think this is the first game that I will end up tackling. The graphics are absolutely gorgeous with a lot of character in the animations (and I have the say this is a very Disney representation of donald duck )

Can the game be easily beat without speaking Japanese? I just beat the first level but had no troubles so far

[Exhuminator]

Then I tried out Magical Quest 3 and I think this is the first game that I will end up tackling. Can the game be easily beat without speaking Japanese?

If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, the GBA port was officially localized into English:



But I doubt you'd have an issue getting through the Super Famicom version in Japanese.

[isiolia]

I have, so far, played through the first Rescue Rangers game via the Disney Afternoon Collection...making liberal use of rewind, because I suck at it. Quite a lot seems to be relying on memorizing the stages, but hit detection seems pretty mean as well. At least for certain things, like environmental hazards.

[chuckster]

Well I beat another licensed platformer. This time it was...

Appleseed: Oracle of Prometheus

Tis a Super Famicom action-platformer, based on the excellent Appleseed manga and anime.
Appleseed the SFC game was, uh, not excellent. Really bad level designs ruin it. Nice OST though!
Full review here.

Great review, very professional and the screens were nice. As much as this game seemed to fall flat, as a fan of Appleseed it's piqued my interest to track it down.

[Exhuminator]

Great review, very professional and the screens were nice. As much as this game seemed to fall flat, as a fan of Appleseed it's piqued my interest to track it down.

Thanks. I'll reiterate the creative OST was the only part I liked though. You can hear that here for free:



I looked on eBay, seems a loose cart of Appleseed averages $20. (Getting it complete is another story though.)

[nullPointer]

I beat the Famicom version of The Goonies last night. I'll be posting some final thoughts over in the Games Beaten thread, but in short it was a worthwhile endeavor. While it's not without a few niggling issues, it accomplishes what it sets out to do and manages to do some things quite well. All in all it was a decent outing with gameplay quite similar to early black box NES titles.

After I wrapped that up, I was apparently still in the mood for something in the theme of "precocious kids out having adventures," so I figured I'd try something starring one of the originals in this genre, Tintin.

First up was Tintin on the Moon which I played through an Amiga emulator. I have to say that while it's generally not too hard to figure out control schemes in older console games (with the occasional exception of consoles that use 'touch-tone phone' style controllers like Atari Jaguar, Colecovision, etc), older computer games like this can be hit or miss when it comes to sussing out the controls, particularly where they weren't natively designed for controller usage as was the case with Tintin on the Moon. After playing this game for a while I'm trying really hard not to use the phrase 'terri-bad' in the description, but it looks like I just failed in that regard. I just can't call this a good game … primarily due to the fact that it seems to be one of those games that implements difficulty through inscrutability. Aside from that it's a game that straddles the line between platformer and adventure game, but doesn't do either of those things particularly well. So between the fact that it didn't feel 100% true to the theme of platformers and the fact that it just wasn't very good, it was time to move on. I might have had a better time with Tintin on the Moon if I had access to the game manual, but it just wasn't good enough to convince me that the search would be worth it.

But I wasn't ready to give up on Tintin! Next up was the SNES version of Tintin in Tibet. Hey this one didn't look too bad! I was rather impressed with the presentation in this game. The frames in the introduction were drawn in the style of the comic, and in fact the game itself had nicely animated graphics which were also quite reminiscent of the comic. On top of that Tintin in Tibet utilizes an interesting background/foreground mechanic in which most of the action takes place in the 'background' but you can run to the foreground as a 'safe zone' of sorts, the catch being that you can't make any forward progress in the foreground. Unfortunately where this game really starts to fall apart is in terms of its gameplay. You move sluggishly, the inertia of the running mechanic feels off, hit boxes seem strangely unpredictable from one moment to the next. In short the gameplay here just feels poorly constructed. It took me a while to realize it, but in some ways this game reminded me of an Adventures of Dizzy game. But while Dizzy has some quirky gameplay (to say the least), it at least tends to work in predictable fashion. Tintin in Tibet just feels sloppy and unpredictable to me. I might return to this one at some point, but it was getting late, and I had already passed my patience threshold for mediocre gameplay.

[Xeogred]

Great review, very professional and the screens were nice. As much as this game seemed to fall flat, as a fan of Appleseed it's piqued my interest to track it down.

Thanks. I'll reiterate the creative OST was the only part I liked though. You can hear that here for free:



I looked on eBay, seems a loose cart of Appleseed averages $20. (Getting it complete is another story though.)

Man Appleseed can't catch a break. The 80's OVA was okay but the budget was horrible. I hate the CGI movies. Seems like it can't get a good adaptation anywhere.