I put so much stock into this that I gave Urban Champion, one of the most hated Nintendo games ever, my Seal of Approval, because I had fun throwing punches that felt like they were connecting. is that combat in games has to feel like there’s real world weight in it. The primary cited difference between the SNES and Genesis Aladdins is the Genny game is based on sword combat. Enemy placement can result in seemingly unavoidable damage. Unavoidable projectiles come from off-screen. Plus, that boulder thing above is just the tip of the iceberg. But, I can’t factor that in to the review because it doesn’t make the game more fun. So yea, Aladdin had the development cycle from hell. Golly, the 16-Bit era produced some insane stories. But, get this: the Montana game they made in short order (around four months) was universally regarded at EA as more fun than their own Madden game, so right before they sent it back to Sega, they deliberately went back and made Joe Montana Football worse. But EA wanted a good relationship with Sega so they decided to make a more casual, arcade-style football game with Montana to counter their more simulation-like Madden title. While that didn’t end up happening and Joe Montana instead came out a month later, you still have to think about it: it’d be like McDonalds paying Burger King to open a location next to theirs. The fun continues with the Montana story: EA was launching their first Genesis Madden game ON THE SAME DAY as the game Sega had hired them to make to compete with their own product. Why? Because 10,000,000 flyers for the game had already been printed and would be included with the home release of the Aladdin movie. Years later, Disney and Sega were so unimpressed with BlueSky’s work on Aladdin that they turned to Virgin Games with 99 days to go before the game had to be finalized in order to be manufactured and ready to launch alongside the VHS release of the Aladdin film. Sega had Electronic Arts finish the first Montana game while actively searching for who would do the remaining games on Montana’s contract, and BlueSky got the call. There’s an irony there: BlueSky was who Sega gave the Joe Montana football series to after their original choice, a company called Mediagenic (who was the linear continuation of the Atari 2600 era Activision) lied to Sega about the progress they’d been making on the game. Fun story on that: it was originally going to be made by BlueSky Software. Now, I’ll concede that the game had a short, very rushed development cycle. But that kind of design is all over Genesis Aladdin. The issue here is that the shading for the rock changes but it does so in a way where it’s abrupt and you can’t tell it’s one continuous platform. People say they could still see the platform. You’ll forgive me, but where I come from, when the game shows the platform has ended, I don’t assume I can keep running past it before jumping. I had to turn to Twitter once because I couldn’t figure out how to outrun a boulder. It’s often not clear what you can jump on, or how far platforms go. But, even the “final cut” version (which is the ONLY version you should play, take my word for it) has flimsy combat and confusing platforms. Whereas the Capcom Aladdin for the House of N featured traditional hop-‘n-bop type of gameplay and was based around jumping on enemies and swinging off pegs, the Genny Aladdin opts for sword-based combat, and it looks great. Hey Konami, I have five or six excellent indie devs on standby to bring that series back. Besides Zombies Ate My Neighbors, which I didn’t like so much as seven-year-old me was *terrified* of that game and would play it while peeking out from under many, many blankets. In fact, it was probably my favorite of those. It was one of a handful of SNES titles we had in my house that I could go back to after 1996, when Santa Claus brought me a PlayStation and planted the seeds for my gaming life. Oddly enough, I have played that one extensively. Aladdin has a little bit more going for it, but that’s by virtue of what’s not included in this package: the Super NES version. And really, that’s such a common story for so many licensed games of the era (especially on SNES it would seem) that I don’t really find it all that interesting. I mean, the #1 memory of Lion King seems to be of children unable to beat it, even on easy mode. But a lot of gamers from the 90s remember them as such. Because Aladdin (Genesis) and Lion King (SNES/Genesis) are not great games. As someone who grew up with no nostalgia for any of the games featured here, I think maybe today’s gamers need a review like this.
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