Playing every PS1 game - Disney games, Part I

Once upon a time, hastily throwing together a videogame tie-in to your mass-market-ready motion picture (usually in the flavour of a passionless collectathon platformer borefest, but very occasionally something quite ambitious) was such an accepted part of the movie marketing process that it was as if it were carved onto a stone tablet somewhere that no summer/Christmas [delete as appropriate] blockbuster could be taken seriously without throwing a few vague storyboards at a developer to queue up a - normally rubbish - branded offering which invited the player to loosely follow the film’s plot through a series of identikit levels.

The practice died out around the time of the PS3 and the final Harry Potter game being painfully backed out into the porcelain bowl, and now the closest thing you tend to get to this genre are ‘Lego’ interpretations of whatever superhero film is popular at the time - the true final boss of passionless collectathon platformer borefests. The circle is complete.

I’m probably missing a few, but given the quality of most of the entries involved (and my own lack of care for them), I’m going to blitz through them in a shorter format than the usual programming.

Disney’s Action Game Featuring Hercules

One wonders what was going through the heads of whoever agreed on the ‘Hello fellow kids’-coded game title.

It’s actually an incredible graphical effort they made with the giant 3D Hydra thing.

At least it’s not wrong. Disney’s Action Game is a simple 2D-but-occasionally-3D-ish action game featuring Tate Donovan’s cartoon Hercules. It’s not very difficult and you can breeze through it in a little over an hour if you know what you’re doing.

It’s a token collectathon like any other.

There’s not that much to say about it. PlayStation-ready MIDI representations of the cheesy pop tunes from the film I expect are all there, there are the mandatory compressed-FMV clips from the film spliced in between each level, and you run around swinging your sword and replenishing your health by gargling cartons of Hercules-branded lemonade.

The Brynglas Tunnels on a Friday afternoon?

What’s interesting and rather remorseless is the fact that you can’t actually finish the game if you play on easy mode. No, such wimps are led on a merry dance all the way up to the ninth of the eleven levels, and then the game brutally no-sells you with a ‘come back later on medium difficulty if you want more, you utter loser’ text message before dumping you back at the main menu. Punishing.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 5/10

Disney’s Aladdin in Nasira’s Revenge

Technically, this isn’t a game-movie tie-in project - Nasira’s Revenge is something made up specifically for the purposes of this game. I guess Disney Interactive fancied cashing in on the Aladdin brand, but given no new film would be forthcoming for another nineteen years (hint: the one featuring the guy who slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars once), I suppose they had to roll their own.

Standard platformer fare.

It’s a 3D token-chasing collectathon. You may start to identify a theme. By the back end of 2000, developers had started to mostly figure out how to handle a third person camera in 3D, and so the controls aren’t as clunky as I’ve been tending to get. Visuals are clean if uninspiring.

Swish your sword with the square button while running around like an idiot trying not to get hit.

The pleasantries end there, though. The game is dull as dishwater. There is not a single novel idea to be found; Nasira’s Revenge is in fact a novelty-free zone. Jump around, pick up those damned coins, get extra lives, bop the odd enemy on the head, and so on forever as the levels and textures change to tease the impression of variety. In between levels you get to do a short ‘bonus round’ where you play a random minigame. If you fail to complete to bonus round, you just repeat it until you are able. So just another level, then. Yawn.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Disney’s Atlantis - The Lost Empire

A Disney film that I assume did happen (yet I simply have no memory of such a happening), Atlantis is…a strange mixture of a 3D token-chasing collectathon and Tomb Raider. You’ll have to bear with me.

Horror WW1-era stormtrooper outfits are always a sign you’re playing as the good guys.

I have to be fair and say that this game does at least try something a bit different. While the platforming and running-into-slowly-rotating-polygons borefest is still pretty integral to what you have to do, the hook is that you are able to switch between one of three different characters who each have various special abilities in order to progress and overcome obstacles. This isn’t exactly going to earn itself a feature in a Top 10 Shocking PlayStation Moments YouTube slop clip, granted (at a minimum, Bugs Bunny and Taz did this very thing a year prior and it was highly forgettable), but it at least encourages a bit of lateral thinking.

Only one guy is able to do the monkey swinging bit.

If it were just that, I’d have written it off quickly, though. The difference is how you are encouraged to pick up various ‘equippable’ items and then use them at a later point in order to solve a puzzle, open a door, or complete some objective or other. You’re also able to climb up walls, hang and lift yourself over edges, swing along monkey bars and heave around giant blocks. If it’s all beginning to sound a bit Lara Croft-adjacent, that’s because it is. It’s something at least halfway ambitious to try that sort of advanced platforming formula in a kid’s Disney game. No gunning down tigers and other endangered species though, unfortunately.

Even the rotating item selection pause menu is directly channelling Tomb Raider.

It doesn’t really commit to the idea though, and in the main it has more in common with your bog-standard 3D platformer than anything else. The game gave me little choice but to get bored very very quickly.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Disney’s Dinosaur

I vaguely remember this film being a thing?

You are looking at a high-fidelity image of a monkey riding on a dinosaur’s back.

I needn’t have been reminded about it. This game is terrible in every way. The experience is an assault on one’s patience from the moment the disc begins to rotate. Every time you boot the game, you are forced to sit through unskippable promo clips for the developer and publisher, followed by a FMV game intro. When you do get to do the playing bit, you are faced with an ugly, half-arsed scene and gameplay which is unclear.

The best part of the game is the ‘encyclopedia’ mode. But maybe that’s just me.

In Disney’s Dinosaur, you spend a significant amount of your time role playing as a lemur. There are two other characters with which whom you can switch in order to do whatever it is you need to do (thankfully both dinosaurs), but they all manage to control terribly and perform ineffectively in a similar capacity. On level one, after a bit of hand-holding where the mechanics of the game are poorly explained, it lets you loose with the main objective - which is just ‘idk kill everything else on the level lmao’. If only it were so simple, given your crew of characters seem to keel over dead in the face of anything beyond an aggressive breeze and you are invited to restart.

Enemy health bars are actually shown as a health percentage. Every few seconds you may get a chance to knock off a few points, and maybe after several minutes of faffing you might defeat your enemy.

The only practical way to proceed is to just stand in place and hammer the ‘attack’ button to try and slowly chip away at enemy health, as they proceed to come in for an attack then ping off you after taking a hit. Unfortunately, eventually they will manage to get a chomp on you, and you die. There might have been some core gameplay gimmick which I was missing here, but in the end - for the first time in this whole process actually - I ragequitted.

Kept my attention for: 45 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Disney’s Donald Duck - Quack Attack

Just eyeballing the title alone, my feeling was that this was going to be another turd. Alhamdulillah, it actually isn’t. At least not really.

Narrow corridor platforming. Look familiar?

Quack Attack’s lack of ambition saves it somewhat. It is a lock and stock Crash Bandicoot clone, and Crash Bandicoot is a good game, so there we are. Swap the apple-collecting for 2D-star-shaped-sprite collecting, swap the whacky cartoonish enemies for, er, different whacky cartoonish enemies, and add in stuff like time trials and the ghastly ‘level hub room’ concept that Crash loved so much but I hated, and you’re close to what’s on offer here.

Running toward the screen while being chased by a boul - I mean, giant bear. Look familiar?

It doesn’t do any of it better. The double-jump mechanic lifted from Crash 2 is implemented clunkily (which is a capital crime for a game where jumping around is the whole point) and enemy hitboxes aren’t quite right. Picking up all the items on a grouping of levels alongside completing the time trials unlocks some bonus levels (the completion of which will earn Donald a new ‘outfit’), but it’s pretty by the numbers all round. Just play Crash Bandicoot instead.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Disney’s Tarzan

If Aladdin was a open-ish 3D platforming collectathon bore, and Quack Attack was a slightly narrower, ‘corridor’ 3D platforming collectathon bore, then Tarzan takes that theme and brings it to its logical terminus: a 3D platformer so narrow that you can only move in two directions and the ‘3D’ bit becomes redundant. I actually played a demo of the PC version of this back in the day, and recall it being a mite difficult.

I guess it’s not as much effort as collecting the letters in ‘Hercules’.

It’s weak. The game is set up plain as day to play like Sonic the Hedgehog with a fast paced left-to-right-with-winding-paths structure, but it seems the developers never properly realised this. You’re actually supposed to take a more traditional and methodical approach to navigating the level and the legions of ‘enemies’ with whom even touching results in a chunk being taken out of your health bar. Every single thing in the jungle is out to kill Tarzan, it seems, from apes and elephants, to birds, frogs and insects.

The quick slide sections are the best bits and could have just been the whole game.

Given the constraints of the source material, every level is more or less the same (How many different ways can you do ‘jungle’?). There are a hundred and one different types of collectable as per expectations for a Disney platformer, but in the end I decided balls to it all and started playing it as if it really were Sonic. It got more fun, but the game likes to take a dim view and quietly bollocks you at the end of each level by showing how pisspoor your percentage of picked-up collectables turned out. Shame.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove

AKA “The Llama One”, Wikipedia truths say that Argonaut Games re-used the code used for Croc 2 when they put this together a year later. It’s funny that such a strategy would have been notable enough to warrant (probably) a few inches in a magazine in 2000, given today pretty much every game out there is either on Unreal or some flavour of propietary engine used for everything a particular developer knocks up.

THEY’RE ALL THE BLOODY SAME.

The game? Absolute peak 3D platformer collectathon garbage. I don’t have the patience to slog through the introductory levels in these games to get through to any change in theming. This time, the act of picking up all the coins on a level is actually the main thing you’re asked to do. Toss toss toss. Quoteth Jurgen Klopp: “I’m running out of energy”.

Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10