Playing every PS1 game - Disney games, Part II

Previously on Playing Every PS1 Game we had the first half of the cardboard cut-out, quick cash-in Disney discs. I’ll finish the rest of them now and never speak of it again.

Treasure Planet

Treasure Planet is a token-chasing 3D platformer borefest, much like its Disney siblings which came before it. Good grief. When will the nightmare end?

In Treasure Planet, picking up 100 tokens gives you an extra life.

I’ve never even heard of this film. Were Disney in a sort of desperate last gasp of 2D animation before Shrek came along and killed it dead forever? That’s a total guess at the history of animated feature films, by the way. What to say of the game? Similarly to the others, it retains a core Temu Spyro the Dragon runaround but includes a couple of slightly different (yet unoriginal) mechanics to spice it up, perhaps out of sheer boredom from the developers handed yet another licenced game to shovel out.

There’s the odd race level which at least spices things up a tiny bit.

This time, the difference is that the levels are looong, rather than short and bitter themed dioramas. You can also (sort of) choose a level to attempt next rather than plod through in the classic concatenated fashion. The rest is something anyone familiar with Aladdin or Emperor’s New Groove would slip into with yawning ease, as the mechanics are exactly the same, down to the ‘press L1 to fire projectiles in first-person view’ mode. The fact that this sort of thing carried across different developers means that the magnolia-flavoured vacuosity of these games must have been a diktat from the publisher. Players have been cheated.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

A Bug’s Life

In comparison to all the other Disney licenced slop, A Bug’s Life seems to be an anomaly where the developers have strived to put together an actual real game. It’s almost a pretty good one, too. Almost. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The spliced-in movie clips are eye-wateringly highly compressed.

I think I’ve worked out why it’s set apart from the others, and also why the likes of Treasure Planet gave into the dull roaming-platforming gameplay. A Bug’s Life only came out a month or two after Spyro the Dragon, which upon further thought is clearly the progenitor for all the terrible collectathons that followed. Given these two games would have both have been in development at the same time, A Bug’s Life will have avoided the disease, and given the relative lack of exemplar material in this sort of genre at the time, the developers would have been forced to actually use their brains and come up with something halfway original (or back out entirely and make a 2D side-scroller or something).

There’s no way the zombie-looking enemy grasshoppers didn’t traumatise many a gullible child.

The environments make a refreshing change from the soulless ‘empty open spaces, right angled blocks and falling off the edge of the level to your death’ dreck that has plagued everything else Disney so far, with actual realistic-ish elevation changes and humourous takes on big-if-you-were-an-ant flora and fauna popping out of the ground. You progress by manipulating seeds to create various plants which respectively do things like bounce you, fling you through the air, spit out health upgrades and so on. Given it was 1998, the camera and controls wobble back and forth astride the line of ‘sucking’ but generally do the job.

It’s not all the same stuff.

It’s let down by frustrating elements, though. All enemies respawn a few seconds after eliminating them, so they tend to just annoyingly get in the way while you try to manoeuvre your way through a dexterously taxing segment. You also can only take a few hits before kicking the bucket full stop. Trying to figure out what to do in a level tends to leave you just aimlessly running around whilst mashing the attack button to just bat the waves of enemies out of the way. It’s not terrible, maybe slightly above average.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10

Buzz Lightyear of Star Command

What a weird one. In this game-of-the-TV-show-of-the-toy-of-the-film, you play as Buzz Lightyear, in character, playing his in-universe fictional role as a laser-slinging space cop. It’s a few layers deep. The game concept itself is pretty unique. Each level is actually a chase - you are dropped onto a planet in order to arrest some random alien scum and bring him or her to uncompromising space justice. Each level begins with a short monologue from the perp (where Buzz will stand stoically, passing up the glaring opportunity to just apprehend them and call it quits), following which they run off and the ‘chase’ begins.

You need to pick up a requisite number of ‘things’ in a level to unlock the next, meaning boring replays.

Except it’s not really a chase. ‘Catching up’ with your quarry is a straightforward task, but doing so doesn’t actually end the level or anything. You’re actually supposed to hang back and fight off the waves of henchmen who pop up to perform a pretty shoddy rearguard action while the baddie heads to the exit point, as you slowly catch up. The thing is, just running past them is trivial, so the game has to introduce some crude gameplay traps to force you to play ball and gun down a certain amount of enemies before you can pass through a gate or whatever.

Buzz is more than happy to just jog along with the fleeing bad guy, rather than do anything to stop them.

It’s all a bit strange. Picking up armour and weapon boosts seems to make them stack on top of each other, turning it into something of a mobile ‘tower defence’ game 20 years before they were popular. Once you do reach the end of the level, your prey will have waited there rather sportingly for your arrival (rather than just…exit) for a final showdown, which in this case manifests as a short boss fight. Pass that test and it’s level complete, to do it all over again in the next level. You get the feeling they came up with an idea for a gameplay concept, ran with it, then realised too late that it doesn’t actually go anywhere. It’s no surprise no game like this has appeared since.

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

Monsters, Inc. - Scare Island

Coming in late-ish 2001, this was probably one of the last Disney games to land on the grey box (though having looked it up at this exact moment, Treasure Planet was still to come a year later), and publishers were beginning to stop giving much of a damn. There is absolutely nothing interesting or remarkable about this game. Mediocrity, thy name is Scare Island.

The horror…

It’s the ‘game of the film’, but it actually bears no resemblance to its movie counterpart. It serves more as a sort of made-up prequel, where you follow your monster duo through their Monsters, Inc. ‘agent training’ or whatever. I mean, I guess? There is no plot. There is nothing driving the characters. There are no antagonists. You don’t even actually do any of what Monsters, Inc. purport to trade in (Saying ‘boo’ to younguns and collecting their lifeforce. Or screams, I don’t remember). Any scaring in which the player actually partakes in is committed against lifeless automatons in summer dresses.

Engage in a 10 second long button mashing sequence to scare this clockwork bot. Then do it again another 10 times to complete the level. Then do it again on the next level.

The levels involve running around, picking up endless coins and ‘ooze’ and the like (which, as if to leap straight to the final destination of token-chasing collectathons, respawn periodically), and then engaging in short button-mashing minigames to ‘scare’ robot children and gain…nothing. You just jog off and find the next robot. So little effort has been made, that if you sit around for long enough, the music simply stops and restarts at the start of the track a moment later.

You need ooze in order to scare the robot kids. Just like in the movie.

Official UK PlayStation Magazine awarded Scare Island a bizarre 8/10, which I would have to guess was part of the fruits of some ‘arm-twisting’ as fewer and fewer decent games were being released to actually write about (and for the official Sony rag to promote). It called it a ‘superior film tie-in’. Weasel words indeed, given most film tie-ins are guff. So is this game.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 3/10

Toy Story 2

Disaster. I actually wrote a fair few paragraphs here about the one Disney game that I’ve thought was actually pretty good, and it seems to have gotten itself accidentally deleted in the time gap between commit and deployment.

Shame.

I definitely can’t be bothered to put it all together again, so I guess it’ll have to suffice to say that Toy Story 2 is, against all odds, a fun token-chasing platformer. Nobody will ever know why.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 7/10

Toy Story Racer

It is surely written in blood somewhere that every 90s-00s successful media franchise must have its own non-canon cartoonish kart racing game. Even minor, recurring, totally mute game world fauna gets involved in it. So it was probably only a matter of time until we were handed Toy Story Racer and told to buckle up.

It can’t get more exciting than a ‘generic wooden attic theme’ track.

It’s not very good. There is kart racing and there is kart racing, but this game simply can’t commit to the bit. You can race as a few of the movie characters - I would suggest the RC Car as it gets to avoid having a terrible stunt-double voice actor whooping and hollering as you race - but through pretty unimaginative environments and tracks (one is literally just going in a square around a house). The ‘weapons’ you can pick up in randomly-placed boxes are pretty much all terrible. It’s actually some feat to even make the pretty much mandatory ‘rocket’ weapon just fop off into nowhere and explode on your competitor with a limp phut. But at least that might actually hit an enemy; at least two are weird spinning tops which, when fired, just randomly spin off into nowhere in particular.

Don’t bother trying to aim the spinning top weapon, as it will just fly off randomly. You might get a surprise “Knockout!” text popup 10 seconds later.

It also can’t commit to the ‘racer’ thing. Half of the levels are actually a Destruction Derby-style melee where the objective is to take all opponents out and be the last car standing. The problem is that when you are being asked to partake in this event with the rubbish weapons on hand, it just isn’t very fun. I didn’t play for very long, and I won’t miss it.

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

For a moment, I felt relief that the Disney games were over. Then a realised that there may be plenty more to come, as long as the title doesn’t start with “Disney’s”.