Aladdin (NES Review)

 

I’ve been pretty impressed by the versions of Aladdin I’ve seen on 8/16-bit.  Regardless of the gameplay, the success of any Disney franchise is colourful graphics which is where I thought the NES would fall flat on its face.  But as you can see from the screenshots, Virgin and Nintendo have done a really good job with this.  Although  Virgin do a good job with most things!

 

Straight away, the colour leaps out at you.  The levels possess a lot of detail for the NES (as I would hope for with a 1995 title) and are well thought out (as a port from the Mega Drive version).  Aladdin and the other sprites are large and well animated although our protagonist is less detailed than his foe, which makes sense seeing as they add the humour to this game.  The sound is passable for a NES game, the music isn’t intrusive and the sound effects do the job.  So how does it play?  It’s a mixed bag made digestible by the visual treats it serves up later on.

 

 

Aladdin bounds about like Tigger as in all the other incarnations, bouncing off the craniums of sweaty pirates (or bandits or whatever the hell they are) grabbing jewels – but no apples.  Oh no, for some reason you have to go a long loooong way to get any apples in this game. One of the joys of the MD version is pelting bad guys with apples.  I rinsed my first ten in level one and didnt see any until midway through level two!  The game also suffers from terrible blurring whenever there is more than one bad guy on the screen, which is often!

 

 

The collision detection is also poor on occasion.  For instance, if you desperately need to grab on to the ledge (which you do a lot in the game) if you’re not exactly on it you will miss it, it’s remorseless.  Also, Aladdin’s pithy jump plus potential blurring make it difficult to bounce off aforementioned craniums even when you’ve thought you’ve nailed it. Enemies respawn as soon as you go back a screen = blurring and collision detection problems.  All of this however is made bearable by the incredibly generous life gauge and continues.

 

This is one for the kids but definitely worth a look.

 

 

If you like this…

 

Castlevania (NES Review)