Here's a great example of a video game that's aimed squarely at the Japanese audience, and the Americans are simply invited to show up too. There's a house sitting on the cloud inhabited by an old man, and Mickey is told of an evil Emperor Pete who rules over this kingdom. This short setup establishes an air of fantasy that intrudes into the benign afternoon in the park, as Mickey suddenly falls, bounces off a branch, and lands on a cloud - high in the sky. Pluto runs off, and Mickey chases him until he abruptly falls off a cliff. Magical Quest begins on a domestic scene of Mickey, Donald and Goofy playing catch with Pluto. Faced with an opportunity to create a Mickey Mouse game for the new Super Nintendo, Capcom did not reinvent the wheel they just made it spin smoother. Sonic the Hedgehog provided multiple paths through levels, rewarding players who replayed levels until they could clear them in seconds. There were games that went in an even twitchier direction, like Mega Man, and ones that relied on memorization and strategy, like Ghouls N Ghosts. They've never really gone away, to be sure, but the initial rush of Super Mario Brothers imitators gradually began to produce such a vast glut of similar product that the mutations set in early. Awash in a sea of the same, it rises above the rest like an island.īy the early 90s, the entire game industry was deep, deep into platform games. The Magical Quest isn't some genre bending masterpiece - it's a really good platform game. But sometimes you get to perfect by simply doing the same thing others have done better, sharper, nicer. Sometimes you reach for perfect by disregarding convention, swinging for the fences, and beating your own path. The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse - October 1992 I don't know if Nintendo or Disney requested a Mickey game of their own to compete against the successful Castle of Illusion, or if Capcom came up with this one all on their own, but this week we're taking a huge bite out of 16 bit Super Nintendo trilogy: The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse. Which brings us to our subject for today, a series of games that will span nearly the whole history of the Super Nintendo. It's a fairly impressive run for Sega, and the quality drop in Disney games once Disney abandoned Sega and Capcom would be noticeable. Next, North America got its own unique Donald game, QuackShot, and finally Mickey and Donald were brought together in World of Illusion, a graphical powerhouse for the Genesis that few games would match. Europe's preference for Donald Duck resulted in two games for Sega's 8-bit console, the Master System, released in that market: The Lucky Dime Caper and Deep Duck Trouble - these games are even better and cuter than Castle of Illusion. The Disney / Sega games could be their own series of blog posts, and they're unfairly obscure today. More importantly, it's light years ahead of Mickey Mousecapade on the NES. The levels are fairly uninteresting - it's wave after wave of the same enemies, over and over - but they do start to improve at about the halfway point. Illusion is a fun, fairly predictable bounce-and-stomp. As everyone knows, that would prove to be Sonic the Hedgehog just a few months later, but I'd argue that Castle of Illusion is a better game. Released in the United States as Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusion in November 1990, the resulting game is a kid-friendly standout on a system that was still looking for its mainstream hit.
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