Subtitle: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse
Developed by Traveller's Tales / Disney Software
Published by Sony Imagesoft
Sega Mega Drive, SNES, Mega CD, 1994
A platform game that recreates several of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse shorts, adapting scenery and characters directly from the originals. The levels are arranged chronologically:
A nice touch is that although you play 'modern day'
Mickey, you can meet up with Mickey 'as he was then' in each of the cartoons, sometimes hidden in secret areas.
Being a Traveller's Tales game, there are several technically impressive sequences, often involving pseudo-3D effects (such as the eye-popping out-of-the-screen Moose Chase sequence). One of the coolest effects is at the very start of Steamboat Willie, where the picture skips and we see the edges of the film frame. Simple but effective.
The game sports absolutely top-notch presentation throughout, but is marred slightly by an insane difficulty level (although at least continues are plentiful). It is also rather linear, with some levels being a little bit too minimalist (by which I mean occasionally so much memory has gone on flashy animations that the level structure is oversimplified). That said, this is one of the elite technical achievements on the machine (by which I refer to the Sega Mega Drive version unders scrutiny here) and is worth checking out for this reason alone.
The heightened fidelity to the source material makes Mickey seem rather an unlikely hero, by the way:- he has to be the only platform game protagonist straight-laced enough to say "Sorry!" to bosses when he hits them.