Aladdin

"Aladdin" is 1993 platformer based on a Disney's animated movie released year earlier. The game's premiere coincided with VHS release. It was made for Sega Mega Drive but was later released for other platforms, e.g., PC. It is also a game that I played heavily in 1995 but never finished. Then I moved on to other titles. But now it's time for reckoning. Armed with a R36S clone, I took another swing at the game.

I read that Disney wanted a high quality of experience. There were some back and forth with production, but it's not that interesting. You can find all the details on Wikipedia. What's important is that the game was simply beautiful, faithfully following the art style of the movie, and all done as pixel art which aged like fine wine and is impressive even 32 years later, though 3.5-inch screen could have helped a little.

The reason I didn't finish "Aladdin" three decades ago was because the difficulty goes up pretty steeply and when you're 12 it can pose some challenges. There are no saves (duh!) and neither codes that would allow to start from a selected stage. So you play x levels to die on a new section and then you have to repeat the whole game. I must have gotten tired with replaying the beginning over and over again.

That is not a problem, though, when you have an option of making saves at any point. The challenging sections are still challenging because you have get through them, but they're no longer frustrating. Win-win. A couple of times I was asking aloud, "How was I suppose to finish this as a kid?" Especially boss fights, which revolve around the right timing of actions, would be discouraging pretty soon. I know people finished "Aladdin" back then, but c'mon. Luckily, not an issue anymore, as I said.

(As a side note: all this was addressed in Nintendo Switch re-release where players, from what I read, have insta saves, a rewind option, and can select level from menu. So, no frustration.)

Despite all these hardships, I could see that I got to level 7 out of 10, which is not a bad outcome. In "Flashback," for instance, I got stuck quite early on. The biggest challenge of all was the final boss and I don't think I would manage it if I didn't remap the back button to allow me throwing apples. Jumping and throwing an apple at the peak was a bit too much for ABXY buttons setting. But it's done now.

To summarise, when using anti-frustration features, be it re-release ones or built into an emulator, the games can give a lot of fun. And visually it didn't lose its original charm. Pixel art at its best, back when pixel art was the only option (well, that's probably not true because there was already various 3D attempts).

I might return to the thread because I saw that the SNES version is different, although it seems to be sharing the assets.