Growing up as a kid, we watched a lot of Disney movies back then that came in those white, squishy Disney VHS cases. For me, my all-time favorite Disney movie was Aladdin. The action scenes, the characters, the voice actors; everything came into this perfect combination of greatness, and for it, became one of the finest Disney movie’s ever created.
Other than movies, we also had a Sega Genesis. One of the games that I owned (and still do) was Aladdin. Unfortunately, my old Genesis is missing a couple of cables so I wasn’t able to play that version of the game, but I did get my hands on the SNES version.
Aladdin looks like your basic side-scroller, and for the most part, it pretty much is. You start out with a couple of hearts, which act as life bars, and if you walk into an enemy, you get hurt and lose one heart. As the game progresses, you attain more hearts, which helps a lot as many enemies will be coming after you in the later parts of the game.
Speaking of enemies, the enemies were designed with a lot of care in mind and stick true to what you might find in that section of the game. For example, you start out in Agrabah, a city, so many of the city guards are after you. In another part of the game, you’re in a cave, so there are plenty of bats and scorpions around. To defend himself, Aladdin is equipped with 10 apples which are used to stun enemies for a short duration. The apples are really useless though, and don’t really begin to help until the last sections of the game. Aladdin’s primary form of defense is to simply jump on your enemies. From the city guards to birds made out of sand, nearly every enemy in the game can be jumped on. It’s a bit of a disappointment, seeing as how Aladdin never jumped on anything to kill it in the movie (I would of rather used his sword), but the game is a platformer after all, so I really can’t complain too much about it.
The gameplay in Aladdin is simplistic (it was made for the kiddies after all). Your main objective is to hop and bop your way to the end of the level, going from the left side of the screen to the right. There are a few items you can get in the levels, which includes some food items that replenish your health, a couple of colored diamonds which, if you collect all 70 red diamonds, unlocks a different credits screen, a flying golden scarab that you can catch which unlocks a bonus game, and paper bags, but I dunno what the hell those do. You get two credits when you start the game and two lives to play off of. The number of hearts you have depends on which level you’re on. When you run out of lives, you can use one of your credits, which sends you back to the beginning of the level you’re on (there are sometimes one or two checkpoints in a level), but you get another two lives. Once you’re out of credits, the game is over. You can enter in a password given to you at the end of each section (each section consists of two to three levels, divided by a cutscene), but that brings you all the way back to the beginning of the section and you have to replay any levels that you did before you ran out of credits. It’s a decent system, with an easy, 4-slotted picture password system (the password selections are characters from Aladdin instead of numbers or letters), but it can really become a pain the balls during boss fights or extremely hard acrobatic situations, as it sends you all the way back to the beginning of the section, granted you can remember the password.
However, in spite of a few of the game’s core mechanics, the level design in Aladdin is simply brilliant. There are plenty of things to hop off of, swing from, jump on, fly over, etc. A lot of care was put into the level design, and it stays true to the movie, locales, and enemy placements. For example, you can swing from a horizontal pole, jump onto an enemy’s head for even more air time, grab onto another pole, and then kick some guard in the face. Simple scenario’s like this can be found all over the levels, and executing this “environmental combination” is extremely rewarding and extremely satisfying. Unfortunately, these fun experiments are usually hard to pull off correctly, and some of the end-game level design relies on you pulling off one of these tricks. It’s not too bad of an inconvenience if you have plenty of lives and credits left, but when you’re down on everything, those parts of the game can become nerve-wracking and frustrating.
To make the game flow more fluidly, there are levels of the game in which you don’t just exclusively go from left to right, but instead fly on a magic carpet, or fight a boss character. There are only three bosses in the game, which is a bit of a bummer, but the magic carpet scenes make up for that and are as challenging as the boss fights themselves.
To compliment Aladdin’s excellent level design is a beautifully orchestrated soundtrack. As with the levels and enemies, the music fits perfectly with the game, and is pretty damn good as its for an SNES game. The action, the boss fights, the carpet scenes; none of it would have mattered much if it wasn’t for the properly selected music, and the soundtrack delivers. It’s compelling and it just makes the whole Disney experience come alive.
There’s not much else I can say about Aladdin. While its difficulty may have been too much for the kids, it’s perfectly suited for an adult or teenage gamer, granted you don’t mind playing an Aladdin game. From its excellent level design, challenging foes, and outstanding musical score, Aladdin is a game which will live on forever in the great selection of the best games the SNES had to offer.
I give Aladdin (SNES):
5 out of 5 stars
