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YMMV / Aladdin (Virgin Games)

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  • Anti-Climax Boss: Jafar, while undoubtedly hard, is a rather lackluster final boss in an otherwise stellar game, especially in comparison to the SNES Aladdin game. The first phase basically has him trying to hurt you through Collision Damage, and his snake form has a very predictable attack pattern and is significantly scaled down from its massive size in the movie. Did we mention you defeat him by merely chucking apples at him nonstop?
  • Awesome Art: The game notably features hand-animated sprites done by Disney's own animators, including a few who had worked on the movie, resulting in some of the best sprite animation ever done for a Sega Genesis game. Notably, at least one Rare employee said that, when making the original Donkey Kong Country, Nintendo urged them to give it "better graphics than Aladdin".
  • Awesome Music: Most of the music originates from the movie. The ones that don't are just as amazing to listen to though. Arab Rock's track provide an intensity that has it feel like speed metal.
  • Broken Base: There's no real consensus on whether the Capcom adaptation or the Virgin Games adaptation is the superior game, though either camp tends to acknowledge that the other is still a good game in its own right.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • The knife-throwing stout guards. In addition to being one of the most common enemies, they're one of the few enemies with ranged attacks, and very accurate ones at that. Worse yet, their attacks can stop your thrown apples mid-flight, making it annoying to take them out from a distance. The knives can be deflected, but the timing can be tricky. Not helped by the fact that they often hang out in places that make it very difficult to attack them or avoid their knives. Doubly so in the last two levels, where several of them are stationed along the magic carpet routes, essentially giving them cheap shots against you unless you know they're there.
    • Knife jugglers are similar to stout guards, but they attack faster, making it harder to hit them with apples or deflect their attacks, and they can also throw their knives in an arc if you're above them. Worse yet, they appear very early in the game, but thankfully stop appearing after the third level.
    • Scimitar guards may not have ranged capabilites, but they more than make up for it with their swordplay. They're even more common than the stout guards, and are also one of the few enemies in the game that can block Aladdin's sword. You're almost guaranteed to take a hit or two fighting them up close from their rapid attacks, and they tend to hang out in areas where you might not always have room to throw apples at them, meaning you'll more than likely have to go toe-to-toe with them. Fortunately, they do have a glaring weakness — if you jump out of their attack range, they'll immediately stop attacking to taunt you, giving you a window to land a free attack.
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • The literal bats in "Sultan's Dungeon", "Cave of Wonders" and "The Escape", mostly because their annoyingly unpredictable movement makes them difficult to defeat.
    • The fish that leap out of water in "Cave of Wonders" and "Sultan's Palace" are equally annoying, not only because they can spit rocks at you and are hard to hit, but also because they have a nasty tendency to leap out of the water while you're jumping from platform to platform. Colliding with one will slow down your momentum and likely cause you to fall in the water and die.
    • Iago becomes this in the last two levels outside of his boss appearance, due to the fact that the carpet's flight routes in those levels will often carry you right into his path without warning, resulting in nigh-unavoidable damage unless you react quickly. And he often appears alongside the above mentioned stout guards in those carpet routes. Worse yet, he's also capable of respawning unlike the game's other enemies, so even if you do get rid of him, you'll have to put up with him again if you fall off the carpet or have to backtrack for some reasonnote .
  • Nightmare Fuel:
  • No Problem with Licensed Games: It's a very fun, polished platformer with beautiful hand-drawn sprites, great music, and a surprising degree of challenge that's tough, but mostly fair.
  • Surprise Difficulty: While it's a great game that looks straight out of the movie, it's also a very hard one, which 90s children have both fond and traumatizing memories. And make it a double surprise for players unfamiliar with platformer convention.
  • That One Level:
    • "The Escape", the level in which the cave collapses and Aladdin attempts to escape on foot, will absolutely destroy new players and put veterans under pressure. It's a long, brutal level where you have to outrun several giant boulders (the first One-Hit Kill hazards in the game besides pits), with massive pits of lava in between. The lava pits are much larger and easier to fall into than the water pools of the previous stage ("The Cave of Wonders"), the roofs of the caves are so low that jumping over the lava pits becomes a matter of perfect timing, and the color of some of the platforms is so similar to the background that you can mess up some jumps by not realizing that there was a platform that you could jump on. Then there's the last boulder, which can sometimes end up falling on top of you during the level-clear animation.note  To top it off, the Genesis version of game won't skip this stage for you like it will for the following stage, "Rug Ride", if you mess up enough times. The rest of the game is a breeze once you clear this level.
    • "Rug Ride" itself qualifies in the DOS version. In both versions, you're riding the carpet through a narrow tunnel, while trying to dodge One-Hit Kill boulders. The level slowly becomes faster and faster and faster until it's so fast that you need lightning-fast reflexes in order to not die. Worse, there are no checkpoints, so dying will send you back to the beginning of the level. What makes the DOS version worse than the Genesis version is that the Genesis version will automatically skip the level after you fail enough times, while the DOS version has no such Mercy Mode. Good luck.
    • "Inside the Lamp", AKA the Genie level, isn't tough at all at first - there are no enemies and no ways to take damage - but the real challenge comes from the fact that the whole level is a bunch of Floating Platforms above a massive Bottomless Pit. Towards the end of the level, finding solid footing becomes increasingly difficult, and you have to perform a fair amount of pixel-perfect jumps. The most maddening moment of this Platform Hell is just before the end of the level: there is a very tiny genie hand platform, a few pixels wide, that you have to jump on. Missing it means instant death and redoing several other difficult jumps. The hand also floats just below the camera, and it can't be seen unless you crouch.

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