It's Aladdin on the NES... again. Back in 1992 the Mega Drive title was a phenomenal success as it was one of the first examples of pairing smooth Disney-like animations with a video game. Though DOS and Amiga ports were understandable, for some crazy reason it was ported to the NES... badly, and released only in Europe. In between then and now, two other NES ports have popped up; the hideous "Aladdin 2" which I've talked about briefly in the past, and "Super Aladdin", which has been around a while apparently but only got my attention recently.
I'll probably be going into more detail for tORP later but since I have no idea when that will be, I might as well mention it now. Super Aladdin was developed by the same group of people who brought us the NES port of Boogerman... and various other pieces of garbage, however, as the official NES port of Aladdin was so bad, this time the group "Super Game" seem to have actually produced a superior product. Sure there's downsides, such as the jumping, but there's been worse. Check it out
Of course there are some fundamental problems with porting this game to the NES - the MegaDrive can put up four times the amount of colours on screen at once and doesn't suffer from the same amount of flickering that Nintendo's system does, but aside from the very orange setting the result isn't too bad. It was never going to be an easy task to get this game on a weak platform like the NES, and though it might not look half as good as the 16-bit masterpiece, the official was...
...this mess. The only upside for Virgin's attempt is the slightly better controls, otherwise it's a very gimped Aladdin game that nobody in the right mind should have bought. Of course, the pirate game "Aladdin 2" is even more atrocious, but if you know you can get a better deal from the black market, you know there's a problem somewhere along the line.
In theory I'll be dissecting all three attempts before Christmas, but I can't imagine there'll be much else going on in the world of tORP unless something amazing rolls along.
Yay, finally a pirate-related update.
ReplyDeleteYa, they're the best, if not only reason I come here.
ReplyDeleteHey, you might want to check out Alladdin 4 (also sometimes billed as Alladdin 3). It's an original game, it starts in Agrabah Market, but the level layout is different. And it's REALLY good.
ReplyDeleteI never got past the second level, because grabbing onto platforms is kinda random and there's a part where I can't seem to grab onto them to go further up. But in every other aspect it's worthy of an official release.