Disney’s Aladdin Review

I was a big fan of Aladdin when I was young. The movie was pretty kick-butt, not like most of the Disney movies today. The movie had such a blockbuster success that it spawned a couple of video games. Back in 1993, Disney decided to release two Aladdin games. One was for the Sega Genesis and the other was for the Super Nintendo. I was one of the rare kids that had a Genesis instead of a SNES. One of the games I had for the Genesis was Aladdin. Let me tell you this. Aladdin (at least when I was a kid) was hard. It was the first game I was forced to cheat on (the good old A+A+B+B while Pause trick).

Years passed until I actually played the SNES version, and when I played it, I was rather astonished. The SNES game had a save feature (if there was a save feature on the Genesis version, then maybe I wouldn’t have resulted to cheating). I actually did like the SNES version better than the Genesis version, but enough wasting your time with my comparison between the two games, on to the review. Capcom, the developer and publisher of the game, has now decided to port the SNES version to the GBA (I guess no one could beat the Genesis version either). How does the game fare even though it’s over a decade old?

The game plays nearly exactly how it played on the SNES ten years ago. You get apples to hurt your enemy from afar. The story still remains the same. It is pretty much like this: save the princess as well as the city of Agrabah by defeating the evil wizard named Jafar and his minions. Sure the game lacked originality back in the day (Aladdin played like a ton of other platformers on the SNES), but it was still fun.

The level design remains the same. The game wasn’t as difficult as I remembered it, but I think I just improved as a gamer. The difficulty is good for a newcomer to platformers, as well as a veteran of the genre.

As for the graphics, pretty much the same thing as the SNES. It remains true to the series, which is a good thing. I didn’t see any improvement of graphics during the port, but I am not really complaining. The sound really isn’t that bad. Nice tracks, very similar of what you hear in the television series. Nothing really to mention about either.

The lack of length shows. I beat this game in a couple of hours. You might go crazy and play it once more, but I doubt it. A newcomer to the genre (or a newcomer to video games itself) might take a lot longer, but it still won’t take that long to beat.

What can I say? The game was fun back when it was first released. I can say that this game will be fun to anyone who hasn’t played the original. However, anyone who does have or beat the original game, I suggest you pass and play something else.

You have to take this into consideration; why pay $30 to get it on the GBA when you could get it for $5 on the SNES? If your GBA is collecting dust, and you played practically every other fun platformer for it, then I suggest you get this game. It’s great for little kids, so I suggest parents buy this game. It’ll keep them quiet in the car. Sorry Capcom, you aren’t going to get a dollar off me.