The Gamer's Quarter

[kirkjerk]

Seeking a bit of masochisic pleasure, I played through Toy Story for the SNES.

What I will say about the game is this: it seems to be written by people who don't like children very much.

It comes from a dark place in gaming, where Donkey Kong Country's shadow loom large, in the form of pre-rendered computer graphics. The thing is, DKC was a pretty decent game, with fun bosses, cool allies, and a nifty two player co-op mode.

Toy Story has none of these things.

I think why it sicks in my craw so much is something I read... possibly in the instruction manual, back in the day, but comments from the team lead or something about how special this game is in terms of the cosmic link between the computer generated onscreen Woody and the computer generated SNES Woody, how in a cosmic sense they were one and the same. Right. 20 frames of cheap prerender is not quite up to bridging that gap.

The gameplay is so flawed. And so difficult. I say I played through it, but the only way I bothered was because of an ingame cheat for infinite health and live. It's just stunning difficult, big clunky, awkward characters, difficulty in telling what's dangerous and what's background, and impossibly sensitive collision detection. Except of course for the collision detection of your weapon, flinging out your pullstring like a whip. That ONLY register exact hits, probably right where the loop is. (It also, weirdly, leaves enemies temporarily bound up in rope. How a whip manages to leave rope behind is never quite explained.)

The plaformer levels tend to be all about back tracking... oh, you can't jump over THIS block, it's a little too high, so go back and see where you CAN climb and gain altitude and then blindly jump, hopefully landing on the other side of whatever the obstacle was.

The production values are just so absent. Death is usually an uncermonious black out, no animation of any sort. Often you're left wondering and waiting if you made it, or have to try again. The board clear screen is equally unispiring, Woody stomping and waving his arms like a silent lowbudget kermit.

There's some variety in there, like racing/scrolling levels, and a Wolfenstein 3D like puzzle level that's decent once you realize where to bring those cute squeaky alien dolls, but even then it's lacking. The first "RC car" level is especially stupid... a poor man's Micro Machines clone, with an awkward physics model tacked onto a "you can only move the 8 compass directions" steering paradigm, a constant need for batteries (retrieved by hitting Buzz Lightyear, who then tumbles slowly into the sky (sometimes too slowly, especially for the very last hit, where you've raced through the whole level (starting from the begining each time you run out of battery power) and now it's only the slowness of the final sky tumble that's making you restart it YET AGAIN...

The nice touches, like the way the motor noises of the Mega Man like platforms in the Claw Machine audibly gear down when you land on them, and the cuteness of walking through the pizza parlor hiding in a soda cup with just your feet sticking out are more than overbalanced by the sheer crapness of the game. Especially this one irritating move you have to do on two different levels, hit an object normally to get it moving, then strike that with this weird "up and whip" action to actually turn it into a weapon. The second time you have to do that, knocking the relentless claw back from your buddy five different times, is especially irritating given the touchiness of the whip collision detection.

And I wonder how many people see the "evil" Sid kid as the hero of the movie and the game. His hybrid toys (an erector set crab with a baby doll head, a action figure torso and head with skateboard lower half, scooting along, a toy fishing pole walking on glam barbie doll legs, show so much more creativity and imagination than anything that insipd Andy does...

So when you win, you get this message screen ( following a few more of the paragraphs-of-text with static graphic shot:
WELL DONE

YOU HAVE
COMPLETED

TOY STORY

HOPE YOU
ENJOYED IT

THANKS FOR
PLAYING

And... that's it.
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=/ \(<D)_/
==/\/ >_ kirkjerk.com

[Cycle]

I always end up trying to play this game every few months and always stop after about 183 seconds.
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[captaincabinets]

I have the version for the gb and it's almost the same. It contains only the platforming and sidescrolling parts, the soundtrack is appallingly, elevator muzak-ingly bland and it doesn't have the megaman noises as far as I remember. Also, being monochrome saps any vibrancy from the "yay toys" idea, but at least that's not the developer's fault.

Having said that, it must have been a fair bit easier: I remember finishing it at least ten times or so during my childhood. I always came back to it because I would get sad about never, ever being able to defeat the alien in super mario land.

Also, maybe I am giving the developer (Black Pearl?) a little too much credit, but it could be that the awkward, rigid controls are their idea of what it would be like to control a real toy. What with the less joints and all.
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Why am I being boiled into a bright red lobster by this little kid?

[kirkjerk]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

You know what this reminds me of, games made with The Games Factory. I'd say Klik & Play but that doesn't allow you to create games with scrolling. This game looks like the devs made it in TGF. You can make some pretty rad stuff in TGF but not this, this is dreck and I vaguely remember lots of 16-bit platformers made around the same time being similar in the build quality but that might be the devils in my head playing tricks on me again.
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[captaincabinets]

[helicopterp]

[Cycle]

The above post is correct.
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[helicopterp]

The post above yours (i.e. mine) or kirkjerk's post above me that starts the thread?
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Harveyjames]

Andy is the model consumer. He even listens to Disney tapes in his Mom's car!

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Andy probably gets beaten up at school by the kids who are into Warner Brother's cartoons.
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[Ethoscapade]

traveler's tales.. mid-nineties...

SONIC 3D BLAST

[Cycle]

mickey mania was a fun game
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[kirkjerk]

It has been a while since I've seen it, but I was left with the impression that Sid created the hybrids.

Checking that font of all Netly wisdom wikipedia...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story :
Left alone in Sid's room, Woody and Buzz come upon a group of mis-matched toys, the results of Sid's many "experiments".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters :
According to an interview, Sid is named after a former employee at Pixar who would take toys apart and sometimes rebuild them in different, albeit disturbingly odd, ways.

There's a reference to his "mad doctor" playing... I guess I'd have to see that scene and judge if Sid is just taking apart or putting back together. The toys pulling themselves together has a certain grace to it, but if that's not what happened I want to give Sid props for imaginative and constructive play.
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==/\/ >_ kirkjerk.com

[FortNinety]

Hmmm.... I remember Next Generation kinda raving about this game, or at least giving it the thumbs up, simply due to the "nice" graphics and variety in gameplay. Not that I ever played it...

[kirkjerk]