Aladdin

Title: Aladdin
Platform Played On: Sega Genesis 
Release Date: November 11, 1993
Date Played: 1995
Time Played: 10 hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 5/5



Opinion:
Back in the 16bit era it was rare to own more than four or five games. So you owned some, your friends owned some. You would swap them for a few weeks at a time and that was the way to play a lot of games. This also meant that the five games you got to own for the entire generation of consoles had to be cherry picked, they had to be the best of the best. For me Aladdin was one of my five.

One of my most distinct memories with Aladdin was when my father and his friend were walking by on the way to the balcony to grab a smoke and they stopped by the 10 year old me, looked at the screen, and said... look at those graphics, pretty soon its going to look like real life. They were right to be amazed, for its time Aladdin looked pretty spectacular, the animations were fluid and since the only point of reference is the Disney movie everything looked hand drawn and basically one for one with the movie. In fact you could argue that the graphics were already life-like, since they looked exactly what you would expect them to look like.

The gameplay in Aladdin consisted of mostly action platforming. You can tell that the developer put a lot more work into the game than they necessarily needed to, the animations alone probably had more than double the amount of frames than most other games at the time, and just extra work of including little funny things like a male/female and genie bathroom out in the desert and little genie cameos throughout the game made it a really likable experience. Every level looked very unique with what seems to be entirely new assets, the soundtrack consisted of all of the favorite tunes from the film. Aladdin on the Genesis (or as I knew it Mega Drive) was great!

Kiddish or not (doesnt matter anyways... I was a kid at the time), Aladdin was amazing. To me it was like being part of one of my favorite Disney movies of all time. I kept playing it over and over again. I think we can look back and say that it was a really good Genesis game, and everyone that got to play it at the time is likely to have a good memory of it. Of course there is no reason to play it now, other than for nostalgic call backs to the childhood years...