![]() ![]() Those movies will probably have a lavish assortment of special features on their Blu-Rays, but the same can't be said for the extras on these games, which feel as lacklustre as an early 00s family movie DVD. As a viewing experience, it doesn't really add much to watch an anonymous stranger play through the game on a recorded video - not these days anyway, when you have streaming platforms available. The play-through option just feels a little strange - fast-forwarding through the action until you find a point where you want to jump in yourself is a long-winded way around for chapter selection. Speaking personally, the ability to save at any time was far more critical - though multiple save slots really should have been added so that players can explore whether they're going to actually make it through the level without risking an overwrite. Rewind could be better advertised as an option, but it's welcome to quickly fix a sloppy jump or to edge back, frame by frame, until the hyena stops dropping directly onto your head. ![]() Like repackaged Sega games in the last few years, the modern nods to accessibility are the Disney Classic Games collection's saving grace. If it wasn't for the ability to save and rewind in this edition I very likely wouldn't have finished it, and broken a controller to boot. Aladdin doesn't get off completely unscathed either - while its difficulty spikes are less persistent, the Rug Ride through the lava is just preposterously difficult, speeding up past the point of sanity. ![]() It's a game that doesn't know how to space itself correctly to keep the experience enjoyable, even while still being challenging. The dreaded hyena is just copy-pasted multiple times into areas far too small for the player to manage, leading to some Capra Demon levels of endless raging restarts. Aladdin suffers less, but The Lion King is seemingly stuffed with horribly unfair ways to kill Simba, where a couple of light touches between pixels can carve a huge chunk of health off, if not kill the king-in-waiting outright. It's a pretty damning example of how difficulty was sometimes managed in games of the early 90s. In these games enemies can be seemingly metres apart from the player character and still land a blow, while some platforms seem to just meld into the backdrop just when the player needs to land. In attempting to recreate painterly Disney backdrops, the developers failed to make well-defined platform edges and appropriate hit-boxes - something that in-house studios at Nintendo and Sega tended to focus on. Before these games came to market players had already been spoiled with well-constructed side-scrolling platformers, sacrificing some visual complexity for solid interactivity with platforms and with enemies. Unfortunately that can't make up for the glaring gameplay faults, even compared to contemporary releases. If you are in the mindset of someone able to appreciate artistic merits on old technology - and surely any purchaser of this bundle would be - there's a lot to love in the colour palettes and the animation attention to detail. Sure, it's blurry and ultimately limited by the capability of the original machines, but a lot of talent and processing power has gone into making sure the characters move how players would expect, having watched the movie and demanded the game version for Christmas. In both cases though, players can get an insight into how Disney animators attempted to replicate the same animation style from the movies directly into the games - and it still shows today. One of the few notable additional features in this bundle is the inclusion of a couple of featurettes - Aladdin's is far a more recent catch up with the development team, while The Lion King's documentary is a hideous reminder of Saved By The Bell era fashion choices. If you were close to these games as a kids, prepare to have your heart-strings tugged almost immediately the games are presented in pristine and unchanged condition, meaning that those familar, chirpy, low-fidelity versions of some of the greatest tunes in Disney feature animation history still resonate. ![]()
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