Friday, March 13, 2015
Mickey Mousecapade
The Short
Pros
- Mickey Mouse adventure with lots of stage variety
- Minnie follows you around and can be useful
- Reasonably solid platforming
- Started Capcoms relationship with Disney, which brought us awesome games like Duck Tales, Talesspin, The Little Mermaid, and others
Cons
- Extremely short
- Nothing particularly compelling about the platforming or combat
- Having Minnie follow you around (and be required to leave screens) can be obnoxious
- In addition, if Minnie falls down a hole, you lose
- Stupid forest level has no rhyme or reason to it
- Music is obnoxious
- Despite having two characters, this game does NOT have two player co-op
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| Note the "Hudson Soft" under the copyrights. |
The Long
Mickey Mousecapade (or just Mickey Mouse according to the title screen) was the first Disney game published by Capcom for the NES. I say "published" instead of "developed" because this game wasnt actually made by Capcom; it was made by Hudson Soft (makers of Bomberman), which probably explains why Mickey Mousecapade isnt on par with other Capcom NES offerings. That being said, Mickey Mousecapade is a decent enough platformer, even if it is wrought with frustration, weak level design, and is offensively short.
The "story" in Mickey Mousecapade is...well, its a thing that it doesnt tell you anything about. From what I understand based on the ending, Im trying to rescue Alice (from Alice in Wonderland) from Malificent, the evil witch from Sleeping Beauty. How she go in on this I have no idea and the game makes no effort to say how these words crossed. I guess you could consider this a precursor to Kingdom Hearts, except without all the angst.
Anyway, Mickey and Minnie run off to save her (with Mickey yelling for Minnie at the start of each stage; she should hit him) and on their way are attacked by EVERYTHING. Snakes, cats, furniture, brooms; everything wants these guys dead. Its basically a "grab everything that looks remotely like an enemy or is from a Disney franchise and shove it in here" affair, which makes the enemies completely inconsistent.
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| Its nice of that door to tell you what you need. |
Anyway, Mickey and Minnie run off to save her (with Mickey yelling for Minnie at the start of each stage; she should hit him) and on their way are attacked by EVERYTHING. Snakes, cats, furniture, brooms; everything wants these guys dead. Its basically a "grab everything that looks remotely like an enemy or is from a Disney franchise and shove it in here" affair, which makes the enemies completely inconsistent.
The other thing thats inconsistent are the goals. Take the first stage, for instance, in the screenshot above. That door (which is the end of the stage) needs a key. So you go up a few screens and...BEHOLD AND LO! Theres a key. So you grab it and come back and...doors still locked. Guess what? You needed another key, the one hiding behind the boss. Well thats awesome; why have two keys? And the doors the first key unlocks arent even really shown to be locked, at least they arent saying "KEY" really obviously. Quality level design.
Some levels are just a flash in the pan. Take the second level, the "Ocean." When I first played it, it was something like 5-6 jumps dodging bubbles. Then I fought a crocodile boss and died. At the time I was like "this has to be a mid-level boss or something; this level cant be that short." Guess what? It was that short; that was the end boss. The whole level was maybe two minutes long. Quality, there.
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| Precise jumps + Minnie = Suckfest. |
Perhaps the most annoying thing is Minnie is tagging along the whole time. Sure, she can be useful. She can shoot, but is also invincible, so with some quick cheesing you can make some of the bosses a lot easier by putting her on the ledge with them while Mickey hides below. But she almost isnt worth the effort when it comes to levels that require jumping (like the final Castle level). The problem is that her AI is downright moronic, and she has issues keeping up. If she falls down during one of these jumps, you have to go down and get her and start all over. When all the enemies are dead and all you want to do is go to the next room, the tedium of the whole thing is just nauseating.
And dont get me started on the forest level. Trees to enter, trees to not enter, a circular stage that requires you in some points to completely cycle around before going in a tree-door, different seasonal screens, and so on. Its a maze with no point; itll probably take you the longest just because youll have no idea where to go without strict trial and error. And one of the doors required to leave is invisible, and you have to shoot it a number of times for it to show up. The requirements to progress are so precise it could take you ages! I guess thats where the "length = value" idea of Mickey Mousecapade comes in, because they certainly ignored it for the rest of the game.
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| Drop Minnie down a hole. |
I should probably also put this in at some point, because I was confused about it like everybody else: THERE IS NO CO-OP IN THIS GAME. Yes, you can plug a second controller in and shoot and sort of move, but really all you can do (aside from shoot and fight with player one for control) is determine how far back Minnie stands from Mickey. There is no actual two-player functionality in this game, which sucks because you always have Minnie tagging along anyway so they should have put it in.
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| Shooting knives from his eyes. |
The music in this game is pretty bad. Unlike actual Capcom games, which have kickass music, this one is just...bland. The opening levels ("Fun House") song loops way too soon, and drove me absolutely crazy after just a few short minutes. Luckily the games six levels are super short (except the forest) so you dont have to endure the assault on your eardrums for long, but would it have killed them to put some music that wasnt insulting to my brain?
Ive been pretty mean to Mickey Mousecapade, but in truth I dont hate it. Well, I hate the forest level, but as it stands the game isnt broken at least. For what its worth, its a decent platformer which at least has some variety. Some stages are platformers, some require keys, some are impossible (FOREST)...etc. But unless you have some nostalgia for it, your patience isnt going to last very long. Its decent enough, but just about any Disney game on NES made by Capcom is going to trump it by a long shot.
And no co-op really is just a kick in the pants. Thats one of the reasons why I bought it! Oh well.
Two out of five stars.
Plus you can beat the whole game in seven and a half minutes.
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