Adventures in the Magic Kingdom (NES)
In some ways, quite a lot of video games can feel like theme parks. To include more variety, many game worlds abandon cohesion for the sake of adding in settings that usually wouldn’t go together, leading to some odd situations where a desert might be adjacent to a snow world which is itself adjacent to a fiery lava land. Turning a real world theme park into a video game environment seems like a great concept for a game, especially since the realities of cost and construction can be entirely ignored. However, despite having the world’s most famous and imaginative theme parks to inspire them, Disney and Capcom’s Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is a waste of a potentially wondrous idea.
Things start off a little strangely, with the actual Mickey Mouse prepared to lead a parade through Disneyland, but the front gate is locked by a gold key which Goofy has lost in Cinderella’s Castle. However, that castle is itself locked as well, but the six silver keys needed to open it are scattered across the park’s attractions. As a young boy with a cowboy hat, the Disney mascots task you with going into the locked park, getting the six silver keys, and letting Mickey in to perform a parade that you will never get to see. A strange complication to this whole business is that even when you complete the tasks required to get the keys, you’ll often meet a character who found the key first, this sometimes being Mickey or Goofy. It’s certainly not a game that tried hard to make its plot make sense, but it is cute to see the Disney characters and their spritework is fairly well done save when Mickey is presenting a park attraction’s rules of play.
Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is less a full game and more a compilation of five minigames based on famous Disney Parks rides. Each one has a different style of play that tries to best match the concept of the ride, some straying further away from the dark rides and roller coasters of reality to give something more similar to a video game experience, but the imagination of the developers certainly pales in comparison to that of the Imagineers. Each game deserves a bit of attention, but before taking a look at their structures, it should be noted that the sixth key is obtained by walking around the theme park and talking to other children. These kids don’t seem to believe your story that you’re a friend of Mickey Mouse and surprisingly fear his anger if they trust someone who isn’t authentic, so each one will ask you a multiple choice question about Disney media and history to test your legitimacy. Most of these questions are softballs, with questions like “What is the name of Mickey’s dog?” and “What is the name of Pinocchio’s constant companion?”, but then it can reach for some very strange questions and ones that were certainly more relevant in the time period of this game’s release. “Who portrayed the younger Hardy Boy?” and questions about specific dates like “What year did the Mickey Mouse comic begin?” certainly seem outside the purview of both children and even many ardent Disney fans, but getting a wrong answer leads to no real punishment. Just talk to the kid again and you’ll get a new question that you can hopefully answer correctly this time.
The Disney quiz is harmless and can be interesting so long as you don’t get poor luck when it comes to questions, but most of the other attractions are pretty awful. Space Mountain, despite being an attraction that could have been elaborated on in all kinds of creative ways, still tries to mimic the feel of a roller coaster with its heavy limitations. From a first person view, you move through a fairly empty star field, eyes fixed on the bottom of the screen where you need to match the buttons that appear on screen. Failure to hit one will drain your health, and the health is perhaps the reason so many of the attractions end up aggravating. Going into any attraction you’ll have three hearts and some lives. Losing all your life will kick you out of the attraction to make you try again from the start, and losing all your lives leads to a Game Over that doesn’t erase any progress, but makes trying to beat attractions a much longer task than it needs to be. Space Mountain is probably one of the most time-consuming, since it requires near-perfect pressing of the buttons and the time window to do so shrinks as you get closer to your far off goal. A few attractions have a menu you can access to purchase power-ups like life, 1-ups, and ones that freeze the action or make you invulnerable, all tied to stars you pick up. The stars are spread out enough that they’re helpful but can’t be relied on too much, but Space Mountain is one of the attractions where you can’t access this menu during play, meaning you only have room for a little error.
Big Thunder Mountain restricts menu access as well, but it’s far less annoying due to its structure. Moving a train down tracks, your only actions are to pick which path it will go down at a junction, the player needing to reach a specific station to win. There’s very little room for strategizing though, you’re moving down a hill and you can barely see what lies ahead. Following stars is usually a safe bet but other than that you’ll go down a path and just hope there’s nothing to hurt you down it. Trial and error is the way to win and you’ll eventually succeed just by learning which paths not to take, so it’s certainly bad, but not nearly as grueling as Space Mountain. Autopia has the same structure as Big Thunder Mountain, requiring multiple tries to find the right paths to win, but it presents itself as a racetrack where you move upward instead of downward. Put in control of a little car, you “race” other cars to the finish, taking jumps, avoiding hazards, and trying to pull ahead of the other racers… but even though I was certainly not the first racer to finish when I finally avoided falling into water or taking bad paths, I was still given the key and the game acted like I won. That mercy is certainly appreciated, but it does make Autopia a bit more bland as the challenge seems just to be reaching the end at all.
If there is any form that flirts with the potential Adventures in the Magic Kingdom had, it comes in the form of the Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion levels. Not only do these levels allow you to use your power-ups, but they involve a gameplay direction that can be fun at times and offers up a more interesting level of challenge. Taking the form of side-scrolling platformers, these stages involve navigating either a port town under siege or a ghost-infested house, with plenty of enemies standing in your way and platforms to jump across. Pirates of the Caribbean is the harder of the two, giving you little way to defend yourself and putting in some enemies that are particularly persistent and hard to avoid. The difficulty still seems pretty disconnected from what you’d expect from a kid’s game, but while being thrown to the start after a death hurts, gradually learning the stage will make it go faster so you can save the six hostages and grab that silver key. The way to beat the level involves lighting a signal fire though, and the candle needed to do so sort of looks like a wall torch that can be easy to miss. The Haunted Mansion is the more fun level, giving you a candle weapon to hurl at foes and replenish with pick-ups. Being able to beat enemies makes the level more dynamic and involved, but it also means the game tries to kill you with a lot more jumps across open pits. Falling is very easy inside the mansion and bound to lead to a few deaths, especially since the later half of the stage is all about riding floating furniture across deadly falls. It culminates in a fairly easy boss though, and on the whole, it’s probably the best designed of the attractions, showing some of the creativity that the game could have used a lot more of. If the game just used this style of play and based platforming levels on famous rides, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom could have been a much more enjoyable adventure.
THE VERDICT: A video game twist on Disney theme parks is an idea that could prove as thrilling as the parks themselves, but Adventures in the Magic Kingdom seems too torn between the reality of the rides and the freedom of fiction to properly capture the appeals of either approach. The rides that trend towards their real world equivalents suffer for it with bland play that is too easy to die during, but the ones that tried to be a bit more creative with the gaming medium prevent the game from being a total waste. Still, two decent attractions can’t make up for the rest being awful.
And so, I give Adventures in the Magic Kingdom for the Nintendo Entertainment System…
A TERRIBLE rating. A mostly weak package of bland minigames, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is further weighed down by rides as abysmal as Space Mountain and repetitive as Big Thunder Mountain. The side-scrolling stages are acceptable but shallow, and the conceit of Autopia seems to be a smokescreen to try and make it more thrilling than it actually is. There is just an utter lack of creativity in a game that is meant to imitate the wild rides of amusement parks, and Adventures in the Magic Kingdom can’t even really capture the appeals of video games too well when it doesn’t embrace the benefits of the medium. Kids will be turned off by the difficulty and adults by the monotony, and the NES’s limitations means it’s not even a visual spectacle despite the few nice sprites of Disney characters. It certainly doesn’t capture the magic of Disneyland nor does it stand in for it in any way, making its existence confusing. If it had embraced imagination more and tried to make the attractions fun first and accurate second, this might have better represented the Disney Park brand.
Adventures in the Magic Kingdom’s uninspired, boring attractions manage to take The Happiest Place on Earth and make it completely miserable.