Goofy’s Hysterical History Tour (Genesis/Mega Drive)
While Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse have appeared as the stars of many platforming games, the absence of the third member of Disney’s classic trio certainly seemed a little strange to me. While Donald and Mickey were starring in games that sometimes turned out quite enjoyable, Goofy didn’t seem to have any major roles of note, and while being a clumsy goofball might make it seem like he wouldn’t be a good fit for a game about jumping around, it’s not like Porky Pig was noted as being particularly agile before he got his own platforming game. Stumbling across Goofy’s Hysterical History Tour, I thought I had finally found the day Goofy got his spot in the sun to join the other two in platforming goodness, but after playing through it, it soon seemed like would have been a very good idea to leave Goofy out of gaming.
While the game’s title can almost make it sound like an edutainment title, Goofy’s Hysterical History Tour is a sidescrolling platformer with the fairly recognizable goal of getting to the end of its set of levels and beating any bosses you face along the way. However, these levels are all divided into different historical eras, the concept being that Goofy is a janitor at the Ludwig Von Drake History Museum and his fellow janitor Pete begun messing with the exhibits. Goofy’s already in hot water for his clumsiness, but with the four new historical exhibits opening the following morning, Pete sees a chance to get Goofy fired so he can replace him in the role as head janitor. This mostly manifests as just placing a few hats in the wrong exhibits, but Goofy’s quest to set things right proves to be surprisingly dangerous and detailed, the game taking players through prehistoric times, the wild west, the American Revolution, and medieval times, Goofy introducing each era with strange puns and jokes that require a bit too much knowledge of wordplay and history to land with a young audience while being too generic to amuse adults.
Lame humor certainly isn’t the worst thing about the different time periods though, as so many of them are teeming with issues tied to their themes and gimmicks introduced to match them. Your first destination is the prehistoric exhibit, which feels like it will never end as you traipse around a fairly generic forest world. While the game could make a case that the giant dragonflies you ride like platforms here are playing into the prehistoric theme, these stages also feature mushroom people, giant bees, and snails as big as Goofy. It’s fairly evident looking at the level that this is just some generic forest theme they repurposed into the distant past, the only clear connections to such ancient times being that Pete has donned a loincloth to look like a caveman and sometimes you hop aboard a wheel not unlike the one featured in the comic strip B.C. to briefly ride across a dinosaur’s back.
Most of your time in these fairly generic forest levels helps to expose the many flaws in the game’s platforming design. Goofy’s Hysterical History Tour has plenty of blind jumps with the possibility of instant death if you happen to drop down a hole instead of onto the thing you apparently were meant to reach. Levels have plenty of slow moving platforms you need to ride and long vertical climbs where a single slip up can set you back immensely. Balloons are scattered about the level to collect for an extra life but collecting enough to get one is likely to get you killed or it would ask you to scour these overly large levels that often repeat set pieces so it’s harder to navigate by landmark. Perhaps one of the most annoying problems you’ll face the moment you encounter your first enemy is how even the simplest enemy in the game requires multiple hits to kill. While this can benefit you rarely when you want to use an enemy’s head as a boost and Goofy can jump on them repeatedly to ensure he’s lined up right for his platforming, far more often these obstacles to progress require you to come to a stop and use your Extend-O-Hand.
The Extend-O-Hand is a miserable piece of technology and it’s functions almost never work as the developers likely intended. When standing completely still, Goofy will fire his Extend-O-Hand at an upwards diagonal angle, meaning if something is flying in front of Goofy’s face he might hit it, but most trouble will be right in front of you. To angle your glove properly to hit something in front of you, you need to be holding forward when you press attack, the detection very touchy and making it very easy to do your diagonal attack instead. However you begin to hammer the foe repeatedly with the glove though, it will eventually go down, but it turns out this tedious process of having to repeatedly batter any enemy in your way likely comes from a weak way of justifying alternate attack options. Find a boxing glove in the level and you can get a few wallops that instantly defeat regular foes, but finding useful items is going to be dependent on exploring risky paths or taking the right one of a set of branching paths that usually just make levels feel bloated and spread out rather than intricate. You can find blue Goofballs to throw, but the angle on these is strange as well and its rather common to miss a target that’s right in front of your face when you hurl them. Something the game calls Gooftraptions appear rarely and can be messed with to have birds or fireworks cause some trouble for enemies in the immediate area, but the placement of these ensure they’re never too useful. Pretty much the only enemy that isn’t a chore to take down because of your awful Extend-O-Hand are the bosses, the player facing off with Pete at the end of every exhibit in his era appropriate attire. Reasonably he takes multiple hits to defeat and sometimes he has a pattern that you can exploit, but it seems like the fights swing between exploitable or prone to having him jump around in a strange and hard to dodge way that trumps whatever difficulty his current gimmick introduced.
By the time the tedious and unimaginative starting exhibit has wrapped up you’ll likely want it to be over, but Wild West, the Revolution, and Medieval times all bring in some new problems to weigh things down. The medieval exhibit has a level where you need to ride rocks a catapult is launching to get up to the top of a tower, but it’s not just one rock. A small salvo will carry you up to a windowsill, and then you need to jump out over open air to catch the next batch of stones and ride them higher. Your position triggers them so if you don’t trigger them properly you can mess up the timing and drop all the way back down to the bottom, and there is no indicator where the rocks will be coming from besides the vague idea that they’ll appear from the bottom left. The Revolution seems to be more like a pirate adventure as the second half of the stages have you first head off to the right by hopping between small boxes in the water only to suddenly need to backtrack for the following stage. Without any instruction you’re supposed to realize this new level that looks practically the same as where you left off in the previous pirate ship area wants you to climb aboard, go left, and reach the top mast of one of the vessels. Most any jump of importance is going to have something like a parrot or other bird patrolling it to complicate things, and if not then some weasel with a weapon is likely to fire on you when you land on the other side.
Crossing gaps is made even more of a chore because the game wants to involve the Extend-O-Hand sometimes. Certain blocks allow Goofy to swing back and forth, so when you jump towards these blocks from below, you often want a diagonal angle to grab them. However, moving forward means your hand will go forward, even if you’re in the air while pressing forward. You can grab some blocks from below instead, but the need to swing and the punishment for messing up being damage or death definitely makes the Revolution levels drag on, although being overly long and annoying to navigate isn’t unique in this game. The comparatively short Wild West exhibit doesn’t do anything particularly unique in its problems save trying to time your jump with the movement of a horse’s head as you stand on it for maximum height at one point. Instead, it’s just happy to throw out the blind drops while littering the area with cacti to damage you if you drop on them or don’t take that incredibly tiny green nub as a serious threat. For some reason the game enjoys having you hop from block to block even though they’re barely big enough for Goofy to stand on, although the Revolution’s rooftop levels certainly engage in this more egregiously. One annoying feature that has an entire area in the Medieval exhibit devoted to it is that even a slight incline will cause Goofy to sit down and start sliding, building up speed until you jump to break him out of it. Even if it’s a very small hill this will trigger, most stages happy to have sections where a slanted bit of turf will suddenly be your destination after a drop so that you might potentially slip to your death or jump early and miss the safe platform you were trying to reach.
There is an incredibly weird set of priorities in general for Goofy’s Hysterical History Tour. You do have a life bar that’s always visible, but your extra lives are only viewable on the pause screen. Rather than refining the glove, the game has weird gimmicks like slipping on a banana peel to smash through anything in your path or a Factory Whistle you can hit so enemies will freeze for a time, although determining its reach is difficult. Add in some blocks that will explode shortly after you touch them despite them being vital for platforming and Goofy’s Hysterical History Tour seems like at best a batch of thrown together unpolished ideas and at worst a misguided and meandering attempt to throw whatever the developers could at Goofy in the hopes that it might prove enjoyable.
THE VERDICT: The biggest joke Goofy’s Hysterical History Tour tells is its game design. The Extend-O-Hand is an awful and weak method of fighting off enemies and its attachments rarely help it be more than that, the level designs are often needlessly large and thus slow traveling platforms and blind jumps are far too prevalent, and weird gimmicks like riding catapult rocks can lead to time lost and frustrations as you have to get the game to try and be consistent in how the action plays out. Squandering its history theme and making Goofy into an awful protagonist whose minimal platforming prowess is pushed too far means it’s far too easy to justify giving this game the lowest rating.
And so, I give Goofy’s Hysterical History Tour for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…
An ATROCIOUS rating. It’s hard to know where to start when pointing out the game’s problems, although the developer’s grab bag of incongruous concepts isn’t a bad place to start. So many random and barely fleshed out ideas like the Gooftraptions and Goofballs give the impression there might be more to the game, but the role they play is so infinitesimal even if you’re trying to engage with them. Enemies shouldn’t be so slow to beat with even your regular weapon, the boxing glove still potentially finding use against tougher foes or peskier ones. The levels should try to actively embrace their concepts rather than slotting in a generic enchanted forest or swapping to pirates suddenly, and even if they did their current size and concepts are often bland and filled with alternate paths that are more trouble than they’re worth. Stage layouts and your weapon both need a significant overhaul, and plenty of the less useful items could be excised without harm or just tightened into something actually worth seeking out.
Like Goofy, Goofy’s Hysterical History Tour is a clumsy mess that messes up most of the ideas it attempts in some form. It barely cares about its concept, its key form of interaction with much of the world is weak and a poor tool for anything beyond repeatedly smacking a generic enemy, and stages never come together in designs that are anything less than tedious. While Goofy would get to be a big player in other Disney games and even got to star alongside his son Max in a well-regarded Goof Troop game, Goofy certainly showed why he shouldn’t be trusted on a solo outing. Even when he can hop between dangerous platforms well enough, the developers perhaps tried too hard to make Goofy stand out from the rest and gave him too many gimmicks to work with that don’t actually help make the experience any richer.