Goofy's Hysterical History Tour (Mega Drive)

 Games on SEGA consoles that star Disney's main mascot characters have a great reputation, and they deserve it. Quackshot, World and Castle of Illusion, Lucky Dime Caper, and others are all widely-beloved classics that radiate quality from the moment you turn them on. There are some lesser titles, though, that aren't so fondly remembered: Fantasia, for example was hated when it came out, and only comes up in discussions of terrible Mega Drive games nowadays. Goofy's Hysterical History Tour has it even worse: it was released without anyone even noticing, and Idoubt that any of those few that remember it do so fondly.

 

It starts out pretty much as soon as you turn the game on: for some reason, it has its own slightly different, slightly cheaper-looking versions of the "Produced by or under license from SEGA Enterprises Ltd." and SEGA logo screens. And the title screen has that strange, intangible look of cheapness that a lot of (but defintiely not all) US-developed Mega Drive games have to them, especially ones aimed at kids. Things briefly start to look up once you actually start playing, though, as Goofy himself has a pretty decently animted walk cycle, and the extending arm device with which he's armed is pretty interesting too, and actually brought to mind better games, like Bionic Commando or  The Magical Quest starring Micky Mouse. 

 

That's about the sum of the positive things I have to say about this game, though. The longer you play, the less fun you'll have. There are enemies every where, and they're all insane damage sponges. You're constantly having to make leaps of faith, being expected to just jump off of cliffs into the void, and hoping there'll be something to land on when you get there. Or you've got to jump down onto a tiny little platform that can only just be seen when you crouch (and of course, you can't jump straight from crouching). There are apparently several epochs on Goofy's eponymous tour, but after about an hour of playing (and I would have given up long before that without save states), and after finishing at least seven or eight surprisingly long stages, there was no end in sight for the prehistoric age, with its one background image and one tileset.

 

The thing that finally made me give up on the game, though, was a sequence of jumps that made heavy use of the extending arm I praised only a couple of paragraphs ago. The thing is that by default, pressing B makes Goofy extend the arm diagonally upwards in the direction he's facing. If you press left or right while presing B, it'll stretch out horizontally instead. All sounds normal so far, right? Unfortunately, the sequence in question wants you to jump and grab platforms above and  to the right. So, you have to press C and right to make the jump, holding them long enough to get close to the platform, then let go of both and press B on its own to stretch the arm towards it. But instinctively, you'll still be pressing right when you press B, and the arm will stretch out horizontally, causing you to fall onto the spikes below. There's a few of these jumps in a row, all identical, and if you fail one, you either start again, or you lose your last bit of health on the spikes below and got back to the start of the stage.

 

You've probably figured it out by now, but Goofy's Hysterical History Tour isn't worth your time. It's boring, frustrating, and ugly. One final example of how it's a shoddy producation as well as a terrible game, though: like most platform games, you can hold up to pan the camera upwards and see what's above you. But Goofy has no accompanying animation for this! He doesn't even turn his eyes upwards, he just stands there as the camera pans. So to re-iterate: game's awful, don't bother.

U.P.P. (Playstation)

 Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information on what UPP stands for. But I did find out that apparently, when it was released, the big selling points for UPP were the attack animations and the voice cast. Though I've never been into sriyuu fandom, so I can't really comment on that, I can say that the attack animations do look really great. The characters appear onscreen casting their spells in big, screen-filling animations. Well animated and high resolution, you could be tricked into thinking this was a PC-FX game or something.

 

But I should really get onto describing the game in which these attacks are taking place, shouldn't I? It's a typical match three coloured blocks falling stuff puzzle game. Except that the blocks are floating upwards towards the top of your well instead of falling to the bottom. For the sake of convenience, just remember that if I describe falling or gravity for the rest of this review, imagine I did so upside-down. Anyway, the mechanics of the actual colour matching are as generic as can be: you put three or more of the same colour in a row, and they disappear. The combat aspect, though, is similar to the Hanagumi Taisen Columns games, in that rather than sending junk blocks over to your opponent's well by making chains, you instead fill up a meter, and can use the meter at your leisure to perform a character-specific attack.

 

These attacks are pretty varied, too! From simple things like filling up the bottom of your opponent's well, sticking all the blocks in your opponent's well together so they don't fall when those below them are erased, and so on. The final boss in single player mode has an especially harsh one: a few random blocks in your well will temporarily be turned into skulls. Erase three skulls over the course of the match, and you immediately lose! Unfortunately, as interesting as these attacks are, and as impressive as the animations that accompany them are, they also provide the game with its biggest negative.

 

The problem is that the pace is so slow! My favourite puzzle game series is Magical Drop, in which matches are often over in a couple of seconds, making UPP's matches feel glacial in comparison. The meter-building gameplay is slow enough (even though it never feels as such in the aforementioned Columns games. maybe the meters just fill faster in those games?), but the much-lauded animations cause everything to stop for ten to twenty seconds while they play. That's longer than an entire Magical Drop match, for a purely cosmetic element!

 

UPP isn't a bad game, and I think it's worth playing at least once, just for how good it looks. But I don't think it's a puzzle game anyone will be going back to for years and years, and I especially don't think it's one that you'll get a lot of fun out of through playing against human opponents, either. Most of all, though, and I think I've said this about puzzle games a few times before: I can't imagine anyone ever choosing this over Magical Drop or Puyo Puyo or Money Idol Exchanger or Landmaker or any of the other greats of the genre.