A playthrough of Capcom's 1990 license-based action game for the NES, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom.
Adventures in the Magic Kingdom was one Capcom's many Disney-based NES games, and it's perhaps the least appreciated and remembered of the bunch.
As the game begins, Mickey is trying to open the Magic Kingdom for a big parade, but Goofy left the key to the main gate in Cinderella's castle, and the six keys needed to open up the castle are scattered all over the park. Mickey asks you, a random boy wearing a cowboy hat, to help save the parade by collecting the keys.
Each of the six keys is gated behind a unique gameplay challenge:
1. Ask Mickey's friends hanging around the park if they've seen anything, and they'll test your knowledge of Disney trivia. Continue to answer their questions correctly and they'll eventually hand over the key.
2. At Pirates of the Caribbean, you'll platform across an island that has been overrun by raiders while saving the kidnapped villagers.
3. At Space Mountain, you'll fly between several planets and fire at obstacles by following QTE-style prompts.
4. At Big Thunder Mountain, you'll guide a locomotive to the goal while avoiding hazards blocking the tracks.
5. At Autopia, you'll race against Panhandle Pete in a sequence that takes inspiration from old arcade classics like Bump 'n' Jump and Spy Hunter.
6. Finally, The Haunted Mansion is a platforming stage in which you'll throw candles to fend off the angry ghosts.
At its heart, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is a minigame collection that's been gussied up by its unifying Disney-themed overworld. There were many games that followed this sort of format - especially on computers in the latter half of the 80s - but Adventures in the Magic Kingdom pulls it off better than most.
The quality of the games is a bit uneven - the platforming stages are easily the best of the bunch with their fun settings and solid mechanics, while Big Thunder Mountain ends up feeling like a pointless recreation of Plinko from The Price is Right - but there is a baseline level of quality and polish maintained here that you didn't often see in these sorts of compilations.
The controls are solid throughout, and the game is super easy, overall. The challenge is well-suited to its target age group, though I must admit that I wasn't able to beat this one as a kid. I could finish Ninja Gaiden, but not Adventures in the Magic Kingdom... I couldn't figure out the Big Thunder Mountain stage and the rental never came with an instruction manual!
The graphics look pretty nice (especially in platformer stages - check out the sky at the beginning of the Haunted Mansion stage!), and the soundtrack is as good as any other Capcom produced for the NES. Thanks to the efforts of the inimitable Yoko Shimomura, there are a ton of memorable themes here - my favorite has to be the Pirates of the Caribbean BGM - that you'll find yourself mindlessly humming long after you turn the game off.
Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is a bit too scattershot to be able to match the experience provided by more focused games like DuckTales or Darkwing Duck, but that doesn't stop it from being a whole lot of fun for the twenty minutes that it lasts.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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10 мар 2022
