Support the show on Patreon: / implantgames IMPLANTgames.com implantgames implant In today’s video I dive in and take a look to see if Toy Story on the Sega Genesis is still good. Enjoy!
Actually, the password feature wasn't removed in the US. The European version released AFTER the US. The feature was ADDED to the European version, and not removed from the US version, as the US version was released before hand without that feature. (Edit: Credit to Jon Burton of "Game Hut," the creator of Travelers Tails, for making clear this common misconception.)
This is an example of when a software dev uses hardware hacks to achieve graphics that were unheard of at the time. They managed to create images with over a thousand colors using background tiles and multi-layered sprites. The pseudo 3D background elements are amazing as well.
The developers were europeans and experienced with amiga which had the same processor. Red Zone was also done by an amiga demo group and is an even bigger showcase on the megadrive. It even had full blown fmv!
Jon Burton (the game's director) announced on his RU-vid channel: GameHut that he will be doing a Director's Cut of Toy Story for the Sega Genesis. Hopefully he may fix the problems you encountered in the game. Regardless, this is a rather fair, and balanced review! Well-written, and informative! Excellent work!
I sort of get the feeling he watched this video when determining what the director's cut should change ;) Glad you enjoyed the video, thanks for the kind words!
implantgames i have pretty much all the games u reviewed toy story Aladdin the lion king the jungle book Batman sonic 1 and 2 tiny toon adventures busters hidden treasure
This game tortured me as a kid. The RC level made me insane, and then when I finally cleared it, I would always get stuck in the crane game where you had to save the aliens. And then yes...the few times I would manage to beat that level, I would be terrorized by that awful crane boss. But I agree - this game was a definite favorite when I was young.
Man, I gotta say, I love these in-depth reviews of old-school games. I've had this for the longest time, I remember renting the SNES version, but I ended up buying the Genesis version. I honestly have no idea what compelled me to do that as a kid xD
Ok, far from being a perfect game, I think it aged quite well (mainly if compared to most Genesis/Mega Drive titles) and can be very fun for a kid to play today, in my opinion. There were not many games on the Sega Genesis/MD with both that audacious technical approach and high quality achievements. It's not the only attempt at software scaling for example, but other attempts usually ended up with a low, choppy frame rate. Also I would not be surprised if I discovered that the color count in some of its screens was superior than the 64-four simultaneous color palette the Genesis/MD was said having. Traveller's Tales works were often technically impresive. Nice review overall, thanks!
This is one game that really shows what the 68000 processor could handle on the genesis, especially with the amiga like music on the title and credits, and the wolfenstein 3D like level (really inside the claw machine)
Correction: the US version was released earlier. In fact, the password feature was added in the European version, because the main developer thought the game was too unforgiving Edit: you can find him talking about this exact topic here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MabGcG0Ao1k.html
Yes. The graphics, sound, and music are enough to make it worth it. Even if the gameplay is only okay, it’s an incredible achievement still. Definitely a Mega Drive classic.
Wonderful review; I grew up with the SNES version, which was _mostly_ the same, but pretty much all of your opinions mirror my own. I always loved the graphics and music, and the Red Alert, Pizza Planet, inside the Claw machine and Sid's house levels were my favorite. The platforming is great and solid, and I always thought the whole swinging on hooks with Woody's pull string was a unique gameplay gimmick! Again, nice review.
The Real Sean W. Stewart, The SNES IS missing some music tracks, the "Day-Toy-Na" level, and the theme from the movie during the cutscenes, and some stills from said cutscenes, and since the SNES have a noticeably smaller horizontal screen resolution, it makes some levels of the game harder than needs to be. Even with these issues, SNES Toy Story is still solid! But I'll take the Genesis game, *ANYDAY!* Preferably, the PAL version, with its password system.
I'm a master of the RC level. Are you kidding? I love the Rex level and it's not that hard, though that might be because I've replayed the game a lot. :)
Well said! I also appreciate the spoiler warning. I love this game even though it is pretty hard, It was one of the first games I tracked down again when I bought another Sega genesis after selling my original. An incredible example of what was possible on the 16 bit Sega Genesis. Again, well done!
The ways TT pushed the consoles with their games are unreal. Founder Jon Burton uploaded many videos on RU-vid where he shows their programming techniques and all kinds of unseen footages from their archives. They were miracle workers.
Great review, Implant. I had this on PC and it had everything except the 3D level. Unlike the console versions, it did have a Level Select which was convenient. It's a shame that it's difficult to play this on PC nowadays with its compatibility issues.
These reviews are absolutely wonderfully made. Having recently come across a copy of this game at a local pawnshop I just had to get it. The first half of the game is a real highlight of it all as the claw boss and everything after it don't quite seem as fun other than the workshop levels.
I had this game as a kid and played it so much I could beat it. Looking back now, this is an incredibly ambitious title, so much so that the ambition gets in the way of it being as good as it could be. Which makes it a perfect fit for the Genesis and Sega as a whole.
I had this game on the SNES. I remember dreading the first RC level, at first. But over time, I got really good at it and I eventually started enjoying it. Also, the Nightmare Buzz used to give me actual nightmares as a kid lol
Nice video man. I used to love this game as a kid (on my mega-drive), and I remember not liking that much the last time I played (with emulators). The Sid levels are way too hard but somewhat fits the idea of "danger" I guess. The "really inside the machine" levels still blows me away to this day, and I loved the soundtrack. Its importante to note also that the genesis version is better than the snes, with more sounds, music, cutscenes, an extra level and the "really inside the machine" level is bigger, has more animations and the music is complete. Anyways, good job
This game would do very well with a remaster similar to the Lion King / Aladdin remakes. Also, I really enjoyed toy story 2 on the N64 even if we barely got to see Woody until the end of the game with his confusingly bad character model for his face
Great review Kris, this is one of my favorite and fondest Sega Genesis games. I completed it in one night with my friends and a couple of beers, great night. Was all of the game play footage recorded on your Framemeister? The scan lines look great.
Ohhh shit I just got to the part where I saw the NTSC version didn't have passwords!!! haha no wonder it was so difficult for you, I played the PAL version in Ireland.
Haha, thankfully I have a good PAL friend and we were able to compare notes while I was working on this video! So annoying the password system was removed!
I remember this one! I could never complete it because of the stupid claw machine boss, but I loved what I played and this game really shows what my favorite console of all time, the Sega Genesis, is capable of. This review was excellent and shows that reviews can be informative and enjoyable at the same time.
Roller bob is one of my personal favorites in the game. Despite the difficulty change as you progress, it's one of my childhood favorites. This guy sounds too picky
Loved this game as a kid. Had the SNES version. I was pretty good at the RC top down stage after playing it so many times. I rememer the buzz nightmare fight was scary for me.
I didn't mind the driving sections or run rex run too much. The first RC level is supposed to be a little difficult to control becasue otherwize it'd be extremely easy. It's also interesting that the controls are from RC's perspective, not the screen's, so you need to adjust to that. I will say you hit the nail on the head with the awful claw machine boss and the too severe difficulty spike in the last 3rd of the game. However, despite it being 20 years later, it seems people are still blinded by the tech of the Really Inside the Claw Machine level. While it's impressive a pseudo 3d level was made for the game, the level itself is disorienting and a tedious timed alien hunt that I dreaded every time I made it that far.
Nice review. The thing about Roller Bob and Rex though is that the hit box is only around Woody and not the characters he's riding - it took me a while to grasp that concept, and it makes the levels more playable knowing that. Growing up with the title, I love just about everything about it, except the Claw level still frustrates me.
Youre wrong about the password system, the game was released in USA first then they added the password system to the European release which came out 4 months later
One thing that it certainly is, is FUCKING HARD I barely got to Sid's room ONCE in my whole life (I'm 24, had it since I was a kid) and the game froze, that was years ago and I haven't attempted to beat it again since then, for all I know, it might've been the last level but I never wanted to look it up. Much like "Earthworm Jim", "AHH real monsters!" and "The Lion King" it's on a list of Genesis games I got close to beating but because of circumstances I was thwarted.
I used to rent this game often because the start of it is so much fun! That is until you get to the Claw. In all of my youthful years trying to beat this game I only defeated the claw 1, maybe 2 times. It's just that there is no real forgiveness if you miss just like you said.
I like a mix of both, they both have something the other one doesn't. Also, GameFanMagazine are wrong about the music, it's one of my favorite soundtrack. I prefer the SNES versions music, but there are a few music tracks exclusive to the SEGA that I really like.
There’s also a cheat you can unlock in the first level to have infinite life and being able to skips some levels. Idk if it’s on the genius version though.
It's about the same quality as the intro one, not perfectly optimized but still pretty cool for the time. Joe from game sack did a video on genesis sample playback at its limiit a few years ago: /watch?v=oKsUAywSyEg
I don't know how I've seemingly forgotten the middle sections of the game, Really Inside the Machine and the Claw boss fight are just not existent in my memory, strange
I played the shit out of this game as a kid. I didn't even know there was a password feature at all. Why do Europeans get it but not us? Hell, why'd they get RGB on their consumer TVs but not us? What the hell?
One of the few prerendered CG sprite games on GEN/MD to turn out well, real masters of palettization and dithering at Traveller's Tales as Sonic 3D Blast looked great too. So many others tried DKC graphics poorly on the system before EG. X-perts. :P I wonder if they had the raycasting and linescrolling code laying around as fun coding exercises since this was when the last games were coming out IE. last hurrah, do everything. The quality didn't suffer but any rough spots are probably time crunch related, licensed games suffer a lot from hitting certain release dates.
Really? You don’t like seeing the story just because the film was better than a Mega Drive game? Of course it was better, but the cutscene are there for people who don’t remember or didn’t watch the film, and to show off the hardware.
I know the genesis version is usually considered better than the Snes version but the colors of the Genesis version are so dull and boring. You can tell they ran out of colors in the first level and just made every cubes be blue B cubes. On Snes there is ABCD cubes with different colors. There is almost no red at all on the first level of the Genesis version. cloths coming out of drawers are blue, balloons are blue, books are blue and most enemies are blue as well.
The RC levels are cancer I remember how upset at that those levels I would get. I once got so pissed I hit a bunch of buttons and activated god mode on accident.
I liked your review, but I think it turns kinda too unfair when you claim too much about the difficulty. I mean the game is not broken. I played this game and I enjoy the fun of a high difficulty, cause I alsow own the SNES version, that is pretty much as the Easy mode of the same game. In my opnion the game would be really forgeattable whitout the difficulty at those stages. EVerybody would end the game in less than an hour and then just put it on the shelf. And again the game is not broke, is just that if you dont have enough skills you will be very frustated, until you could master it. (if you are able to reach that point)
If you really want to enjoy this game's OST, listen to the PC version of the soundtrack. Don't actually play it though, the gameplay physics are completely screwed up.
Not exactly the coolest Mega Drive Game ever created. The best Disney Game I've ever played and managed to get through, without getting "Give up, Street Rat!" from Jafar laughing wickedly, is Aladdin. This comes second underneath the Disney Game that is still number 1 in my book: Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse.
The Genesis cannot utilize ROM the same as RAM. It's too slow. It would not be correct to think the Genesis hardware can take graphics right from ROM and display them on the screen.
The graphics are presented exclusively from VRAM, but ROM->SRAM copy seems quite superfluous. In spite of different waitstate/DTAK behaviour between SRAM and ROM, 68000 performance should be barely affected because it takes a bunch of cycles per instruction and fetch cycles are spaced out quite a bit. Many games do end up being performance-constrained on tile loading because they store level tiles in compressed format and you need to decompress them in RAM - only a handful of tiles per frame can be processed when that's the case, but that's a choice. VRAM interface introduces a lot more waitstates than ROM anyway, which limits how much tiledata you can replace each frame, probably less than 1/4th of a layer worth or so - considering only blanking period of about 1/10th of a frame gives you full speed access. And again 68000 is clearly too slow to do that directly, that's why you have DMA hardware.
@@implantgames I forgot, a few hours after i wrote all this i just ran the game in Exodus and monitored the RAM and VRAM. The game is very aggressive about replacing the tiles in VRAM, nearly every frame a quarter of a screen worth of tiles is replaced from ROM. I would have probably written up which elements are static and which are streamed and how and when, but i vaguely recall both main character being streamed in rapidly and some background tiles in slowly from ROM. The main RAM in the meanwhile is basically empty, with utilisation of a handful hundred bytes. Most of it was just a strings of 0s or FFs, i forget, either is obviously empty. With exception of 3D sections when it was half-full, as the image is rendered in there. Once that section leaves, sometimes the RAM is cleared, sometimes that image remains in there since untouched for a section, obviously unused again. I didn't play the game since i couldn't operate the game controls and the RAM and tile analysis tools at the same time, i tested in attract modem since i had to manually match palettes to discover what elements are being replaced. I could have probably figured something out like pausing and a gamepad, but i didn't. It is feasible that more game state is tracked and more runtime variables are present when the game is actually being played, but i suspect it's still not going to fill up the RAM. Exodus is fairly glitchy with VPU timings on this game though, and i had to try a number of Exodus builds till i got it to run at all. If i should investigate more or verify my faulty memory, let me know.
I would recommend watching the GameHut videos which were made by this game's producer Jon Burton. It offers great insight into the development on the Sega Genesis and including memory management and restrictions.
@@implantgames I have, he hasn't said much on the topic. Which i wish he did, but it probably doesn't make for a great material for his partially very young and predominantly non-engineering audience. I particularly want to know about memory management in Haven, but that might be a talk for an hour.
Everyone knows the Snes version is better lol. Is the buzz claw machine level hard on this version? Also does anyone notice that there is no Pizza at Pizza Planet.
Toy Story was never good. I remember looking at the screenshots on magazines and thinking how disgusting it looked, and how the character sprite was way too big. I never understood the fixation with giant sprites.
It's his style of structure. I suppose he just doesn't want the videos to feel like skit based reviews from Caddicarus or Jontron. His videos just focus on the topic and they do that pretty well, in my opinion. It really is a matter of taste whether you like it or not. And there's more to this than just doing research. Script writing, voiceovers and editing aren't easy to do. And they have to go well together to build up a pleasant pace. And for this kind of video he does a mighty fine job.
