Here's another one from the Joey file.
He has been obssesed, like OBSSESED with Toy Story for the past few months. And not just the first movie either. I have probably seen all four of the Toy Story films ten times a week for the past several months. I guess it could be worse. There are a lot of lousy kids shows and movies out there that have no redeeming qualities for parents so at least I'm not watching those over and over again.
And unfortunately, that's what the video game was as well. Remember when I talked about licensed movie tie-ins during the Golden Compass review? The Toy Story video game is a picture perfect definition of a shameless cash grab designed to capitalize off the success of the movie. There are parts of the game that are borderline interesting and I have to give them credit for at least trying to provide gameplay variety. But much of the deviation from the standard platforming levels is unwelcome and forces you to contend with awkward controls and poor design. The platforming levels are difficulty appropriate for the target audience, but some of these other levels are...less so. Even in the platforming stages, there is too much inconsistency and frustration to warrant much more than a playthrough. Full disclosure, I played the SNES version of Toy Story. There is a Genesis version as well, but the two games are functionally similar.
There are some positives here. For one, they actually followed the plot of the movie. That wasn't always a given with licensed games at the time, so it was nice to see here. The graphics are pretty good, at least in the SNES version. The game captures the movie's visiual style well and the character animations are smooth, even if they have weird, choppy outlines around them. All the toys are here, you play as Woody and spend much of the game with Buzz as the antagonist. Other toys like Ham, Mr. Potato Head, Rex and a variety of Sid's "mutant" toys are their to both help and hinder you. The game hits all the high points from the Buzz showing up in Andy's room unexpectedly to Pizza Planet to the escape from Sid's and still images and text help progress the plot. That's okay, it's not video but its the best these consoles could do. It also features some pretty good sound and includes tracks from Randy Newman's score as well as some originals. There are no lyrics or anything, but you can tell exactly which songs you are listening to, which, again, didn't always happen in this era.
The level design is incredibly simplistic, its just a stright line with some shelves to jump on. I can't knock them too hard for that, it is a game directed at kids, but it would have been nice to see a little imagination. The enemies are all generic toy trains and planes, though sometimes the other toys can damage you. Woody can jump, though not very high, and his lone attack is swinging his pull-string. This is where the hit detection problems start to become very noticeable. You absolutely have to hit enemies with the end of the string, if they end up in the middle your attack won't work. That gets very old, very fast. The frustration is compounded because the planes don't every actually disappear from the screen when you hit them, so you never know when they are safe to walk past or they will damage you. The hitboxes are also inconsistent, I was never able to tell when I was going to take a hit or when I was okay. At least they are consistently inconsistent, the opposite happened too where I was like "welp, I'm dead" and an enemy went right through me.
While I was able to use that logic to combat my frustration, it's unlikely the target audience would have been able to do the same. Remember, this is a game for kids and those are the kinds of things that are inaccessible to young gamers. The problems with hit detection are especially prevalent in the chase levels, of which there are two. These were the only parts of the game where I struggled, largely because I was never sure when or where I was going to take a hit. I can't imagine a kid playing through these without getting upset. Ditto the non platforming levels, especially the one where you control RC Car from an overhead view. It's bad enough that the game doesn't tell you how to control yourself, but it's damn near impossible to actually go where you are supposed to. I appreciate that they wanted to add more variety, but this was just bad. It's kind of a shame, because they actually did do a good job of setting the right difficulty in other sections. For one, you don't die when you fall into a pit, but you do take a point of damage. This was a smart design choice for a kids game as pit deaths are always frustrating. But a lot of games for younger gamers go too far with this and don't include pits at all, which negates any semblance of challenge at all. The boss first boss fight against Buzz is actually a great "boss fight 101" for someone who's picking up a controller for the first time. It's a basic pattern that would be just challenging enough for a kid, but not so difficult that they would get stuck.
It really is a shame there were so many technical flaws in Toy Story (the game). They did a lot of things right in terms of balancing difficulty and following the film, but the hit detection issues and frustrating controls bury it. If just a little more care was taken to get these basic things right, we might have had a hidden gem on our hands. Instead, this game is relegated to the ever-growing pile of licensed schlock that plagues the game industry. I guess it's not that bad, but you can tell what they were going for and making a good game wasn't it. It's certainly not the worst video game I ever played and it was even enjoyable at times, but its far from worth playing today. I guess I may as well watch the movie (again) instead.
4/10
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