short and easy little licensed platformer. i played this to hell and back as a kid so i probably am blinded to some objective bad, but i had a lot of fun revisiting this and i think it manages to be well beyond good enough for what it is.

gameplay switches up frequently enough that i never got bored and the difficulty is so low that if i did get sick of a level i could have been done with it within a couple minutes.

visually functional. i mean, it’s pleasant enough to look at and that’s all you can ask in this context. and even being pretty generic, the music is hard sometimes. one of the tracks sounds like a midi of an early nine inch nails song for some reason, and another like it belongs on the vvvvvv ost.

PC/Home Console version is a pretty good game, but Madagascar GBA is (rather unsurprisingly) not great. It's a pretty mediocre 2D platformer. You can control 4 of the movie's main characters and switch between them, and each offers different abilities, and some abilities can be unlocked later in the game. After you beat a level, you can come back with all characters unlocked and all their abilities. Interestingly, this is exactly what Caddicarus mentioned you couldn't do in the Home Console/PC version of the game, but you can in this version. The platforming is pretty generic and there's not much variety. One issue is the camera, and how often I got ambushed by a hazard from offscreen, like a spider. Also the game doesn't allow you to pan the camera down to see what's below, which was fixed in Madagascar: Operation Penguin. There's also insta-kills in the form of water, only Gloria can swim, but I wish the game didn't kill you outright but placed you somewhere near and deducted a hit point. I got frustrated a few times because I landed in water that I didn't see as someone else. There are a couple stealth levels that aren't very good, because it's a lot of waiting. At least it features a nice zooming out effect that allows you to see further, I haven't seen any other game do that on GBA. And there are a couple mini-games, a dancing mini-game, that isn't a simple press a button when prompt enters an area thing, instead you have foosa on different platforms that correspond to a button or D-Pad direction, and when foosa jumps from that platform you press a corresponding button, so it's at least something more original, and the mini-game where you kick foosa on different platforms while the lemurs are getting rescued, pretty average. The graphics are pre-rendered once again, though certain things can blend with each other, like how I found metro area pretty distracting and how cacti hazards on the island didn’t stand out much against the scenery. Shin'en did the music, so I probably shouldn't tell you that the music is good. But I will. The music is good. Overall, I didn't enjoy this game that much. It's just kinda bland, though not totally offensive.

Also, this is the second game for the GBA that I know features loading screens, before cutscenes with movie stills, like Madagascar: Operation Penguin, though chronologically this is the first.

game from my childhood
never was interested in it
never beat it
too cheap to sell, too valuable to throw away
's goin in the drawer for the next 12 years