I actually expected a little bit more from the game..I think the sprite work ended up between a 8bit and 16bit style sometimes.
The gameplays is janky to make a artifiicial difficulty, but the levels are cool. This made me realize how crazy it is we have chrono trigger, link's awakening, FF 6, super metroid on SNES lol.
Overall it was okay..but I definetely remembered something else :b
The gameplays is janky to make a artifiicial difficulty, but the levels are cool. This made me realize how crazy it is we have chrono trigger, link's awakening, FF 6, super metroid on SNES lol.
Overall it was okay..but I definetely remembered something else :b
Shockingly great. They just don't make movie tie in games like they used to.
Genuinely overrated in terms of difficulty. The only level that's actually difficult is Be Prepared. Everything else is just basic platforming. Well, maybe the Hyena level too. It's a puzzle. But this game is a childhood classic for me. Played it a shit ton and was shocked when I learned there were cheats for it.
And if my pal Barbie is reading this, the cheat code spelled out B A R R Y on the controller.
And if my pal Barbie is reading this, the cheat code spelled out B A R R Y on the controller.
all i remember is the giraffe level....
It's a very good looking game but is punishing as fuck.
Nostalgia tie-in moment, yep. I hated the "Can't wait to be king" and the volcano levels, still. And that Scar final boss fight was dumb.
Video: https://youtu.be/p2p2vHmlP2E
This review applies to both 16-bit versions of this game, since I played them around the same time and there aren't too many major differences between them to my way of thinking. If it matters, I like the Genesis version a little better, since that was the console better able to realize what Virgin Interactive was going for.
Anywho, Virgin's Lion King is a game I think about a lot, as a consequence of what it is. The Lion King (the movie) was HUGE in my house growing up. Easily my favorite Disney movie, to the point where holding any other Disney over it, even masterpieces like Beauty and the Beast, is incomprehensible to me. Almost certainly my brother's favorite, too, and at the very least up there for everyone else. Even before I had access to "video games" and just had "computer games" to play with, The Lion King formed a huge part of my formational gaming experiences: Activity Center, Animated Storybook, Lion King 2's Active Play and Gamebreak, Hippo Hop and everything else in Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games... once my family started getting into console and handheld gaming, it was really only inevitable that the better-remembered Lion King video games would follow suit, with Virgin's efforts being the vanguard to all that.
Virgin's take on Aladdin made for one of the most important licensed titles of its era, if a bit understated these days in historical relevance. But it was enough to prompt Disney to renege on what had been Nintendo console exclusivity deal with Capcom and ask Virgin to produce all versions of the game. A separate studio handled primary development (Westwood, whom I mostly know for Eye of the Beholder) but production generally followed a similar approach as Virgin's Aladdin: Disney animators were tapped for spritework and backgrounds, while the good folks at Westwood handled the actual gameplay side of things.
Of every Disney licensed game, with one exception, this is easily the most important Disney game to who I am, mostly for my relationship with my brother. Dude loooooooves The Lion King, looooooooves that this video game existed, and loooooooooves to engage with it. I've mentioned this elsewhere, but ever since the Wii was first announced as the Nintendo Revolution, and we learned about the Virtual Console, my brother's #1 do-or-die wish was this game. All versions of The Lion King, actually, including the ultra-obscure NES release handled by Dark Studios. We're still waiting in NES Lion King to get its due, but I was pretty stoked to finally see the OTHER versions come out on modern consoles with that Disney Classics Collection (which is how I played it for this review). I dunno if my brother knows this collection exists - for reasons I'm not ready to divulge here, this is a difficult question to answer - but if he does, I know he would be happy that the 16-bit and Game Boy releases finally made a comeback.
Given how important The Lion King in general and this game in particular are to me, it hurts to admit it, but - Westwood wasn't able to recapture what Virgin was able to pull off with Aladdin. At least part of this is circumstantial, though. Lion King was on a tight timeline for its dev cycle, with only 6 months in the kiln, so some rough spots aren't that much of a surprise. This is why you have, for example, the notorious difficulty spike in "Can't Wait To Be King" - the dev team ran out of dev time but needed some way to keep the game from being an easy rental, so they padded. I haven't read any commentary to this effect, but I imagine this is also why "Simba's Return" is as tedious as it is - easy to pad out a maze if you gotta.
The Lion King by its nature also runs into a fairly typical issue that I think of as the "Quadruped Problem". Basically, it's inherently harder to come up with new, varied functions for a player character to do in a video game if they're quadrupedal (that is, walk on four legs and have no functional hands) than if they're bipedal (have two legs and presumably functional hands). This is the main reason why Insomniac stepped away from the Spyro franchise, for example - even by the third game, they ran out of things for Spyro to do and cheated by giving him (bipedal!) animal friends with varied functions. This isn't to say that there aren't games that make great use of quadrupedal protagonists - it's just a harder baseline to work with versus a humanoid avatar.
You can definitely feel this in The Lion King, particularly when comparing with Aladdin. Simba can jump and (eventually) claw-swipe for two moves, and he's working on his ROAR for a third. The game gets something from him climbing up surfaces, which is a fair thing to have a cat do. He tumbles, which... I guess that works. He can also swing off things? You can sort of feel that the team was trying to figure out how to pad out this moveset to satisfy a full-length game, which is how you ended up with stuff like Simba roaring to flip the monkeys, or all the beetle pick-ups to add some sort of variety to play. Compare this to Aladdin, who quite naturally climbs ropes, lobs apples, jumps around, and HE'S GOT A SWORD!
But there are some things I just can't reconcile. I've gone through the game several times, and I still have no clear idea of what I'm doing with the final Scar fight. A lot of the bosses are pretty weird, like that lava "boss" in "Be Prepared" I also DO NOT get the gorilla in "Hakuna Matata". Granted, I dunno what boss encounter you would place there, and you DEFINITELY need to represent that sequence somehow in this game, but still...
It's a cheap asset flip, but I kinda like that the boss to "The Pridelands" is just a normal lategame enemy. Always a sucker for that sort of design.
I don't think The Lion King is a very good game, but it is one I'm quite fond of for largely unrelated circumstances. Nothing has really come close to capturing what The Lion King makes me feel in the language of video games, but this is at least a decent effort. The music and animation conversions are all great, and I love how much of the original is still present here. Timon's "...it starts", placed out-of-context, is a weirdly memetic line for me that I find myself wanting to quote a lot, more for its video game use than its movie use. I love the use of "This Land" as the opening stage's background music - it's such an important track to defining the movie's early tone, but it's easy to lose track of it given it's not one of the vocal songs, so giving it a peppy remix helps bring it tonally to the same level as everything else.
Man, I love this game. I can't justify a high score, but I also can't justify a low score. Down the middle will have to do.
P.S. - Apparently, when Disney gave Virgin the license for The Lion King, one of their suggestions for a video game adaptation was a fighting game, in the style of Street Fighter II. I don't expect this would have been any good, particularly since Westwood had no experience with the genre, but I so wish I could see what that might've looked like.
Anywho, Virgin's Lion King is a game I think about a lot, as a consequence of what it is. The Lion King (the movie) was HUGE in my house growing up. Easily my favorite Disney movie, to the point where holding any other Disney over it, even masterpieces like Beauty and the Beast, is incomprehensible to me. Almost certainly my brother's favorite, too, and at the very least up there for everyone else. Even before I had access to "video games" and just had "computer games" to play with, The Lion King formed a huge part of my formational gaming experiences: Activity Center, Animated Storybook, Lion King 2's Active Play and Gamebreak, Hippo Hop and everything else in Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games... once my family started getting into console and handheld gaming, it was really only inevitable that the better-remembered Lion King video games would follow suit, with Virgin's efforts being the vanguard to all that.
Virgin's take on Aladdin made for one of the most important licensed titles of its era, if a bit understated these days in historical relevance. But it was enough to prompt Disney to renege on what had been Nintendo console exclusivity deal with Capcom and ask Virgin to produce all versions of the game. A separate studio handled primary development (Westwood, whom I mostly know for Eye of the Beholder) but production generally followed a similar approach as Virgin's Aladdin: Disney animators were tapped for spritework and backgrounds, while the good folks at Westwood handled the actual gameplay side of things.
Of every Disney licensed game, with one exception, this is easily the most important Disney game to who I am, mostly for my relationship with my brother. Dude loooooooves The Lion King, looooooooves that this video game existed, and loooooooooves to engage with it. I've mentioned this elsewhere, but ever since the Wii was first announced as the Nintendo Revolution, and we learned about the Virtual Console, my brother's #1 do-or-die wish was this game. All versions of The Lion King, actually, including the ultra-obscure NES release handled by Dark Studios. We're still waiting in NES Lion King to get its due, but I was pretty stoked to finally see the OTHER versions come out on modern consoles with that Disney Classics Collection (which is how I played it for this review). I dunno if my brother knows this collection exists - for reasons I'm not ready to divulge here, this is a difficult question to answer - but if he does, I know he would be happy that the 16-bit and Game Boy releases finally made a comeback.
Given how important The Lion King in general and this game in particular are to me, it hurts to admit it, but - Westwood wasn't able to recapture what Virgin was able to pull off with Aladdin. At least part of this is circumstantial, though. Lion King was on a tight timeline for its dev cycle, with only 6 months in the kiln, so some rough spots aren't that much of a surprise. This is why you have, for example, the notorious difficulty spike in "Can't Wait To Be King" - the dev team ran out of dev time but needed some way to keep the game from being an easy rental, so they padded. I haven't read any commentary to this effect, but I imagine this is also why "Simba's Return" is as tedious as it is - easy to pad out a maze if you gotta.
The Lion King by its nature also runs into a fairly typical issue that I think of as the "Quadruped Problem". Basically, it's inherently harder to come up with new, varied functions for a player character to do in a video game if they're quadrupedal (that is, walk on four legs and have no functional hands) than if they're bipedal (have two legs and presumably functional hands). This is the main reason why Insomniac stepped away from the Spyro franchise, for example - even by the third game, they ran out of things for Spyro to do and cheated by giving him (bipedal!) animal friends with varied functions. This isn't to say that there aren't games that make great use of quadrupedal protagonists - it's just a harder baseline to work with versus a humanoid avatar.
You can definitely feel this in The Lion King, particularly when comparing with Aladdin. Simba can jump and (eventually) claw-swipe for two moves, and he's working on his ROAR for a third. The game gets something from him climbing up surfaces, which is a fair thing to have a cat do. He tumbles, which... I guess that works. He can also swing off things? You can sort of feel that the team was trying to figure out how to pad out this moveset to satisfy a full-length game, which is how you ended up with stuff like Simba roaring to flip the monkeys, or all the beetle pick-ups to add some sort of variety to play. Compare this to Aladdin, who quite naturally climbs ropes, lobs apples, jumps around, and HE'S GOT A SWORD!
But there are some things I just can't reconcile. I've gone through the game several times, and I still have no clear idea of what I'm doing with the final Scar fight. A lot of the bosses are pretty weird, like that lava "boss" in "Be Prepared" I also DO NOT get the gorilla in "Hakuna Matata". Granted, I dunno what boss encounter you would place there, and you DEFINITELY need to represent that sequence somehow in this game, but still...
It's a cheap asset flip, but I kinda like that the boss to "The Pridelands" is just a normal lategame enemy. Always a sucker for that sort of design.
I don't think The Lion King is a very good game, but it is one I'm quite fond of for largely unrelated circumstances. Nothing has really come close to capturing what The Lion King makes me feel in the language of video games, but this is at least a decent effort. The music and animation conversions are all great, and I love how much of the original is still present here. Timon's "...it starts", placed out-of-context, is a weirdly memetic line for me that I find myself wanting to quote a lot, more for its video game use than its movie use. I love the use of "This Land" as the opening stage's background music - it's such an important track to defining the movie's early tone, but it's easy to lose track of it given it's not one of the vocal songs, so giving it a peppy remix helps bring it tonally to the same level as everything else.
Man, I love this game. I can't justify a high score, but I also can't justify a low score. Down the middle will have to do.
P.S. - Apparently, when Disney gave Virgin the license for The Lion King, one of their suggestions for a video game adaptation was a fighting game, in the style of Street Fighter II. I don't expect this would have been any good, particularly since Westwood had no experience with the genre, but I so wish I could see what that might've looked like.
vá se fuder com a fase dos avestruzes
A decently fun platformer back in the day that suddenly becomes incredibly difficult after the first or second level.
This game is so friggin hard.
Wird immer ein Spiel meiner Kindheit und derer Erinnerungen sein.
Once you know how to play each stage, it's pretty fun.
Disney, like so many companies that harvest children's hearts for money, are awash in opportunities to generate that buy-in to make sure they have a chance to pull someone's identity into their market profile forever. For me, the two that almost worked were Aladdin and The Lion King. The Lion King was so enormous in my childhood that in our music class, one year's production was The Lion King. I'm pretty sure it was the only production I really made it to? That's a bunch of other sad stories there. Anyways, the point is, I genuinely believe my ownership of the cartridge of this game is the thing that inoculated me against Disney Adult Disorder, as I don't know that any child could have touched this goddamn thing and held any affection for anything related to it after the fact.
"It starts..." was apparently in reference to the pain.
The Lion King on SNES is a classic, but it's also brutally difficult and unfair in a way that will test the patience of modern gamers. The visuals and music are amazing, nailing that Disney nostalgia, and the first few levels are truly fun. But man, the later stages with precise jumps and instant deaths are rage-inducing. It's one to revisit for the memories, but be prepared for frustration unless you're a platforming pro.
Absolutely gorgeous sprite work and music, but god help the kids who ended up getting their shit rocked.
To be clear. I have officially played through and completed both the SNES and Genesis versions of this game. The Genesis game has some of the most horrific controls I’ve experienced in a Sega Genesis game ever. The jump is sticky, everything has a chop to it from changing directions to short/long jumps to environmental hazards like collapsible floors, spring jumping platforms, slides, all of it has a horrible degree of separation from anything I would consider crisp, snappy, smooth and fluid. With an automatic built in rewind button present in the Disney Collection on the Switch, I bounced between the 16 bit consoles and after forcing myself to complete the Sega version of the game (a span of 4-4 1/2 hours) I fired up the SNES version to see what was different. Everything about it is the exact same game and everything about it is different. The sprites are larger. The graphics are brighter. The voice clips are way clearer, the audio entirely is superior and the controls, though still chock full of those slippery edges, performs insanely better. There’s even a few more bonus games in this one. It felt like THIS was how I was supposed to be playing it on the Genesis. Plus I played through this version in just a little over an hour. With that, I’m giving the SNES version a solid 3 but the Genesis version is a hard 1 1/2 earning that first star for being the Lion King and looking/sounding adequate. With that, grab the Disney collection, prepare that rewind trigger button and DEFINITELY play the SNES version of 1994’s The Lion King
O game pode ser jogado DUBLADO em português:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3w-AsmlsW0&t
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3w-AsmlsW0&t
I have never beaten this game. I believe this may be the hardest game ever made. I read that the game was made intentionally difficult so that kids didn't buy it and beat it in a weekend. I would say that they succeeded in that.
Aunque la nostalgia juega un papel importante, y es indudable que la dificultad jugaba otro papel en aquella epoca, en muchas partes es injusto, artificial o directamente obtuso.
5 stars in my childhood mind. I beat this several times in the 90s. Replaying for the first time in years and it's just as brutal as I remember but I don't care it's a perfect game.
Update: finished the game again and I still don't know the proper button combo to throw Scar off the cliff
Update: finished the game again and I still don't know the proper button combo to throw Scar off the cliff
Technically a committee of 4 of us completed this game. Regular substitutions were required due to sheer defeat fatigue.
A lotta self-reports for skill issues in this review section.
Stupid and floaty. Insanely hard for a young dumb kid like myself.
love it!!
Plays smoothly, looks great, and it isn't all that hard honestly (after multiple playthroughs granted, specifically the monkey stage). Not much I can say, dis is a gud game.
Everything the light touches is our kingdom!
This was my favourite dos game back in the 90's, the majestic pc-dos soundtrack jingling tunes straight from the movie as the occasionally brutal, yet vibrant and diverse levels sets the tone just right as individual set pieces to our beloved tale.
Challenging and occasionally cheap (looking at you level 2), but at the same time forgiving enough with 1 ups and continues generously scattered about, increasingly so as you get to the final stretch of this otherwise short and bittersweet platformer.
This was my favourite dos game back in the 90's, the majestic pc-dos soundtrack jingling tunes straight from the movie as the occasionally brutal, yet vibrant and diverse levels sets the tone just right as individual set pieces to our beloved tale.
Challenging and occasionally cheap (looking at you level 2), but at the same time forgiving enough with 1 ups and continues generously scattered about, increasingly so as you get to the final stretch of this otherwise short and bittersweet platformer.
If you like eating cactuses and plucking your nails off, sure play this game. I like it nonetheless
Pior game que joguei na vida. A primeira e segunda fase me enganou durante muitos anos achando que esse jogo seria bom, mas agora que peguei pra terminar vi um jogo lixo, quebrado, porco e sacana.