Based on the movie by the same name from 1988, Michael Jackson's Moonwalker is a beat 'em up game released initially on August 24, 1990 for the Sega Genesis and Master System. An Arcade version was released a month earlier, which is an isometric run and gun game.
The game is better than I expected for a game around a celebrity, and the good parts go beyond the soundtrack. More on my thoughts in detail below.
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STORYTELLING
The setup for the story is explained in the manual, while the game itself only has any explanation shortly before the boss fight. What your goal is, is self-explanatory as you play though.
You control Michael Jackson, duh, and go into hostile territory to free a bunch of kidnapped children. All children look like Katie from the movie and say "Michael!" when you free them whilst giving you a boost to your magic/health bar.
At the end of each stage, Mr. Big - the boss - shows up and tells you that "you will never catch me" before he sends a bunch of his goons at you.
The manual tells you that Mr. Big is kidnapping every kid in the world to turn them into his slaves and the text in-game only tells you that you can now face him, so there isn't much here. I'm probably the guy who dived the deepest into the storytelling of this game ever right now because it's barely existent and not the point of this game.
GAMEPLAY
Michael Jackson shows up in a club and flips a coin into a jukebox to flip on a banging soundtrack that provides the backdrop for a gaming experience that is fun despite its limitations, but is held back tremendously by the game's level design.
In this 2D beat 'em up game, you do two things. First, you beat up a bunch of bad guys using your feet (or your arms when you jump), which releases magical sparkles that apparently damage bad people. Second, you have to rescue children.
The Fighting Part: This was fun but had plenty of issues. You see, you have only ONE bar in this game, which represents both your health AND your magical spark tank. And once you drop below a certain amount, you can only do weak punches, not shoot magic anymore. There is a special attack that you can do by spinning, which however drains your bar very fast. If you spin for a little bit, you throw your hat and it creates an explosion. If you spin for half of your health bar, every enemy on screen stands next to Michael Jackson and they do a little dance, which kills every enemy afterwards. It's a great little gimmick for this game but it's unfortunate that it drains your health bar to do it, instead of getting its individual bar. This made me ignore this feature apart from a few small instances throughout the game.
Another issue I got was that you couldn't both turn and shoot magic. Especially in the final two "chapters", enemies would be thrown at you in bunches from both sides, and it felt like it was pretty much impossible to get through the levels unless you knew where to find the kids and therefore skipped most of the level.
The Finding Children Part: And so, let's talk about this part. Depending on the level you find yourself in, you have to check windows, doors, in car trunks, in caves, behind bushes or even behind tombstones to find children. There are dozens of these per level and there is a set number of children hiding in pre-determined hiding spots. As mentioned, I'm glad, because this is probably the only way to beat the game (which I didn't), but imagine missing ONE spot and having to go through the entire level again trying to find it, whilst enemies keep respawning and draining your health bar.
Some hiding spots you won't even find because you won't know where to look. For example you will have to look behind manhole cover that seem to be there as part of the scenery, but no, you actually have to do a spin on top of it to essentially screw it open.
Overall, the core gameplay loop was fun enough, but it all went to shizzles starting in around Chapter 4, where so many enemies would appear that it would make looking for kids tedious. The boss fight only triggers once you find them all, and even the boss fights become a pain, because all of a sudden, 10, nope 20, nope 30 enemies appear one after the other, if not even more than that, and in the graveyard level in particular, those damn zombies appear that can just detach from their legs and fly at you to deal a lot of damage. Meanwhile you can't use any special attacks because it would drain your health too much and you'd die shortly after. These zombies are beatable, I managed it, but it only gets worse from there and that's where I said I've played this enough.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Not fair to call it voice acting, but the children do say "Michael" every time you rescue one, which I imagine will be instantly memorable for those who have played this a lot when they were young. I have mixed thoughts about the sound design. Some actions sound good, like the sparkle of the magic or Michael saying "wooo" when you jump-punch, but then you got the bad swooshing sound that plays whenever you check windows, doors, bushes and so on. Overall it's not too bad, not that great either.
What is great however is the soundtrack. It's a 16 bit remix of some of Michael Jackson's most popular songs and whether you like the beats or not will make or break this for you. I think his most popular songs are timeless classics, so naturally I enjoyed this quite a lot. My only issue was that there was no Thriller during the graveyard level (zombies and Michael even did the dance) but apparently there were licensing issues there.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The design of Michael Jackson and enemies is great and the game has plenty of differently and nicely designed levels from a graphical standpoint.
ATMOSPHERE
Mixing beats from Michael Jackson songs alongside a graveyard level with zombies and Michael doing the Thriller dance is great and puts you in a great mood, even if the song Thriller itself is not licensed. Levels also have unique themes which I enjoyed, even if they didn't always feel like they suit Michael Jackson.
CONTENT
The overall package here is fun but there isn't a lot of variety. You don't gain any new abilities, there are no power up items, special moves are discouraged due to draining your health, mission objectives are always the same and most of the playing time you accrue comes from trial and error. As I said, the content overall is fun though, so I'll assume that most of you will enjoy a couple hours with it.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
This just gets progressively worse as more and more and more and more enemies are thrown at you, but your abilities never improve to properly tackle them on. Instead you just wildly shoot left and right and hope you get them all before your health runs out. Don't even think about using special items because that's basically suicide.
On a smaller scale, making it extremely hard to even figure out where to look for the children, making you go all the way to the boss fight whenever you die during one and making you run around the entire level if you miss a single child are some more annoyances with how this game is designed. Not good.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
The way they've added a bunch of Michael Jackson animation and dance moves, the dance he does with the enemies, the remix of his songs and designing the game to his likeness overall is pretty well done, however it doesn't really translate to other games.
REPLAYABILITY
No abilities to collect/find, no secrets apart from one if you somehow manage to catch a shooting star (check it out on YT if you don't want to play this game, it's pretty nice), no randomizing of hiding spots for children (though some of you might prefer this) and terrible level design in later chapters means a replay is only advisable if you really want to try and beat your high score.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I liked the core gameplay here, even if its is feature-limited. Playing this to that great soundtrack was great fun for the first few hours but once I got into the latter stages of the graveyard chapter, it just got more and more annoying to play. Ultimately that makes it an average game for its time overall.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
This game was a big topic back in the day, with multiple magazines putting Michael Jackson on their covers.
- Andy Eddy for VGCE, Issue 19 (Aug 90): "Updated cartridges were constantly provided to Jackson, and his suggestions were then passed on to the programmers" | Not an 'opinion' but certainly awesome to hear Jackson being so involved in the creation of this game
- Andromeda for GamePro, Issue 13 (Aug 90): "The animation is smooth, realistic and eye-popping."
The game is better than I expected for a game around a celebrity, and the good parts go beyond the soundtrack. More on my thoughts in detail below.
____________
STORYTELLING
The setup for the story is explained in the manual, while the game itself only has any explanation shortly before the boss fight. What your goal is, is self-explanatory as you play though.
You control Michael Jackson, duh, and go into hostile territory to free a bunch of kidnapped children. All children look like Katie from the movie and say "Michael!" when you free them whilst giving you a boost to your magic/health bar.
At the end of each stage, Mr. Big - the boss - shows up and tells you that "you will never catch me" before he sends a bunch of his goons at you.
The manual tells you that Mr. Big is kidnapping every kid in the world to turn them into his slaves and the text in-game only tells you that you can now face him, so there isn't much here. I'm probably the guy who dived the deepest into the storytelling of this game ever right now because it's barely existent and not the point of this game.
GAMEPLAY
Michael Jackson shows up in a club and flips a coin into a jukebox to flip on a banging soundtrack that provides the backdrop for a gaming experience that is fun despite its limitations, but is held back tremendously by the game's level design.
In this 2D beat 'em up game, you do two things. First, you beat up a bunch of bad guys using your feet (or your arms when you jump), which releases magical sparkles that apparently damage bad people. Second, you have to rescue children.
The Fighting Part: This was fun but had plenty of issues. You see, you have only ONE bar in this game, which represents both your health AND your magical spark tank. And once you drop below a certain amount, you can only do weak punches, not shoot magic anymore. There is a special attack that you can do by spinning, which however drains your bar very fast. If you spin for a little bit, you throw your hat and it creates an explosion. If you spin for half of your health bar, every enemy on screen stands next to Michael Jackson and they do a little dance, which kills every enemy afterwards. It's a great little gimmick for this game but it's unfortunate that it drains your health bar to do it, instead of getting its individual bar. This made me ignore this feature apart from a few small instances throughout the game.
Another issue I got was that you couldn't both turn and shoot magic. Especially in the final two "chapters", enemies would be thrown at you in bunches from both sides, and it felt like it was pretty much impossible to get through the levels unless you knew where to find the kids and therefore skipped most of the level.
The Finding Children Part: And so, let's talk about this part. Depending on the level you find yourself in, you have to check windows, doors, in car trunks, in caves, behind bushes or even behind tombstones to find children. There are dozens of these per level and there is a set number of children hiding in pre-determined hiding spots. As mentioned, I'm glad, because this is probably the only way to beat the game (which I didn't), but imagine missing ONE spot and having to go through the entire level again trying to find it, whilst enemies keep respawning and draining your health bar.
Some hiding spots you won't even find because you won't know where to look. For example you will have to look behind manhole cover that seem to be there as part of the scenery, but no, you actually have to do a spin on top of it to essentially screw it open.
Overall, the core gameplay loop was fun enough, but it all went to shizzles starting in around Chapter 4, where so many enemies would appear that it would make looking for kids tedious. The boss fight only triggers once you find them all, and even the boss fights become a pain, because all of a sudden, 10, nope 20, nope 30 enemies appear one after the other, if not even more than that, and in the graveyard level in particular, those damn zombies appear that can just detach from their legs and fly at you to deal a lot of damage. Meanwhile you can't use any special attacks because it would drain your health too much and you'd die shortly after. These zombies are beatable, I managed it, but it only gets worse from there and that's where I said I've played this enough.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Not fair to call it voice acting, but the children do say "Michael" every time you rescue one, which I imagine will be instantly memorable for those who have played this a lot when they were young. I have mixed thoughts about the sound design. Some actions sound good, like the sparkle of the magic or Michael saying "wooo" when you jump-punch, but then you got the bad swooshing sound that plays whenever you check windows, doors, bushes and so on. Overall it's not too bad, not that great either.
What is great however is the soundtrack. It's a 16 bit remix of some of Michael Jackson's most popular songs and whether you like the beats or not will make or break this for you. I think his most popular songs are timeless classics, so naturally I enjoyed this quite a lot. My only issue was that there was no Thriller during the graveyard level (zombies and Michael even did the dance) but apparently there were licensing issues there.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The design of Michael Jackson and enemies is great and the game has plenty of differently and nicely designed levels from a graphical standpoint.
ATMOSPHERE
Mixing beats from Michael Jackson songs alongside a graveyard level with zombies and Michael doing the Thriller dance is great and puts you in a great mood, even if the song Thriller itself is not licensed. Levels also have unique themes which I enjoyed, even if they didn't always feel like they suit Michael Jackson.
CONTENT
The overall package here is fun but there isn't a lot of variety. You don't gain any new abilities, there are no power up items, special moves are discouraged due to draining your health, mission objectives are always the same and most of the playing time you accrue comes from trial and error. As I said, the content overall is fun though, so I'll assume that most of you will enjoy a couple hours with it.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
This just gets progressively worse as more and more and more and more enemies are thrown at you, but your abilities never improve to properly tackle them on. Instead you just wildly shoot left and right and hope you get them all before your health runs out. Don't even think about using special items because that's basically suicide.
On a smaller scale, making it extremely hard to even figure out where to look for the children, making you go all the way to the boss fight whenever you die during one and making you run around the entire level if you miss a single child are some more annoyances with how this game is designed. Not good.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
The way they've added a bunch of Michael Jackson animation and dance moves, the dance he does with the enemies, the remix of his songs and designing the game to his likeness overall is pretty well done, however it doesn't really translate to other games.
REPLAYABILITY
No abilities to collect/find, no secrets apart from one if you somehow manage to catch a shooting star (check it out on YT if you don't want to play this game, it's pretty nice), no randomizing of hiding spots for children (though some of you might prefer this) and terrible level design in later chapters means a replay is only advisable if you really want to try and beat your high score.
PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.
OVERALL
I liked the core gameplay here, even if its is feature-limited. Playing this to that great soundtrack was great fun for the first few hours but once I got into the latter stages of the graveyard chapter, it just got more and more annoying to play. Ultimately that makes it an average game for its time overall.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
This game was a big topic back in the day, with multiple magazines putting Michael Jackson on their covers.
- Andy Eddy for VGCE, Issue 19 (Aug 90): "Updated cartridges were constantly provided to Jackson, and his suggestions were then passed on to the programmers" | Not an 'opinion' but certainly awesome to hear Jackson being so involved in the creation of this game
- Andromeda for GamePro, Issue 13 (Aug 90): "The animation is smooth, realistic and eye-popping."