Chris’s note: Rarely on a Monday morning am I greeted with such a weirdly lucid spam message about such a revolting concept. Let alone four of them like I got this morning. LEGOs and dog constipation… you other spam bots are gonna have to work hard to top this one.

Since I didn’t give a complete list in my article, Bag-O’-Sega™ came with Aladdin, Jurrasic Park, Eternal Champions, Street Fighter 2: Special Championship Edition, Sonic The Hedgehog 2, and The Phantom 2040. Not having a manual for any of these games means that I am limited to what the game itself tells me to do, and experimentation. I played Phantom and Champions for about six seconds each before declaring them suckfests, but have since found reasons to appreciate these games. I may review them in the future, but the point I’m trying to get to is this:

I thought Aladdin would suck so much, I didn’t even give it a chance.

I’m glad I finally did, because this game is SO impressive in many, many ways. The first amazing feature that makes itself known is the audio. I mean damn this game sounds great. The voices, usually compressed and crappy on older console games, sound great and are totally understandable. The sound effects are spot on, and the music is probably the best music I have ever heard for a console game from this era.

Visually, the game is just awesome. It is incredibly animated, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise considering its Disney’s baby from back in the day when they could do no wrong and weren’t the Devil. The colors are rich and vibrant, the motions are fluid, and there are little pieces of charmingly clever eye-candy hidden throughout the game (my favorite so far is seeing that rastafarian crab/lobster guy from ‘The Little Mermaid’ chained up to the wall inside the the Sultan’s dungeon). Little touches like that can make a game for me, and Aladdin delivers.

I’m currently trying to survive the Cave of Wonders. Its a great level, and surviving it would be a lot easier to do if it weren’t for the bats. Its not that they’re hard to kill, its that they’re hard to hit, and theres 900,000,000,000 OF THE FUCKING THINGS! JESUS CHRIST IN HEAVEN!!

So, yeah, I wanted to hate it. I wanted to hate it partly becuase I thought it was a throw-away kiddie game, but mostly because it was Disney, and I thought it would be another crap money-making franchise feeder. But just like ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’ movie, the Aladdin game for Sega Genesis completely threw me for a loop by rockin’ the casbah, whether the fuck the sharif likes it or not. Forced me to give some props to The Mouse, which I don’t normally do. There’s no denying it; Aladdin is a quality game. 9 out of 10.