Goofy's Hysterical History Tour (Mega Drive)

 Games on SEGA consoles that star Disney's main mascot characters have a great reputation, and they deserve it. Quackshot, World and Castle of Illusion, Lucky Dime Caper, and others are all widely-beloved classics that radiate quality from the moment you turn them on. There are some lesser titles, though, that aren't so fondly remembered: Fantasia, for example was hated when it came out, and only comes up in discussions of terrible Mega Drive games nowadays. Goofy's Hysterical History Tour has it even worse: it was released without anyone even noticing, and Idoubt that any of those few that remember it do so fondly.

 

It starts out pretty much as soon as you turn the game on: for some reason, it has its own slightly different, slightly cheaper-looking versions of the "Produced by or under license from SEGA Enterprises Ltd." and SEGA logo screens. And the title screen has that strange, intangible look of cheapness that a lot of (but defintiely not all) US-developed Mega Drive games have to them, especially ones aimed at kids. Things briefly start to look up once you actually start playing, though, as Goofy himself has a pretty decently animted walk cycle, and the extending arm device with which he's armed is pretty interesting too, and actually brought to mind better games, like Bionic Commando or  The Magical Quest starring Micky Mouse. 

 

That's about the sum of the positive things I have to say about this game, though. The longer you play, the less fun you'll have. There are enemies every where, and they're all insane damage sponges. You're constantly having to make leaps of faith, being expected to just jump off of cliffs into the void, and hoping there'll be something to land on when you get there. Or you've got to jump down onto a tiny little platform that can only just be seen when you crouch (and of course, you can't jump straight from crouching). There are apparently several epochs on Goofy's eponymous tour, but after about an hour of playing (and I would have given up long before that without save states), and after finishing at least seven or eight surprisingly long stages, there was no end in sight for the prehistoric age, with its one background image and one tileset.

 

The thing that finally made me give up on the game, though, was a sequence of jumps that made heavy use of the extending arm I praised only a couple of paragraphs ago. The thing is that by default, pressing B makes Goofy extend the arm diagonally upwards in the direction he's facing. If you press left or right while presing B, it'll stretch out horizontally instead. All sounds normal so far, right? Unfortunately, the sequence in question wants you to jump and grab platforms above and  to the right. So, you have to press C and right to make the jump, holding them long enough to get close to the platform, then let go of both and press B on its own to stretch the arm towards it. But instinctively, you'll still be pressing right when you press B, and the arm will stretch out horizontally, causing you to fall onto the spikes below. There's a few of these jumps in a row, all identical, and if you fail one, you either start again, or you lose your last bit of health on the spikes below and got back to the start of the stage.

 

You've probably figured it out by now, but Goofy's Hysterical History Tour isn't worth your time. It's boring, frustrating, and ugly. One final example of how it's a shoddy producation as well as a terrible game, though: like most platform games, you can hold up to pan the camera upwards and see what's above you. But Goofy has no accompanying animation for this! He doesn't even turn his eyes upwards, he just stands there as the camera pans. So to re-iterate: game's awful, don't bother.