All in the Details: Glittering Gems Light Up Seven Dwarfs Mine Train Queue

Weather_Lady

Well-Known Member
Totally agree they are not necessary... My opinions of this queue stuff is based in environment and theme, not if people will play the games... I keep thinking to myself "How does an ipad screen embedded into wood in the middle of a hill being mined for diamonds/gems in the middle of a mideval times fantasyland forest fit the theme?" The answer I keep coming up with is: they don't... At least the Space Mountain queue games fit the environment and blend in... These will stick out like sore thumbs cause they do not belong... People want to waste their time playing silly video games in a queue, the same games they can play at home on their computer or phone, that's their issue...

Agree 100%. Video screens "fit" in Tomorrowland and Future World. Anywhere else, they're thematically inappropriate, and to them I say, "harumph." I am confident that my kids, however, will find them absolutely delightful and won't see them as discordant -- any more than a garbage can, Exit sign, safety rail or lightbulb would be discordant -- because they have grown up in a world surrounded by digital screens. It's a generational thing: I see a video screen, an unmistakable and jarring piece of modern technology. My children see the gems on the screen and a fun game, presented in a form that is, to them, as ubiquitous and unremarkable as rocks and trees.
 

MerlinTheGoat

Well-Known Member
The first Epic Mickey was pretty good if you could get past the camera issues, and Disney Infinity has been pretty cool.
Neither of which were developed by Disney personally. Epic Mickey was developed by Junction Point Studios (which Disney bought, but it's still not their own crew). I enjoyed Epic Mickey to some extent despite its issues, camera problems generally come with the territory in 3D platformers (Epic Mickey is also far from the worst camera i've seen in such types of games, the Nintendo 64 and PS1 era of 3D platformers were often worse and I still enjoyed them). A lot of people were split on the game however, I was glad to see a new 3D platformer because they're kind of a dying breed lately, but it certainly wasn't as good as the classic 3D platformers from the PS2 era and prior. Have yet to try the sequel, it looked promising but i've not heard much good about it and it's supposed to be worse than the first. Either way Junction Point is now dead, apparently due to sales of the sequel not meeting expectations.

Disney Infinity was developed by Avalanche, though Disney probably had a little more hands-on with this one due to financial reasons and the toy gimmick. I didn't care for the game at all from what little I played, but it's a blatant cash grab on top of that. The toy idea at its foundation is also a blatant knock off of another obvious cash grab series- Skylanders. The game itself isn't what i'd call awful, but I didn't like it either. And again the main goal Disney had with the game was selling overpriced "DLC" (download content for the non game savvy, just in physical form here instead of digital additions) in the form of its collectible figurines. There are way worse Disney games (the shovelware on many handheld gaming and phone devices for instance), but there are also far superior ones as well. Ones that don't rely on a stupid faddish toy selling scam as the selling point. Epic Mickey would be included in the ones that are better (and that is still far from the best out there).

Another fun recent game was a loose "remake" of an old Sega Genesis game called Castle of Illusion. Though while it does take story and thematic elements directly from the original game, it is effectively an entirely new game from a level design perspective. Critics were a bit mixed on it, but personally I found it a very good sidescrolling platformer that really reminded me of the original Mickey games from the 16 bit era. Again though, Sega are the ones responsible for its gameplay quality (and sadly that particular division of Sega that developed the remake has now been shut down).

There was another really neat recent game called Ducktales Remastered. It is a remake of the original Nintendo 8bit Ducktales by Capcom, though this time Way Forward handled development. It does some new things here and there regarding level design, but it's far more faithful to the original game than Castle of Illusion's remake was (Ducktales Remastered is more of an actual remake while Castle of Illusion is more of a reboot). The awesome thing about Ducktales Remastered though is that they got some really talented artists to hand draw the sprites, AND they got the original voice cast from the old Ducktales show to come back for new story scenes. Some gamers didn't enjoy the story sequences because they were rather lengthy, but I was overjoyed to see them. It was like we were seeing a brand new episode of Ducktales (and the dialog was written well and definitely paid proper tribute to the original story). It was great.

My point remains though. I do not disagree that there have been some excellent Disney licensed video games. There very clearly have. But the ones that are good were not actually made by Disney, they were all handled by experienced third party developers such as Capcom, Sega etc who already know the business and have track records with making good original games already. When Disney tries their own hand at developing video games such as these queue games it fails pretty badly, even in comparison to cheap phone games.
 

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