Aussie Bargain Roundup: Disney Classic Games: Aladdin and The Lion King

I remember buying the demos to these (plus The Jungle Book) on 3 1/2 inch floppy disks from a shareware vendor at Westfield North Rocks’ Sunday computer market for $5.00 a pop in the mid 90s. We couldn’t afford full version games in those days, so the majority of my childhood games were shareware games (oddly, some “registered version” episodes of certain games, usually the third episode in a trilogy were erroneously sold by some vendors as shareware, but almost never the second).

I particularly recall The Lion King being brutally difficult, and the demos probably only afforded a single level each. I recall there being a retail compilation set on CD-ROM with Aladdin, The Lion King, and The Jungle Book in one of those oversized (then normal-sized :P) boxes for PC. While The Jungle Book is the least interesting of the three properties here, it is a shame that they are not including that as part of this (overpriced) collection.

I’m also really glad that they are including multiple versions of the game as part of this release, including the Game Boy versions. When old multiplatform games are re-released, handheld iterations are usually ignored completely, which is a shame as I overwhelmingly prefer Game Boy games to NES/SNES. There have also been cases where the Game Boy Color/Advance iterations of a multiplatform release were superior to the identically-titled game on consoles, and I would like to see more rereleases in this vein where the handheld versions are preserved as they offer their own experience and value to the package.

With the Ghostbusters, I believe the Wii version had its own art/gameplay style and I assume that the DS version was a different game altogether (with only the name/license in common). It’s a shame that they were not preserved/remastered as part of the recent rerelease.