My dear island guests, I am gonna take you back to the past! To play some shitty game that suckd (Feeb)as. When I first came up with Pinkie, I wanted to make Pinkie’s Playroom. A youtube channel that would combine Angry Video Game Nerd, Kizuna Ai and Tamagotchi in a very Moe way. Pinkie would hatch from her egg in an empty room with just a NES and a single bad game to play. Trough likes, an unknown force releases more games and later toys and decoration in her room. She would start with bad goes and occasionally get a good one. Today I’d like to talk to you about that game in the first episode. Adventures in the Magic Kingdom for NES however my blog is not about hating things! So I just had to play it again and see if there was something to love!
Frowny Stormy Cloud
Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is a Disney Game that launched in europe in december 1992. It was one of the first NES games I got and my most glitchy cartridge. While the US got this “gem” of a game, a whopping 2,5 years earlier than us , there was no internet to tell us how much this game would suck. Nor was there much objective game magazines out there. At least not that I was aware off. Let alone that I would read as a six year old girl. I was not prepared for the unfair and poorly designed game what awaited me. The game places you in the role of a young boy that you can name yourself visiting Disney’s magical kingdom. Goofy has lost the seven silver keys to Cinderella’s castle and now the parade can start. It’s up to you to find the six silver keys in the rides scattered across the disney theme park.It seemed like such a nice idea but the AVGN would probably call this game, a shit load of fuck. Of course Pinkie would not be as profane as the iconic internet character of James Rolfe. She would swear with very clean curse words… stuff like “Unicorn Sprinkles!” Buuuu! (just a sound) or Frowny Stormy Cloud and trust me there is a lot to frown about in this game..but that is not what this story is about this story is about love.
For a kid who had never been to disneyland herself it was a dream to play this game. Which only got better after I visited. I could first discover these rides. Then finally seem them for real myself. After I went to the park, I could finally recognise these and I could see.. the lay out….sorta .. kinda… fitted. Of course Euro Disney was a bit different so it might have been that. I could still ride Thunder Mountain, race in Autopia, survive the haunted mansion, escape the pirates of the caribbean, travel the galaxy in space mountain.. and take part in a trivia treasure hunt. It’s everything a little kid could want. However all these games are bogged down with artificial difficulty, patterns you need to study, RNG you need to overcome and a very high difficulty wall to overcome. It isn’t really fit for it’s targeted demographic, so back than I never beat it.. but now as an adult I surely must be able to beat these. Isn’t it amazing that you grow into a game like into all the rides of Disney? Wait.. I died how many times! … I have to STOP during a race to wait for an random element to appear? Even if I finish the Thunder Mountain minigame have to stop at a specific station to get the key?! Fuuuuuudge-muffins! Bag of not so tasty Chips! Crab …Cakes! Frowny Stormy Cloud. FROWNY STORMY CLOUD!
Learning About Disney
Okay Okay, that wasn’t very nice of me to say when I was a kid I had fun with this game it’s all that counts right? Okay half the game … okay I liked two out of six mini games. I could beat four of them! The first one I ever learned to beat was the quiz. It was fun to learn about Disney stuff and test my knowledge and since..young Pinkie could do it surely I should be able to do it as well. The first question that I was asked “Which is the smart and the most responsible dwarf’ Such a cute question, I remember these. Next question “what was the first Mickey Cartoon” … hmm well I know this but I think little me would have not known that. Nani! Donald Duck’s Middle name is Fauntleroy?! I never knew that! Cool!.
“ Flowers and Trees was the first academy award winning cartoon?! “That’s not stuff a kid would know. Let me tell you that these questions are impossible, the only way a kid could get all these (again in the time before the internet) was through trial and error. Of course these questions are randomised and you can actual game over trough wrong answers…. Well at least it’s more fun than doing homework hey?! I mean we can learn what year cinderella originally came out in! I never knew Snow White made Gooseberry Pie for the dwarfs. I figured it would have been an apple pie, or a strawberry pie! What even is a gooseberry anyway? I do know Yennefer smells like them!
Finally I managed to study enough to clear this trial I did in my past. Time to move onto space mountain, the second trial young Pinkie managed to clear. This one is a quick time event. It says to press the button prompt on the screen. Surely I can do that! There it says A… Oh… it meant I was on planet A…the button prompts are below. Well that is one hitpoint down. This one is fairly doable, until you get to the halfway point. This one is about memorising again. About learning to recognise small cues instead of the actual button prompts because those arrive way to late. Still all in all this is actually a fun minigame and look I can actually buy hit points from the menu!….But I can’t get any stars in this stage… this one is meant to play last. Darn.. I lost a life.. wait.. Game over?! Of course that means new questions to memorise! At least I am getting real Disney smart.
Where are the disney characters though? With the quiz I just talk to random humans. Why not make it disney characters. Wait they aren’t on any of the rides either.. we just get some still images. During one event we race against Petey.. but of course he is just another car sprite…. hmmmm. that kinda… “No Pinkie .. this blog is about love! Tell us what you love about this game!” Well the music is pretty catchy! I love the space mountain theme. I love how it makes me appreciate the actual characters so much more and want to visit the actual theme park. By now I could really impress them with my big Disney Brain. I now know Mickey’s Birthday is 18 november 1928. Disregarding the year our birthdays are just a day apart. I really love knowing that.
Training your brain
The two stages I never beat as a kid where the platforming stages, my sister could at least beat Thunder Mountain so we did get close to beating this. Yet I was pretty good at platformers. I beat all the robot masters in mega man 2, I completed Super Mario Bros 3. Yet I never could finish Adventures in the Magic Kingdom? Let me investigate this. I actually had fun finding out where I struggled with this as a kid. Though it did not take me long to find out. These stages are very challenging. Both the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean are challenging platformers with unique mechanics. In Pirates you got to rescue some girls and in The Haunted Mansion you have to defeat a ghost with limited candles as ammunition. Pirates has you dodging projectiles and is composed of mostly evasive jumping, where the Haunted Mansion mostly relies on precision jumps and well timed actions. I got to give them credit they still feel very different from each other.
However once again they do seem to be way too difficult for their core audience. My younger self should have been it’s core audience, yet the three hit point system is way to unforgiving. While these two stages ACTUALLY hold stars that allow you to buy extra hit points, so much cheap deaths are thrown at you that you are mostly training your brain again. While this was common for games of that time, these stages kind of linger on. A game over resets all progress which makes this a very long stretch to remember. Perhaps if you somehow could SAVE a moment in Retro games ..to pick up after we could beat them.
Now it does seem like this post will end with me being very negative about the game, but somewhere in my end struggle something happened. I actually began to find the magic, I actually had some sort of fun. I found back the fun young Pinkie had. Old Pinkie has become spoiled. She played better, young Pinkie.. kinda did but never in the same genre. Never could young Pinkie experience some a hub world game that lead to several kinds of games. Never could she walk in a theme park like in this game. When old Pinkie reached the zenith of her annoyance .. she realised there was nothing like this anymore. Nowadays games are meant to be beatable by everyone, enjoyable to anyone and we have so many tools around herself to make gaming never be the same again. People tell us how we should play games on Youtube, if we die in a game there are no consequences and we have so many ways and tools to make a game great and extensive.
Back in my old days we had no such options. We had artificially difficulty , a game wasn’t just about how well we can hold a controller it was about remembering patterns and actually being punished harshly for it. We weren’t massive game addicts in that time because these game could frustrate us so much we had to take breaks and since our progress was wiped anyway. Adventures in the magic Kingdom is a game you can beat in 18 minutes… like most games of that time. Yet we needed strategy guides, intense training , memorising everything, every pattern and learn it by heart. I can dream final fantasy VI and VII by heart even if it took 100 hours to finish, I caught every single pokémon in Galar in two or three weeks.. and yet this below mediocre Disney themed game. Yet this 18 minute game took me 29 years to beat. I did not put that many hours in .. but it was never meant for that.. It was meant to frustrate you and push you to get a little better each time until you eventually beat it. Yes it’s incredibly unfair, there is way to much RNG and pattern memorisation, the looks and theming is lackluster and it certainly did not cater to it’s audience..but it was good enough for Tiny Pinkie. This dumpster fire of a game pleased me, because I just wanted to play games and this was another I enjoyed. Everyone has a game like this, their Bubsy, their Bebe’s kids, their Skate or Die. That one stinker you really enjoyed because it was still a game.
Nowadays we boycott our favorite developer, because the new game is slightly shorter than the game before it. Now we make angry tweets on how “Generic Shooter 5 has only 190 guns, while Generic SHooter 4 had 250, therefore Generic Shooter 5 is not worth full price.. and what’s worse they will make those other guns accessible in a free update that comes with dlc! For shame! A game as terrible as Adventures in The Magical Kingdom makes me appreciate how far we have come, how great games have become and how enjoyment isn’t always strictly in the quality of a game but what you as a fan make of it yourself. I remember my sister and me playing the quiz over and over..roleplaying we were on big tv quizzes, making up stories about the Haunted Mansion level being a game show where you had to survive giving each life a personality of its own. It was great. Games like these make me appreciate games that much more and showed me what it truly meant to love gaming. And for that it genuinely is a magical game that I will cherish forever.
Pinkie's Paradise 