I like Aladdin’s smooth sense of agility and the overall polished nature of the gameplay, whether it be for him running, jumping, gliding, and hanging on to the ledge of a platform (which is such a huge saving grace during key instances, like in Brøderbund’s Prince of Persia), the visuals are vibrantly colorful and great to look at (I like the parallax scrolling looming across from the palace as you’re high up in Agrabah, the Cave of Wonders looks fantastic, and the Genie’s lamp segments are fun to look at) with Aladdin having smoothly fluid animation, the lighthearted Disney charm is well-implemented (I love how expressive Abu is, and how during one point in Genie’s lamp you can spot Abu clinging on to Carpet as it flies from a distance), I love this video game adaptation’s sweeping music by Yuki Iwai, Yūko Takehara, and Setsuo Yamamoto (the first Cave of Wonders’ relaxing theme and the pyramid theme’s mysterious nature, and I greatly enjoyed their renditions of “A Whole New World” and “Friend Like Me”, RIP Robin Williams) and I liked how they tried to capture the Alan Menken quality as best they could, and I like how Capcom’s Disney’s Aladdin had replay value depending on how many red gems you collected by the time you finished the game (provided you did it in one sitting) which gave you different-looking credits should you have gathered the majority of them and how you might uncover a secret or two after searching every nook and cranny.

Out of the six Disney Capcom games on the Nintendo 16-bit system, this was the first among them that I played, and there is a funny story about how I first played this take on Disney’s Aladdin: so over twenty years ago, one of my cousins owned a plug-and-play system which had a multitude of Famicom and NES games (at the time, I didn’t even know the majority of them were real until I learned about them from the internet years later) and I was surprised to see “Disney’s Aladdin” listed in one of their plug-and-plays which was a ROM hack of the Capcom game (not knowing at the time that it was originally, indeed, a Capcom game) and from what I recall I enjoyed playing that quite a bit (it was different from the Virgin version of Disney’s Aladdin I played on the Game Boy and on the PC growing up), the only downside was that if you lost a life once then the music stopped playing and it was possible to lose a life in the “A Whole New World” segment. On September 2005, there was a Hurricane called Rita that had my family and I evacuate from our home so (for the week that it lasted… our home was unaffected by it) we went to stay at a friend of my mother’s who lived several hours away from us and while we were there I played video games on the child’s SNES console: it was the first time I played HAL Laboratory’s Kirby’s Dream Course (which I was addicted to) and Kirby Super Star, Konami’s Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose!, Nintendo’s Mario Paint, and Capcom’s Disney’s Aladdin. Now, when I was a much younger kid, I do recall one time seeing its box one time my family and I went to a Toys R Us during one Summer (generally I went for Game Boy games) seeing its box, but not knowing anything about the console wars at the time I was under the impression that the Disney’s Aladdin on the Nintendo 16-bit system was more or less akin to the version I played on the Game Boy and PC by Virgin. I was mistaken, as I discovered when I played it on the SNES during that week-long stay, as I was surprised that it was like the NES ROM hack I played mere years prior (and ended up enjoying a lot more, especially with the ability to run).

I remember reading many years how Shinji Mikami, who was also the designer of Who Framed Roger Rabbit on the Game Boy and the Nintendo 16-bit adaptation of Goof Troop, in a retrospective interview regarding Capcom’s Disney’s Aladdin how he had some reservations about the take he worked on and how he wished he was involved in the Virgin version with the primary reasoning being how Aladdin doesn’t wield a scimitar in-game like he does on the cover; it’s always fascinating reading about the insight behind the development of certain titles of yesteryear, what they’re most pleased about, what their fondest memories working on it are, or what they could’ve done differently if given the opportunity.

Which 16-bit version of Disney’s Aladdin do I find to be better, though? Well, that depends on the mood, really, they’re both fun games in their own right with their own sets of pros and cons: the Virgin take is fun with its intricately designed (occasionally open-ended) areas and alternation between apple tossing and scimitar swinging with Disney quality animation and the Capcom version is good fun while it lasts with a vibrantly colorful aesthetic and polished controls (of the two, though, I much prefer Carpet’s entrance here) as you acrobatically hop and bop off of enemies.

Merry Christmas, Steve, and once again congratulations on becoming a father! =D Take care!

To each their own