Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland

 I was just browsing through lists of Game Boy Color games, and on a complete whim, I decided to play one of them on emulator.

The game I played was: "Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland". The screenshots of this game looked appealing and I wanted to give it a try.

This is a platforming game. It's quite short and not too difficult.

Most of the time the game is a sidescroller, but there are some top-down exploration sections as well.

The main thing that caught my attention when I saw this game was how beautifully fluidly-animated Alice's sprite animations are. Her movements are so incredibly detailed, and the motion looks so smooth. This game has some top-notch pixel art animation, I was not expecting it.

The first part of the game is a stage where Alice falls down the rabbit hole, and you have to move left and right to avoid incoming obstacles.

Once you land, you begin playing sidescrolling stages.

The main gameplay in the sidescrolling levels is just running and jumping. You jump on enemies' heads to defeat them. It's about as basic and simple as a platformer can get. Which is a good thing for a game like this. ...This game isn't trying to be particularly inventive, it just wants to be a pleasant little journey through some of the memorable parts of the movie. And I'd say it succeeds at providing that for the most part.

Alice runs at a nice fast pace and responds well to the controls. It feels nice to play.

I will complain a bit about how the ledges feel too short - the graphics are detailed, but the terrain collision is done with simple square tiles. So very often, the standable part of the platforms are shorter than what it looks like visually. It makes jumping a bit annoying in some areas. But overall it's not too problematic.

There are mushrooms placed in the stages, which change Alice's size when you touch them - sometimes you need to be tiny to fit through small gaps. You can go back to normal size by touching a mushroom again. ... ...it reminded me of the magic elves from Rayman 1, which work the same way haha. But indeed, size-changing is a very fitting gameplay mechanic for an Alice game. I like the detail where, when you're tiny, the main melody of the music becomes higher-pitched. Very cute.

The level design isn't great, but it isn't too offensive either. Sometimes there are trap doors that make you have to go all the way back up again if you fall down. it's annoying, but since the game isn't too long or challenging, I didn't mind it too much.

There are stars to pick up. If you collect every star on the current screen you're playing, the Cheshire Cat will award Alice with a health refill. It's not a particularly good reward, because you always start at maximum health whenever you enter a new screen, and collecting the last star means that you're almost at the end of the current screen anyway. ...but this game doesn't have lives or any other kind of commodity to worry about, so there wasn't really much else they could have given you.

After three or so platforming levels, the next level is Alice traveling in a bottle down a river. It's another level where you move left and right to avoid incoming obstacles, similar to the rabbit hole level at the start of the game. Though this one is more difficult.

After this, you arrive at a more open-ended hub area, where you have access to four corners of Wonderland to play in the order you choose - the Tea Party, the Caterpillar's forest, the Tweedles' area, and the White Rabbit's house. 

In order to fully complete each area, you need to find items from the other stages. Find a lost handkerchief, find a lost cane, find a lost hammer, that kind of stuff. So there's a bit of running back-and-forth between areas, but it's not too complicated.

...I actually kind of enjoy how the game becomes a bit open ended like this? It's a nice change of pace, and it gives me an opportunity to explore Wonderland at my own pace. And I kind of like the peaceful music in the hub area too. Sometimes it's nice when a game gives you a moment of downtime.

While in this section of the game, whenever you collect 100 stars, the White Rabbit challenges Alice to a race - if you win the race, you get access to a bonus level. In the bonus level, you can find a unique collectible teapot. Collecting the teapot unlocks some character artwork in the gallery on the main menu. 

In the gallery, you can rearrange the character graphics on the backgrounds to create your own little scenes. And it can be printed out if you have a Game Boy Printer.

... ah. This is the kind of fun extra stuff that GBC games used to do. Little interactive gallery modes and stuff like that. I remember Super Mario Bros Deluxe had a lot of things like this in it. ...I kinda miss it.

The worst section of the game is the White Rabbit's House. Alice becomes gigantic, and so you have to play as Bill the Lizard who carries a ladder, and you must continuously place down, climb up, and pick up the same ladder, over and over, in order to reach the top of the house. It is so monotonous and not very fun to play. And it's incredibly annoying when the birds keep knocking your ladder down to the bottom and you have to start from scratch. 

I would call this the only truly bad part of the game.

After completing all four sub areas, you continue on to the Queen of Hearts. There's section where you have to paint all of the roses red within a time limit, then you need to win a very simplistic croquet minigame, and finally, you have to win against a large number of the Queen's card soldiers, who are all defeated by jumping on them of course. It's an endurance test where Alice must defeat 52 cards to win. After this, Alice leaves Wonderland and the game is completed.

Overall... playing a small simple GBC game like this was actually making me feel really wistful.

Because.... this is the exact kind of GBC game I would have played a lot of as a child, if I had had it back then.

I remember as a kid, I played a lot of a really bad Simpsons game on my GBC, and a not-so-great Tom & Jerry game on my GBA...among others.  ... it didn't matter that the game wasn't all that great, it was just fun to interact with and spend time in a fictional world I liked. As a kid, you don't tend to care about bad game design.

...and this Alice game isn't even bad at all!

Playing this Alice game made me feel like.... yeah, in an alternate reality where I owned this game, played it on my GBC, took it on holiday, played it while sitting by myself introvertedly at events my parents took me to....   messing around in the gallery mode when I got bored... idling in the hub area just to hear the music...  in this world that never existed, it probably would have become a childhood favourite game of mine.

But in this current reality, where I only played it on emulator as a 34-year-old, well after it has lost all relevancy.... well, I all I can really do is appreciate it and move on to the next game. ... ... ... ... ...

... ...mmm. am I mourning a nostalgia that never existed? ... I recently learned that the word for this feeling is "anemoia".

Uh anyway. It's a fun cute little GBC game. Nothing groundbreaking, but I'm glad I played it. And it made me remember how much I really loved my Game Boy Color as a child.

That's all.