This makes the game really frustrating, and ruins much of the appeal that this general audience title reaches for (which would have included the rarely pursued pre-teen, female, and older players who help make up the broad-spectrum fan base that a big-name license such as Disney's Toy Story brings with it). The game's settings all look manageable, but run Buzz around in them for a while and you'll find that your space commander hero is a flightless bird, a feeble zero. You'll try over and over again, never knowing that the distance of the leap and the geometry of the thing you are leaping to simply will not allow that leap to work. Thankfully, the game has very few bottomless pits (unlike Mario or Prince of Persia), so very few of those leaps are fatal, but that just makes the game even more frustrating, as you will spend ten minutes getting back up on a ledge to try a leap that you are sure you can make, only to miss by a millimeter again. If you miss a ledge by a centimeter, Buzz won't even reach. In other mascot games (and most specifically Mario 64), the interaction with obstacles is a little forgiving - if you see a jump that you are fairly confident in crossing, you will likely make it, and even tough leaps of faith often work in your favor. Ledges are always inches out of Buzz's reach, no matter how much you double-jump. Everything about the controls feels OK until you try doing something that Mario would have no trouble with. Buzz himself controls reasonably well, but the problem is that he just doesn't control as well as Mario, and yet he faces a quest that is just as daunting. His gun doesn't auto-aim (the game would have been much better served with some of Syphon Filter's control features), but the weapon control is only occasionally bothersome. ![]() Buzz has a number of mascot moves at his disposal (the stomp out of mid-air, the double-jump, the spin move, the ability to grab edges and pull himself up a wall) in addition to his powerful laser weapon (isn't his laser just an LED?). When I have a friend who is facing a life-or-death peril, I'd like to think my buddies would just give me a fricken' pizza token!Īctual gameplay in Toy Story 2 is pretty solid. Potato Head seems to lose a limb or vital organ on just about every level, and you'll need to find the missing parts for him to gain a special power so that you can race your buddy RC around the level in order to collect a Pizza Token (which, of course, is your only way of getting to the next level). Unfortunately for Buzz (and the player), your toy gang is rather incompetent, and so you'll spend most of your time rescuing them and doing menial tasks to win their favors rather than venturing forwards with your quest (kind of makes you wonder why the rest of them even went along on the journey). Woody has been kidnapped, and it is up to Buzz Lightyear and the rest of Andy's favorite toys to rescue him. Gameplay Toy Story 2 follows the plot of the movie point for point (not that I've seen the movie already - the game did a fine job of utterly spoiling the film for me by including cut scene FMV directly from the film, without a single frame of exclusive footage). Guess what went wrong in the 32-bit sequel? The 16-bit games had fantastic graphics (one of the first non-Nintendo games to use the ACM technique of rendering characters and environments on computers), detailed animation, and a soundtrack that fairly reproduced the film - they also had stiff controls, poor aiming of your weapon, vague and senseless mission objectives, and (perhaps worst of all) an arduously long and difficult quest that tested the patience of skilled gamers and drove children back to the sandbox. In fact, if you remember the old SNES and Genesis games of the first Toy Story, you'll have an inkling of what to expect with this sequel (both of which were programmed by Disney Interactive's Traveller's Tales). The gameplay, graphics, and sound all work considerable better on the PlayStation. ![]() It's a good game, better than the N64 game by infinity. Not that Toy Story 2 on PlayStation is a bad game.
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