Disney's Aladdin
Disney's Aladdin is a platformer based on the animated film of the same name and ranks among the best-looking games ever released for DOS. The player moves through the marketplace of Agrabah, the Cave of Wonders, the Sultan's dungeon, and the final palace, using a scimitar for close combat and apples as a throwing weapon. Besides regular jumping, Aladdin swings on ropes, slides down stall awnings, climbs poles, and in one section flees on a magic carpet ahead of rising lava. The levels are full of small secrets, hidden gems, and bonus items, so it pays to move through them more slowly than the pace of the game might suggest.
The main draw is the graphics. The characters are animated using a hand-drawn technique close to film animation, so Aladdin runs, dodges, and fights across hundreds of smoothly connected frames, and the whole thing feels like an interactive cartoon. The backgrounds are colorful and full of detail, from crackling fires to moving crowds, and the PC version makes full use of a VGA palette. The audio side borrows familiar melodies from the film and plays them through a sound card, backed by pronounced sound effects. The game demanded a fairly capable computer by the standards of its time, but the reward was a visual experience the likes of which had barely been seen on PC before.
The title originally started life on consoles and arrived on PC as a port, and for many European players this version became their first encounter with the game. At the time, reviewers praised the graphics and animation, while criticism centered on its relatively short length and on difficulty that was gentler compared to other platformers. Today it holds a reputation as one of the finest movie tie-ins in gaming history, mainly because it didn't settle for simply retelling the plot but offered its own carefully designed action game with immediately readable controls. Visually it remains one of the most charming games to appear on computer screens of its era, and many players remember it exactly for that reason.
Game 13 of 204 for PC / DOS (XT až 486)
The same title elsewhere (3)
The 1994 DOS version ranks among the best-looking platformers of its time — it follows the more action-oriented take that made the Genesis version famous, with a scimitar as the main weapon and fluid animation modeled on the film. The Game Boy Color version, by contrast, was made by Capcom, a studio known for more precise platforming, so it leans closer to the other, more refined line of Aladdin games that emphasized accurate jumping over sword-swinging action. Graphics and music inevitably had to scale down to the handheld's lower resolution and sound chip, yet both versions keep their own identity — this isn't a simple port of one game onto another platform.
