TaleSpin (TurboGrafx-16 Review)

TaleSpin
Platform: TurboGrafx-16
Developed by Radiance Software
Published by NEC
First Released July, 1991
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Always check to see if there’s cheat codes first, Cathy. I could have probably cut the forty-five minutes of agony I spent with TaleSpin down to a more palatable thirty. Hell, maybe even twenty.

I can say exactly three good things about TaleSpin, which is sadly the very first TurboGrafx-16 game to ever get the full Indie Gamer Chick review treatment. (1) You can throw projectiles diagonally. I hate it when games don’t let you do that. This one, you can. Kudos. (2) When you game over, it doesn’t make you restart a stage from the start. You go back to the last checkpoint. It’s basically just a point reset. Double kudos. (3) It didn’t gain sentience and murder me through my monitor. Otherwise, this is easily the worst game I’ve played during this Disney marathon yet. It’s one of the most boring and poorly made platformers I’ve ever played.

For about four minutes, it’s also one of the worst shmups I’ve ever played. It might be THE worst, in fact. All the collision box and cheap hits from the platforming sections, only this time in a shmup. Oh, and there’s no variety to it and no boss fight.

TaleSpin consists of four non-linear levels, a shmup, a level where you play as Kit (I’d never seen the show and assumed his name was “Li’l Britches”) and a final platforming stage. I played the jungle level first, and it was easily the best stage in the game. By “best” I mean it barely rose to the level of “competent but bland.” A fairly basic side-scrolling type of affair notably only for the rate some enemies fire projectiles at you. There’s also a branching path for no reason. Before the start of every level, you’re told to find X amount of some random item. In that stage, it’s feathers. In another stage, it’s pearls, and so forth. I had been under the impression that was the object of the game, but it’s not. It’s just for bonus points. I didn’t discover this until the second stage. For me, that was an underwater level where your weapon seems to be a squirt gun. Yes, really.

Too bad nobody bought this. The sequel would have seen Baloo take a flamethrower to do battle with the sun.

To the game’s credit, it paid-off the absurdity of bringing a squirt gun to an underwater level by having it be the worst weapon in the history of video games. Not only is it unresponsive, (along with movement in general in this specific stage) but it doesn’t do a whole lot of damage. This was such a bad level that I nearly had a panic attack when I realized I was barely two stages into a game so awful that it feels historic. To TaleSpin’s very limited credit, this was as bad as the game got, but it’s pretty damn bad AND I had to go back and replay it because my first session had a logistic problem: I spent a lot of time trying to avoid ALL the fishes when some of them are benign. Of the normal looking ones, only the brown ones damage you because they’re really blowfish who swell up when they approach your massive collision box. As if they weren’t bad enough, the game has these massively spongy crabs that nibble at your collision box. I suffered my first of multiple GAME OVERs here.

There’s electric eels too that you can usually duck under. The crabs? I’d be impressed if someone could avoid taking damage from them.

You’ll note that I’ve been saying that enemies attacked my collision box instead of Baloo himself. Well, that’s because TaleSpin’s collision detection is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. Your box is absolutely massive, and the boxes for enemies and their projectiles are too, which combine to make avoiding damage a living hell. Seemingly the only thing that doesn’t have huge boxes are YOUR projectiles. I was often stunned by how lazily done the collision is and how they seem to have understood this and placed enemies to target THE BOX, and not the sprite. I made a couple examples. Take a look at this.

It gets even worse when you get to Kit’s stage. Even though he’s physically smaller, he seems to have retained a collision box that matches Baloo’s. Also, in that stage, there’s no attack. TaleSpin TG-16 becomes an avoider-game for that level. Thankfully, it’s just a lazy series of ramps that seems tailor-made to avoid enemies comfortably. That is, until it climaxes with an enemy that I honestly don’t believe there’s any way to avoid taking damage from. You just can’t leap high enough, even with Kit’s ability to use a parachute, to avoid this guy. In this screenshot, I’m being hit.

Allegedly there’s health refills in the game in the form of gold bars. I finished the whole game and, to the best of my knowledge, I never found one single health refill. I scored several free lives and, in the (terrible) bonus stages I even scored a couple extra continues, but I never saw a health refill. In every stage BUT this one, I defeated literally every enemy I came across, and they never really dropped anything besides the bonus times that are only worth points. Your health doesn’t refill between stages, and if not for the fact that the game offered continues, there’s no way I’d have finished TaleSpin. This isn’t merely old-school janky. This is a mechanically broken game. There’s also no personal touch to it. When you enter a section where boxes are thrown at you by enemies, the arrangement of where the enemies are placed is repeated several times for the full hallway. No charm. No tact. This is not a game made with love. It’s a game made because Radiance was probably the lowest bidder.

Shere Khan isn’t the last boss. What the hell?

If you were to pretend that this didn’t have overly-heavy jumping, feathery combat, and some of the worst collision detection I’ve seen in a platformer, TaleSpin would just be boring anyway. This offers NOTHING besides very rudimentary platforming high jinks. I feel sorry for those TurboGrafx-16 owners who didn’t get to play the Disney offerings on Sega or Nintendo. The shoddy play mechanics, unresponsive and sluggish controls, and the way damage is handled makes TaleSpin stink of a game that was rushed through development without a hint of polish. It’s an ugly game, too. One of the worst looking TG-16 titles I’ve seen so far, and I played through the TurboGrafx-16 Mini. Burn this one in the red flower.
Verdict: NO!
Oh god.. they did the Darkwing Duck game on the TurboGrafx-16 too.