TaleSpin Review (Sega Genesis) (Retro WedNESday #6)
Developer: Interactive Designs
Publisher: Sega
Released: November 1992
I was six years old when TaleSpin came out on the Genesis. Seven, by the time my parents rented it for my brother and me, and enjoyed it enough to ask them to buy it. And then spent the next three years of my life being absolutely tortured by it. I’m not sure any other game in my childhood, save for maybe The Simpsons: Bart vs. The Space Mutants, gave me that specific combination of genuine enjoyment and complete, total frustration on a near-constant basis. TaleSpin on the Genesis was that game for me, and going back to it on an emulator recently confirmed that absolutely nothing has changed.
The TaleSpin cartoon was a staple in my house for a couple of years in the early 90’s. Baloo flying the Sea Duck, Kit Cloudkicker, Don Karnage and his air pirates, the whole Cape Suzette setup. It was one of those Disney Afternoon shows that just had a great vibe, and when a game based on it showed up, it was an automatic must-try for a kid who watched the show every chance he got. The Genesis version does a decent job of capturing the feel of the show, at least visually. Baloo and Kit look like their cartoon counterparts, the levels pull from locations that feel right for the world, and the premise of collecting cargo from locations around the world while avoiding Shere Khan’s goons and Don Karnage’s air pirates fits naturally into what the show was doing.
What the Genesis version also does, that the NES version didn’t, is mix up the gameplay between on-foot platforming sections and aerial combat in the Sea Duck. That variety is one of the things I appreciated about it even as a kid. The NES game was purely in the plane the whole time, which was fine, but the Genesis version felt bigger and more complete because of that split. You’d be running around on foot through some location dodging enemies and collecting cargo, and then you’d get back in the Sea Duck and start dodging bullets from every direction. It kept things from getting monotonous, at least in theory.
In practice, both halves of the game have the same core problem: the controls never feel quite right. Baloo on foot is a little floaty, a little imprecise, not by a catastrophic amount but just enough that you never feel fully in command of what he’s doing. The aerial sections aren’t much better. The Sea Duck handles with a looseness that makes threading through tight bullet patterns more frustrating than it should be. And there are sections in this game that are pure bullet hell, stuff that would be asking a lot of an adult gamer, let alone a seven-year-old kid renting it from a video store on a weekend. The repeating boss battles at the close of every day were also a little repetitive, even when they changed the fight up some.
I’m not ashamed to say that I never actually beat this game. I got close. A few times, I made real progress and thought that might finally be the run, and then something would happen, and it wouldn’t be. Looking back on it now, I don’t think that’s entirely the game’s fault. Some of it was just being a kid without the patience or the developed skills to see it through. But some of it is genuinely the game being harder than it needed to be, with hit detection that isn’t always reliable and enemy placement that occasionally feels less like a challenge and more like the level designers were just throwing things at the wall.
But at the same time, even as a kid, my deaths rarely felt cheap. Even when I was furious, I usually knew what went wrong. I got hit because I mistimed a jump, or I flew into a bullet because I panicked, or I didn’t account for an enemy coming from off-screen. The game was hard, but it was mostly honest about it. And because of that, I kept getting better the more I played. Slowly, grudgingly, over the course of years, I learned the levels. I learned where the enemies came from. I got better at reading the bullet patterns. I never finished it, but I got closer every time, and there’s something to be said for a game that keeps pulling you back in despite making you miserable on a regular basis.
Coming back to it now with emulator save states as a safety net, I can appreciate the level design more than I could at seven. There’s genuine creativity in how the locations are structured, and the difficulty, frustrating as it is, does build in a way that feels intentional rather than random. The graphics hold up reasonably well, the music is serviceable if not particularly memorable, and the cartoon license is handled with more care than a lot of licensed games from this era bothered with. Could I beat it today when seven-to-ten-year-old me couldn’t? Probably. I don’t think the 20-something version of me would have had any trouble with it, but 40-year-old me doesn’t have the same reflexes I did have. Still, I may spend a weekend at least trying to finally conquer this thing.
The rose colored glasses are a real factor here, and I’ll admit that gladly. A game I hadn’t touched in three decades still brought back specific memories the moment I booted it up, and that’s worth something. But I also can’t pretend the controls are good or that the difficulty is balanced well, because they aren’t. What I can say is that even with all of that, it was always fun. It was the kind of hard that made you want to try again rather than quit, and for a licensed game based on a cartoon in 1992, that’s actually a meaningful accomplishment.
TaleSpin gets a three out of five: SUBSTANTIAL.
This one trigger some nostalgia for ya? Then check out my review of Cool Spot or Super Mario Bros. Retro WedNESday runs every Wednesday here on Titanquisitor, you can browse the full archives by clicking here. Next week, we’re hitting the track for some SNES racing with Top Gear 3000.
Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect forums.
