Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse is a 1994 platformer video game developed by Traveller's Tales and published by Sony Imagesoft for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, and Sega CD. In the game, the player controls Mickey Mouse, who must navigate through various side-scrolling levels, each designed and based from classical Mickey Mouse cartoons. The game was later released on the PlayStation as Mickey's Wild Adventure.
This run borrowed inputs from Sonikkustar's LOTAD with permission from him.
Note: this encode doesn't show credits as I didn't feel like including them.
Game objectives:
- Emulator used: Bizhawk 2.2.1
- Uses hard mode (only real difference between normal and hard mode is hard mode removes checkpoints, otherwise everything is identical.)
- heavy glitch abuse
- takes damage to save time
tricks
level warps
this is a common trick you'll see in this run, if you ever saw my Toy Story TAS for snes you might have seen a similar trick used.
Basically when the developers were submitting this game, they had to make sure the game wouldn't easily crash, so what they did is whenever something unexpected happens like too many sprites on the screen at one time, instead of the game crashing, it forces a level warp. this allows us to skip quite a bit of rooms in the game, and especially helps with routing.
if you want more information about it, you can check out GameHut's video on it (AKA Jon Burton, one of the leading programmers for Travellers tales): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9bkKw32dGw
Rope Zips
when you grab a rope, if you jump off one frame after grabbing it, it causes mickey to move incredibly fast. this allows some need maneuvering in a later level.
Stage by stage comments
Steamboat willie
very first instance of level warps to collide with a cat as I activate a cut-scene with Willie
in the next scene, I have to ring bells in order to open up the bridge, and I have to wait for pete to move to the bridge in order to jump on him.
the box crane moves on a global timer, so skipping pete doesnt save any time, it just looks cool
Jump and throw projectiles at the gears to beat the stage. The Japanese version contains boss music for this boss while the US version doesnt for some reason.
The Mad Doctor
this is where things start getting interesting
there's 2 rope zips and 1 level warp here, the level warp is about a 2 second timer to hit, all you have to do is throw one projectile in that timeframe to get it. it's by far the easiest level warp in the game
for the mad doctor battle, we try to avoid the exploding flasks while still being close to them.
Moose hunters
to set up another level warp, we only need to take damage 3 times, the idea is to get pluto to warn us about the incoming moose at a specific point. then he can spawn and warp us out of that level
in the next level, we want to collect enough apples as they make us go a bit faster, also jumping above water as it slows us down.
The Lonesome ghosts
when going up the stairs, they can stop you from moving. that's why it seems like when we're able to clear them why we dont move for a bit, that's the game doing that.
another rope zip here.
Mickey and the beanstalk
a level warp is used right away simply by hitting the first enemies we see
another is used when we spawn a bunch of bees on screen and throw a projectile
stepping on the seeds makes a plant grow, it's only faster to skip them on the last seed, otherwise trying to jump off a moth will just cause us a hit point
The Prince and the Pauper
the candle platforms need us to move back and forth to get enough momentum to jump
we have to turn on the lights otherwise a wall is preventing us from continuing.
another level warp is caused by getting three weasels in the same place while we throw another projectile at it.
the tower stage has the wrong sound effect for the barrels, they're supposed to be spiked balls but the developers changed them to barrels, and just forgot to change the sound effect too.
right before we do the last level warp, we grab the two health points as they'll be useful with the final pete fight.
Pete fight
until the wrecking ball shows up, this stage acts as an autoscroller.
when the wrecking ball does show up, we can jump on pete's sword when he throw it at the wall, jumping off of it lets us hit a switch that hits pete
however the hitbox for the sword doesnt go away right away, so when you jump on the sword on the first possible frame you take damage. this is why I got the extra health, so I didnt have to wait for the hitbox to go away.
That's about it, we hope you enjoyed watching!
Memory: Judging
Memory: I was really curious about the section in Lonesome Ghosts where you have to slide down the first set of stairs but I couldn't personally find a way to avoid it. I was also curious about the seesaw section but couldn't find anything there either. Optimization looks good otherwise.
Entertainment wise this run has a bunch of really good moments but also a lot of downtime and some kinda dull gameplay. It was received well nonetheless however.
Accepting to Moons.
feos: Pub.