 S... ...restrunk. As soon as Disney started seeing lots of commercial and critical success for their NES games like DuckTales and Chippendale Rescue Rangers, they did not hold back when it came to licensing as much stuff as they could for both the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. We got games for Pinocchio, 101 Dalmatians, Fantasia, Goof Troop. There's like three different Beauty and the Beast games for some reason. And there's a game based on the Jungle Book movie developed in the summer of 1994 by Virgin Games, who made other Disney games like Lion King and the Genesis version of Aladdin. As you might expect, Jungle Book is one of those games that got ports all over the place, like the Sega Master System, Game Boy, Game Gear, even on the NES super late in its lifespan. And the game is slightly different on each of those platforms, but I'm looking primarily at the Super Nintendo Edition. Jungle Book fits right in with the other Disney games I mentioned. It does a great job keeping the Disney aesthetic consistent with the movie, very similar to the way games like Lion King and Pinocchio also did. The sprite animation and backgrounds here are top notch, and the music and sound design fit really well too. And those are the biggest strengths of the game by far, and ultimately that's really the goal of games like this, to make kind of an interactive version of the movie for kids. So from that standpoint, this game succeeds. Everything just runs together so smoothly, especially the Mowgli sprite. He's got like four different idle animations. He's dancing, he's throwing punches, he's juggling bananas. The whole game is filled with little touches like that. As far as the gameplay goes, it's pretty much just jumping, climbing and swinging around vines as Mowgli using B to jump, Y to throw bananas, and A to use special items like coconuts, papayas, or mangoes while using the L and R buttons to switch between them. Geez, you think with all this food, Mowgli should just stop and open up a bodega somewhere. You can roll coconuts like bowling balls and toss mangoes and papayas like grenades. You get a health meter with six lives to get through 11 levels broken up into a couple stages each. You start with zero continues with the game instead having you earn them by collecting red gems. You also collect green gems to unlock bonus stages where you can collect extra lives and item upgrades. The goal of each stage is to simply make it to the end or to fight a boss, but the maps are plenty big enough to wander around and find lots of hidden stuff. Like for instance, there's idols that you can find that take you to spots on the map that you couldn't otherwise. And there's no time limit so you can just stand here and juggle bananas all day if you want. The controls are on the slippery side. It can be tough to get used to grabbing onto vines, but otherwise it's a pretty fun game that's easy to run straight through in about an hour or so. My only real nitpick is the camera viewpoint. This is yet another game where sometimes it can feel like your eyeballs are being yanked back and forth. This is partly because the game generously lets you look up and down while you're standing still to avoid any blind jumps, which is nice, but when you're avoiding projectiles or trying to get past enemies, the viewpoint feels like it's shifting around all over the place. Here's the thing, though. This game is fine on Super Nintendo, but the Sega Genesis version of Jungle Book is clearly the better playthrough. Oh, are we doing this? Well, no. A couple of guys already did do that. But it's true. The Genesis version is better. The graphics contain a lot of detail and everything just has that smooth, polished look to it. Same as the Genesis version of Aladdin. The game structure is a bit different on Genesis since you have to collect a certain number of gems before you can continue on to the next level, but the controls are much tighter and your banana weapon has more range, allowing you to throw diagonally. The Sega version also features more characters from the movie, which is always a good thing. So yeah, to be totally honest, I've been playing so many awful games lately that playing something like Jungle Book makes me feel like Andy Dufresne after he crawled through 500 yards of sewage. So it's possible that I'm overrating this game a bit. But it is, undeniably, a great-looking game. It represents the movie really well, and it's a slightly barely-above-average-okay-ish playthrough, although like I said, you're better off playing the Genesis version. The Super Nintendo Edition is still fine, though. I'd rank it higher than games like Pinocchio and Beauty and the Beast, but not quite as high as Aladdin or Maui Mallard. It's one of those games that's worth checking out if you've already played all the other good Disney games to death. Alright, that's all for now, and I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.