Michael Jackson's Moonwalker (1990)

Dawg, MJ out here is rescuing some young girls from some evil musical entities. sometimes on the street, sometimes in fucking graveyard... why not fam. MJ is out here ready to rescue some Young Girls, and then blast some dude in space.

I laughed so hard when I played the first level where you had to rescue young looking and sounding girls. the 90s were wild.

Fr though, The game feels too clean for an early Sega Genesis title. the animations on MJ are fantastic and smooth. rest of the game, not so much as the rest of the game becomes a bit looking and moving but putting away too much of the quality. you will still feel the smooth and attention to details in MJ's animation work.

The game is short. you will need about 40 minutes to complete it, and it's not that difficult to begin with. it does become a hard for a good bit at Round 5 but not to a near extreme levels. gameplay is fairly basic accommodating for the game's difficulty and how it uses MJ musical ideas to progress through the levels. despite that, Knocking dudes down while sliding down the stairs is very satisfying.

The controls can be an every so annoying. you sometimes press up to hit someone above and doesn't register, you sometimes stand a small pixel you didn't want to and the game thinks you going up the stairs, effectively disabling some moves you can't do. other times when you need to go up the stairs, the game will be very annoying to recognize that you're going up or down the stairs.

even with the problems with the controls, I enjoyed the level design so much. I tries to make you think outside of the box and use logic to find the last "Gurl". sometimes behind a waterfall, others in weird places you didn't know they were in the level. it's fun. and that's how I found the game. it's a fun novelty, dumb, weird, and wild from the 90s to cash on the mega hit, the king of pop. I would say play it if you ever found it for cheap.

or just emulate it.

(This is the 20th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Based on the movie by the same name from 1988, Michael Jackson's Moonwalker is a beat 'em up game released initially on August 24, 1990 for the Sega Genesis and Master System. An Arcade version was released a month earlier, which is an isometric run and gun game.

The game is better than I expected for a game around a celebrity, and the good parts go beyond the soundtrack. More on my thoughts in detail below.

STORYTELLING

The setup for the story is explained in the manual, while the game itself only has any explanation shortly before the boss fight. What your goal is, is self-explanatory as you play though.

You control Michael Jackson, duh, and go into hostile territory to free a bunch of kidnapped children. All children look like Katie from the movie and say "Michael!" when you free them whilst giving you a boost to your magic/health bar.

At the end of each stage, Mr. Big - the boss - shows up and tells you that "you will never catch me" before he sends a bunch of his goons at you.

The manual tells you that Mr. Big is kidnapping every kid in the world to turn them into his slaves and the text in-game only tells you that you can now face him, so there isn't much here. I'm probably the guy who dived the deepest into the storytelling of this game ever right now because it's barely existent and not the point of this game.

GAMEPLAY

Michael Jackson shows up in a club and flips a coin into a jukebox to flip on a banging soundtrack that provides the backdrop for a gaming experience that is fun despite its limitations, but is held back tremendously by the game's level design.

In this 2D beat 'em up game, you do two things. First, you beat up a bunch of bad guys using your feet (or your arms when you jump), which releases magical sparkles that apparently damage bad people. Second, you have to rescue children.

The Fighting Part: This was fun but had plenty of issues. You see, you have only ONE bar in this game, which represents both your health AND your magical spark tank. And once you drop below a certain amount, you can only do weak punches, not shoot magic anymore. There is a special attack that you can do by spinning, which however drains your bar very fast. If you spin for a little bit, you throw your hat and it creates an explosion. If you spin for half of your health bar, every enemy on screen stands next to Michael Jackson and they do a little dance, which kills every enemy afterwards. It's a great little gimmick for this game but it's unfortunate that it drains your health bar to do it, instead of getting its individual bar. This made me ignore this feature apart from a few small instances throughout the game.

Another issue I got was that you couldn't both turn and shoot magic. Especially in the final two "chapters", enemies would be thrown at you in bunches from both sides, and it felt like it was pretty much impossible to get through the levels unless you knew where to find the kids and therefore skipped most of the level.

The Finding Children Part: And so, let's talk about this part. Depending on the level you find yourself in, you have to check windows, doors, in car trunks, in caves, behind bushes or even behind tombstones to find children. There are dozens of these per level and there is a set number of children hiding in pre-determined hiding spots. As mentioned, I'm glad, because this is probably the only way to beat the game (which I didn't), but imagine missing ONE spot and having to go through the entire level again trying to find it, whilst enemies keep respawning and draining your health bar.

Some hiding spots you won't even find because you won't know where to look. For example you will have to look behind manhole cover that seem to be there as part of the scenery, but no, you actually have to do a spin on top of it to essentially screw it open.

Overall, the core gameplay loop was fun enough, but it all went to shizzles starting in around Chapter 4, where so many enemies would appear that it would make looking for kids tedious. The boss fight only triggers once you find them all, and even the boss fights become a pain, because all of a sudden, 10, nope 20, nope 30 enemies appear one after the other, if not even more than that, and in the graveyard level in particular, those damn zombies appear that can just detach from their legs and fly at you to deal a lot of damage. Meanwhile you can't use any special attacks because it would drain your health too much and you'd die shortly after. These zombies are beatable, I managed it, but it only gets worse from there and that's where I said I've played this enough.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE

Not fair to call it voice acting, but the children do say "Michael" every time you rescue one, which I imagine will be instantly memorable for those who have played this a lot when they were young. I have mixed thoughts about the sound design. Some actions sound good, like the sparkle of the magic or Michael saying "wooo" when you jump-punch, but then you got the bad swooshing sound that plays whenever you check windows, doors, bushes and so on. Overall it's not too bad, not that great either.

What is great however is the soundtrack. It's a 16 bit remix of some of Michael Jackson's most popular songs and whether you like the beats or not will make or break this for you. I think his most popular songs are timeless classics, so naturally I enjoyed this quite a lot. My only issue was that there was no Thriller during the graveyard level (zombies and Michael even did the dance) but apparently there were licensing issues there.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN

The design of Michael Jackson and enemies is great and the game has plenty of differently and nicely designed levels from a graphical standpoint.

ATMOSPHERE

Mixing beats from Michael Jackson songs alongside a graveyard level with zombies and Michael doing the Thriller dance is great and puts you in a great mood, even if the song Thriller itself is not licensed. Levels also have unique themes which I enjoyed, even if they didn't always feel like they suit Michael Jackson.

CONTENT

The overall package here is fun but there isn't a lot of variety. You don't gain any new abilities, there are no power up items, special moves are discouraged due to draining your health, mission objectives are always the same and most of the playing time you accrue comes from trial and error. As I said, the content overall is fun though, so I'll assume that most of you will enjoy a couple hours with it.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN

This just gets progressively worse as more and more and more and more enemies are thrown at you, but your abilities never improve to properly tackle them on. Instead you just wildly shoot left and right and hope you get them all before your health runs out. Don't even think about using special items because that's basically suicide.

On a smaller scale, making it extremely hard to even figure out where to look for the children, making you go all the way to the boss fight whenever you die during one and making you run around the entire level if you miss a single child are some more annoyances with how this game is designed. Not good.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION

The way they've added a bunch of Michael Jackson animation and dance moves, the dance he does with the enemies, the remix of his songs and designing the game to his likeness overall is pretty well done, however it doesn't really translate to other games.

REPLAYABILITY

No abilities to collect/find, no secrets apart from one if you somehow manage to catch a shooting star (check it out on YT if you don't want to play this game, it's pretty nice), no randomizing of hiding spots for children (though some of you might prefer this) and terrible level design in later chapters means a replay is only advisable if you really want to try and beat your high score.

PLAYABILITY

It works well from start to finish.

OVERALL

I liked the core gameplay here, even if its is feature-limited. Playing this to that great soundtrack was great fun for the first few hours but once I got into the latter stages of the graveyard chapter, it just got more and more annoying to play. Ultimately that makes it an average game for its time overall.

WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME

This game was a big topic back in the day, with multiple magazines putting Michael Jackson on their covers.

• Andy Eddy for VGCE, Issue 19 (Aug 90): "Updated cartridges were constantly provided to Jackson, and his suggestions were then passed on to the programmers" | Not an 'opinion' but certainly awesome to hear Jackson being so involved in the creation of this game
• Andromeda for GamePro, Issue 13 (Aug 90): "The animation is smooth, realistic and eye-popping."

MJ's Moonwalker takes the arcade game and transforms it into a 2d beat'em up that it might be a little dull sometimes.

You play as Michael Jackson (duh!) across 5 levels. Each one divided into 3 stages plus level 6 (final boss level). In each one your primary mission is to rescue little girls (I know, I know, little girls + MJ does not sound good, but this was before the accusations against him). After rescuing all the girls you can fight the boss.

Let's break a little the game:

Gameplay/Controls:

You use the 3-button on your genesis control to do things. A button makes you do the special attack. This special goes from a spin, throwing your hat and finally make all the enmies in the screen to dance and then die. The more you press the button, the more powerful is the special. So, if you press once you do the spin, if you press a little bit more you do the hat and if you press the button like 3 seconds then you do the dance attack. Note that the special attack drains your life bar so it's not spammeable. Actually the dance attack drains half oy your bar, so be careful with that. The B button is the attack button. You can't really make combos with it so it's a little lame. ANd finally the C button is for jumping. Never had a issue with unresponsing control or the hit detection, so good job in that aspect.

Rescuing the little girls:

Every stage's objective is to rescue X number of little girls. Each one might be hidden or in the open. Normally the are hidden tho. In order to know where they are you have to get close to the object you want to open (doors, windows, trash containers, bushes, trunks) and then press UP in the D-Pad.If you managed to rescue a girl then she gives you life as a reward. At first this mechanic it's ok but sooner than later it gets repetitive cause you are force to check everything and you can't advanced until you saved all the girls in the stage. So if you miss a little girl you have to start to check again everything because by that time you can't really remember wich door/window/bush you already searched. Thankfully I did not have such problems because the stages are really not that big.

Stages:

As I said before this game has 6 leves divided into 15 stages + final boss stage. So 1-1,1-2,1-3 have the same topic. 2-1,2-2,2-3 same topic and so on.

You start in some kind of pub referencing to the smooth criminal place in the music video. Well, actually you even throw a coin into the jukebox and Smooth criminal starts to play.

Level 2 is some streets and you have to search trunks and below ground using the sewers cover as entrance and some randoms elevators.

Level 3 is the graveyard and no, sadly the Thrille song is not present :c at least in this version of the game. The "Revision 0" of the game has Thriller as the music of the dance attack in the graveyard. I played the "revision 1" and in that Thriller is completely removed from the game.

Level 4 are some caverns and this is where the game is a little more like a maze and not a linear stage (level 3 is also a "maze" but it's reaaaally easy). I even got stuck a little in one of the stages and had to start checking every cave of the level trying to the find the last girl.

Level 5 is the Enemy Hideout and it has to be the hardest level of the whole game. You have more enemies, turrets in the cealing, you use teleportes to walk around the level.

Boss:

At the end of each stage you have to fight some enemies that act as the final boss of each segment. Nothing too crazy. If you have full life you can use the dance attack and dispatch a lot of guys in one go. You can win every figh in that way at least until level 4. The final boss is Mr. Big and you play in a first person view inside a spaceship and have to kill this guy while you try to avoid him and the obstacles in the place. I died like twice here because I was a little confuse of how the controls work in here. But when you know how they work it's really easy to kill him.

Bubbles:

MJ's monkey is here also. This time he appears after you rescue the last girl. He is on the shoulder of MJ and his job is to guide you through the level so you can go the boss. He starts to point like crazy so you must follow his directions.

Overall:

I would say to give it a try. Although the mechanics are a little boring after a while the game itself is short (less than an hour) so it does not get to the point where you want to quit cause of full boredom. Sadly, as far as I know the game is only available in the Genesis. I would love to know if the game is in another platform.