Sometimes beloved childhood games aren't painted with rose-tinted nostalgia. Sometimes you knew they sucked even when you were a kid, but they were so distinct and memorable that the experience stuck with you. So you seek them out and try them again as an adult and go "Yep, this still sucks" and move on with your life ever so slighly happier because you got to re-live soemthing from your formative years. For me, this game was Adventures in the Magic Kingdom for the NES. Click to read more and watch gameplay.
Amazon doesn't allow direct e-commerce links to Adventures in the Magic Kingdom for some dumb reason, but click this and buy something anyway. It'll help out the site.
Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is a collection of mini-games meant to resemble the rides at Disney theme parks. There's Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain, The Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, and that crappy "drive" a car on a rail ride next to Tomorrowland (you know which one I mean). They're all pretty much crap. The platforming stages in Haunted Mansion and Pirates are basically impossibly bad. Big Thunder Mountain has you navigating a maze in order to reach a specific station. The car game blows. Space Mountain is OK, but it's really just pressing the buttons the game tells you to. The game totally sucks, and I knew it wasn't very good even as a kid.
Yet, somehow, it has stuck in my mind as a "fond" memory. When you're a kid, especially if your family didn't have a lot of money, you could play with anything and have fun because you didn't have anything else. You'd play the hell out of total garbage because you didn't have anything better to do and wanted to feel like you got your money's worth, so by sheer repetition and stubbornness you could grind your way through even the most terrible games. That was me with Adventures in the Magic Kingdom. I still never actually beat it, of course, but I could at least finish some of the rides back then.
Trying to re-play it as an adult, though, just leads to almost immediate frustration. The game is so bad and not fun to play. I will say, however, that it has great, great, great music.
If you want a much better Disney adventure with the same concept - going on video game versions of the rides -, I highly recommend the Xbox exclusive Disneyland Adventures game (playable with Kinect or controller on Xbox One). It looks great, is a decently accurate rendition of Disneyland circa 2011 (it's different now), and is actually pretty fun. I enjoyed it as an adult and I'm sure kids will go nuts for it.
