The barest of necessities.
PLAYERS: 1
PUBLISHER: Virgin Interactive
DEVELOPER: Virgin Interactive
GENRE: Platformer
RELEASE DATE: August 1994
And so, Capcom’s reign as Disney’s go-to developer comes to an end with The Jungle Book, a Virgin Interactive game that aims for the spirit of the movie itself. To that end, The Jungle Book is decent. There’s a lot of content here (ten loonnnng levels) and each of the levels begin and end with plot progression straight from the film. You play as Mowgli and have to collect diamonds strewn throughout the jungle, non-linear style, before you can progress to the next level (methinks these could be blood diamonds, but I may have my continents mixed up). Collecting diamonds and jumping from treetop to treetop is pretty entertaining, but the controls can often punch a hole through that entertainment. Mowgli’s jumping feels very stilted and stiff, like his muscles are sore from going through puberty during his sleep. It’s not always constrictive, but I died many a time from Mowgli’s poor jumping skills. It can also be frustrating to get to the end of the level and not have collected all the diamonds. At the end of stage 1, I had one diamond left to collect, but I couldn’t get back over to the area where the diamond was and the game had saved my progress up until that point. Even if I died, I restarted in that one section, thus forcing me to start the level over. Despite these somewhat large kinks, The Jungle Book is still a solid Disney platformer. Capcom, eat your heart out.
C+
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6 replies on “#328 – The Jungle Book”
I never beat it but not a bad game at all. One of the last NES games….
This game is last NES third-party game ever but it was not till Wario’s Woods is only last first-party NES game as last NES licensed game ever! Wario’s Woods is made by Nintendo.
Since reading your reviews starting with 1942, I think see a pattern: NES games with the red “N I N T E N D O E N T E R T A I N M E N T S Y S T E M: label across are the later releases, some with SNES counterparts. Most of the NES ones are crap. Developers were just trying to squeeze out a few more $$$s out of people holding on to their precious NES, but didn’t make an effort to improve the color palette (using less colors) or make the gameplay experience comparable to the SNES version.
Yeah, most of the 8-bit ports of 16-bit games are terrible. Jungle Book wasn’t the worst, but I’d rather play the SNES version any day.
Jungle Book takes place in India, just to be helpful.
I loved this game! It’s like Abe’s Oddysee for NES. I can’t think of any other NES platformer where the levels are so non-linear.