Into the Vault: Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Games (SNES)
Disney is in full swing of celebrating the 30th anniversary of one of it’s most beloved animated classics, The Lion King! And while there is a very well-remembered SNES and Genesis classic loosely based on the film that you can easily play on modern platforms through the Disney Classic Games: Aladdin and The Lion King collection, I thought I’d focus on a lesser-known game starring Simba’s buddies that you can’t play on modern platforms!
Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Games is exactly what you might expect from the title, a collection of minigames, also known as the “party” genre which is more or less dominated by the likes of Mario Party these days. But unlike Mario Party or other videogames that often take place on a board that you progress through and play minigames, Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Games has no overarching structure to it. You can simply select any of four games to play and you just try and get the highest score you can and that’s pretty much it. There is sort of a beauty to the simplicity here.
But without the added shenanigans you often get with a game board, your selection of games has to be pretty strong to stand on their own. And what we’ve got with Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Games is four perfectly decent but not particularly noteworthy copycats of better games that came before them.
First there’s “Burper” where as Pumbaa, you spit and burp at objects falling from the top of the screen to get points. Sometimes the objects are bugs that if they land can attack you but you can hit them with a tail whip so you aren’t completely defenseless in that situation. This is arguably the strongest of the four games as it performs well and there isn’t anything particularly wrong with it but once you’ve seen the first stage there aren’t any big twists or turns to keep it interesting.
Then there’s “Jungle Pinball” which is a pinball table. And today, we have lots of great pinball options available on modern consoles. In the 16-bit days, console pinball was pretty rough. For the time this wasn’t half bad but there’s actually not a lot going on in the actual pinball and it gets boring fairly quickly.
In “Hippo Hop”, as Timon, you are playing a variant of the classic game Frogger. The big difference here is instead of safely crossing to the other side, you hop back and forth trying to collect bugs while not missing a jump and falling in the water. The biggest issue I had with this game is the controls felt a little unresponsive, but that could honestly be because I was playing on my Polymega console with a Polymega controller so I won’t say for sure that’s the game itself.
Finally, the weakest of the selection is “Slingshooter” which is a shooting gallery game that works well enough but you have a very limited amount of ammo to work with. I feel like unlimited ammo with a time limit (which is also there) would’ve worked much better. Plus the hit detection is not the best so it leads to plenty of wasted ammo that should have hit.
The biggest credit I will give the SNES version of Timon and Pumbaa’s Jungle Games is that the sprite animation is fairly good, though we’ve seen better from the likes of better-remembered classic 16-bit games based on Disney properties. Like virtually everything else in the game, it’s a tad above serviceable, but not much.
But, if you want to play Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Games, you are definitely better off getting your hands on the PC version. It looks cleaner, there’s a lot of extra animation, better music, and even voice acting in addition to a whole extra game that isn’t in the SNES version. It doesn’t make the game magically good but sure makes it pop a lot more.
So ultimately what we have with Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Games is a not terrible but mostly forgettable small collection of minigames with a bare-bones presentation and just not much else to it. It’s perfectly fine but also understandable why it’s mostly forgotten from an age where you got a lot of classic licensed games that still hold up today.
That’s it for today, I may slip in another post tomorrow, but will definitely have one next weekend so either way see ya real soon!
