MIDAS POCKET PRICE SERIES (PS)

THE DALMATIANS | GOLDIE | LION AND THE KING | NICE CATS
Publisher: Midas.
Developer: The Code Monkeys. 
Released: September 2000.
Genre: Movie; Puzzle.


Posted 12th February 2023.
By Tom Clare © 2023

​The Pocket Price series from Midas comprised a quartet of simple, film-on-a-disc games that were released together for the PlayStation during the Autumn of 2000. Each game is mechanically the same, comprising an identical feature set of comparable quality and content. Therefore, a round-up of the four titles seemed appropriate.

Before focusing on the games individually, however, several points apply to all four. Individually and collectively, they’re terrible. Each is spearheaded by a dodgy, license-bating, Disney rip-off FMV movie, crunched to within an inch of its life to fit on a CD. Each also features an insultingly simple painting suite, proving an entirely inadequate substitute for a colouring book. It allows the player to fill in crude drawings with blocks of colour. The cursor moves with a sluggishness that’s almost traumatising and there are a mere 11 colours to choose between, meaning each picture can be finished in a couple of minutes. It’s utter rubbish, but rather worryingly, by far the most engaging part of any of the games.
Finally, there are half-a-dozen sliding-block picture puzzles. These are some of the most frustrating, joyless and tedious challenges you could ever hope to witness in a video game, yet also the closest any of Midas’s games come to providing anything like recognisable gameplay. The player can select between four different difficulties (essentially different degrees of helplessness and despair) and these are often hindered by the murky quality of the images. It will likely remain a mystery as to how a developer like The Code Monkeys, whose experience dated back to the home computers of the mid-eighties, could have been responsible for four such stains on the PlayStation’s catalogue.

​THE DALMATIANS
The block-sliding puzzles are a misery, but they're also the closest any of the games come to providing traditional gameplay
Ah, very subtle. What could this possibly be an imitation of? You’ll start to see traits emerging in the Pocket Price series straight away: the excessively low-budget nature of the movie animation and the unfocused nature of the scripts make for entirely unflattering comparisons with the films from which they’re leeching artistic license. Two Dalmatians are captured and forced into slave labour, whilst two others seek help from the “Backstreet Dog Gang” to free them. Aside from a needlessly annoying bird narrator, that’s all she wrote. It’s borderline unwatchable and very heavily compressed in places, yet still makes for a less depressing watch than Goldie and Nice Cats. You’ll notice plenty of rote animations portraying animals running horizontally across sludgy backgrounds. If for the sake of completionism or morbid curiosity, you wish to watch all four movies, you’d best get used to this particular fallback, as well as incessant jabber from the characters, delivered in a monosyllabic fashion. An absolute dog’s dinner.

OVERALL: 1/10

​GOLDIE
Goldie is a pale imitation of Bambi. That’s putting it very mildly. It’s more like the zombified, half-hearted reanimated corpse of Bambi. We’ll start (and quickly finish) with the positive: its painting and puzzle mode artwork is acceptable, if a little samey, featuring lots of nice but similar images of Bam-, er, I mean “Goldie”, and his mother. More side-to-side running, a recurrence of the weird and still ill-fitting didgeridoo music from The Dalmatians, and what appears to be a lone man voicing the entire story. Whilst the backgrounds look like they’ve been hastily bodged together with felt pens, the animals look a bit better than in the other films. However, this microcosm of quality is squandered by the fact the film is less than twenty minutes long and couldn’t have been any less interesting if its writers had tried to make it so, out of spite. Its brevity is a blessing in truth, but this does highlight Goldie’s complete absence of lifespan. Terminally forgettable.
​
OVERALL: 1/10

​LION AND THE KING
The stock image animals said they would play no part, subliminal or otherwise, in advertising The Pixel Empire
Are the actors starting to sound familiar yet? Yep, it’s the same pair voicing every one of these. Not only an awful experience, LatK comes across as conspicuously lazy, even in present company. The cover art bears no resemblance to the movie, nor do its colouring pictures or block-shifting images, each featuring lame, nondescript animal drawings that might as well be stock images, for all their relevance to the subject matter. The movie sees Simba-clone Robin befriending a panther cub, with a crocodile pal seemingly intended as comic relief (minus the comedy, or indeed, the relief), yet none of them feature in any of the game’s artwork. The film is trite and muddled, seeing the actors stumbling over lines as if the recording was the first time they were reading them. Given the sheer grandiosity of the film it so scandalously plagiarises, Lion and the King manages to come across as both an insult and an embarrassment. Of this lamentable collection of misfires, it probably isn’t quite the worst film, but it marks a low point as a video game.

OVERALL: 1/10

​NICE CATS
An instant contender for the naffest name ever attached to a video game, Nice Cats does at least feature colouring images appropriate to its movie. That’s the only positive I could think of, however. Said story is a shameless rip-off of The Aristocats, referencing class divide and a cat-based slave trade, though entirely devoid of its Disney counterpart’s charm and quality. As with Goldie, the film feels completely soulless. It’s depressingly unadventurous, lacking in all aspects of the narrative and basic storytelling, whilst completing the set of recycled didgeridoo music used ineffectively in every one of these short movies. Made with so little heart, it’s impossible to see it as anything other than a cynical cash-in, never intended as anything more than a distraction for young children. However, so low is its quality that it doesn’t even clear this lowest of low bars.

OVERALL: 1/10
VERDICT
"Individually and collectively, the Pocket Price series games are a complete failure. Each game scores minimally across presentation, gameplay, entertainment and longevity. None of them are worth a second of your time, acting as monstrous imitations of better Disney films and games."