As diverse as the Dreamcast library has been so far, platformers have been a bit of a scarcity. With the exception of Sonic Adventure, Soul Reaver, and a few others, the adventure-platform genre has been sorely underexposed. Leave it to Disney and Activision then to try and uncover the category for all it’s worth, with a port of their moderately successful movie-game Toy Story 2. And while their effort doesn’t quite match the excellent standards set by the previously mentioned games, it has enough charm and depth to keep you occupied for awhile... until its two most glaring faults drive you away.

Toy Story 2 is essentially a next-generation mock-up of the unstoppable Super Mario 64. The hero Buzz Lightyear is basically our favorite plumber in a space suit with a laser gun. All of the pratfalls, nuances, and gameplay elements from the Nintendo game has pretty much been kept intact. Substitute the fireball for a battery ray, and head jumping with a twist attack and you’ll get the basic idea.

If you’re one of the six people who hasn’t seen the motion picture yet, the plot was practically made for a video game; Woody the Cowboy has been stolen by a greedy toy collector and seemingly has no chance to be saved. Hell-bent on liberating his friend, it’s Buzz Lightyear to the rescue! Hopping from area to area, our hero overcomes puzzles, traps, and other obstacles to help narrow the trail to finding his lost comrade. If that’s not the setup for a direct movie to game port, I don’t know what is.

Following the familiar Mario-style of play, Toy Story 2 has all the elements that most platform fans crave. There’s a ton of secrets, special items, and tokens to collect and use throughout your fifteen level adventure. Although fifteen levels doesn’t seem like much, each stage is absolutely huge, seemingly doubling in size the deeper you go. And if that’s not enough to make you curious at least, keep in mind that you can go back and explore the stages you’ve been to before (To seek out anything you may have missed the first time around).

The graphics too are something to appreciate. While not groundbreaking by any means, they are worlds above the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 versions, although there are some major slowdown problems here and there. Bright and colorful, each stage looks to be ripped directly from the kiddy flick. Texture-wise it’s nothing we haven’t seen before but they’re Clorox clean, and withstanding the occasional seam-glitch look pretty damned good. Reflection effects have been put to good use as well, especially inside Buzz’s helmet. I don’t think I can remember a game that used an inner-reflection technique from within the first-person POV before this one did. Bravo.

Also of mention has to be the voice samples. Borrowing the sounds from all the real-life actors of both movies, Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Little Bo Peep, and the others are all recreated fairly well. A little short on the number of things they say, the little added bonus of actually hearing Tim Allen’s voice was a nice touch.

Unfortunately, Toy Story 2 begins to falter when you get into the meat of it all. When dealing with complicated platform designs such as the ones used here, it’s imperative that the developers implement a solid control scheme. The button layouts themselves couldn’t be simpler; A button for shooting, jumping, spinning, and switching to first-person mode can be reconfigured and delivered without a hitch, but the real problem lies within movement.

Overly sensitive and way too quick on the push, moving in straight lines can be a real problem. Things are more easily handled with the digital pad than with the analog, but this still doesn’t provide a big enough improvement to keep that frustration level low. The worst examples of this can be found on any level where you’re required to walk or jump onto a “tight rope” or similar structure. Falling off the thin pathways more often than not, your blood pressure may get higher than your Pizza Token count before the game is over with.

Tag-teaming with the poor control is an irresponsible camera. No matter which setting of two you choose as your poison, keeping up with the onscreen action becomes harder and harder as the levels grow more complex. Not the worst camera movement I’ve seen, but with the stage design the way it is and the over-responsive movement we’ve already addressed, making it through the latter levels is quite trying. I wish I could say it was for a cool reason like helluh tough bosses or brain-bending puzzles, but it’s really because it’s so difficult to control and decipher what’s really going on.

Filed among all the other “okay” games released on a dozen systems over the years, Toy Story 2 falls into that “coulda, shoulda, woulda” category I had hoped it would avoid. Pleasant if only for its bright recreation of the Disney/Pixar world of living toys, rent it and get your fill of Woody and Buzz while you can. In the long run however, the troublesome camera angles and problematic control will make you want to hide this one at the bottom of the toy chest.

I did that once, try third grade.

Kind of looks like Playstation, oh wait...