Michael Jackson's Moonwalker

This is one of those odd games from the Sega Genesis era. Its a game where you play as Michael and rescue little children from criminals while fighting enemies with your dance moves. It has a fun concept and I like the soundtrack since it consists of Jackson's music, but it gets old after the first few levels. The game just drags on and on and the difficulty starts to feel artificial. I mean it isn't horrible, but its pretty forgettable and the definition of a mediocre beat em up.

Every part of me wants to rate this game higher than I have. Michael Jackson's Moonwalker is a ludicrous concept and a functional action game and I appreciate its existence but the fact of the matter is this, Moonwalker is terribly average.

Maybe it's the repetitive goal, which sees you literally spinning doors, trunks, and cave walls open to rescue kids, that makes Moonwalker feel like a slog. Maybe it's the hordes of respawning enemies. Maybe it's the labyrinthine later levels. Most likely, it's all three of these combined that turn Moonwalker from a fun novelty to a tedious grind. Add in one of the least responsive final boss battles in any game and you have yourself a recipe for a game that is better suited for a demo kiosk than a home console.

That being said, the novelty of playing as the King of Pop never truly wears off. The soundtrack, comprised of some of MJ's greatest hits wonderfully recreated with that iconic lo-fi Genesis sound, kept me in the zone. The different dances Jackson could pull off brought a smile to my face, and the small touches on Jackson's sprite drive home the idea that you are really playing as a 16-bit Michael Jackson.

The best way to describe Moonwalker would be as a novelty game. Its arcade counterpart (also titled Michael Jackson's Moonwalker [Arcade]) is far superior leaving this game as little more than a tough to love, even tougher to hate oddity in the Genesis library. Worth a cursory glance but not much else.