Rayman (1995)
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Rayman is a platform game developed by Ubi Pictures and published by Ubi Soft on the Atari Jaguar on September 1st, 1995.
Plot
Mr. Dark, a mysterious evil wizard, stole the Great Protoon, the Glade of Dream's source of power, and imprisoned the Electoon's, who gravitated around the Great Protoon, in cages. Betilla the fairy attempted to stop him but failed, so she requested Rayman to save the day. With assistance from Betilla and the Magician, Rayman must break all the cages to free the Electoon's and find Mr. Dark's lair in order to recover the Great Protoon.
Why It Will Make You Say "Yeah!"
- The graphics are outright stunning, colorful, and beautiful, and mind blowing for its time as well, since that there is around 65,000 different colors and four independently scrolling backdrops in the game.
- The soundtrack is not only beautiful and catchy, but the songs fit in each area of the game gracefully, whether if it's trying to give off a cheery vibe, a jazzy vibe, or a mysterious vibe.
- The game has a ton of creativity in it, such as the stage selection screen being seen from Mr. Dark's point of view with his binoculars.
- The characters are both goofy, creative, and likable in their own ways, with the biggest example being Rayman himself, as he's resembled as a chill and fun character, yet cares for his friends as the same time.
- The controls are both responsive and fluid, which makes it easier to react to upcoming obstacles.
- The hit detection is very precise, as the hitboxes for each of the enemies are all scaled to around the size of the portions of their bodies.
- The very frame that Rayman grabs onto a ledge, the player can immediately jump above the ledge, thus preventing the game's pacing from slowing down.
- Rayman's move-set, while being very weak in the beginning, gratefully improves as you make more progress throughout the game, with the best example being the ability to glide with his hair.
- The level design is very unique, as the enemies are not only unique in their own ways, such as being able to throw rocks at the player or being able to jump towards the player, but the levels are also designed around Rayman's move-set, with a few examples being listed here:
- In some stages, you'll need to grab onto a ledge to get further to the end of the stage, and sometimes you need to grab onto a Purple Lum to gain access to a hidden cage.
- In some stages, you will need to revisit them later on with new power-up's in order to access more cages, though backtracking in these stages aren't that big of a deal, as the levels are more easier with these new power ups.
- There are multiple secrets that can be awarded to players if they're skilled enough and can be found throughout multiple stages, such as extra lives and/or hidden cages, and thanks to how the levels are designed, it's easier to access a few of these secrets with certain power-ups.
- Three of the stages feature special temporary power-ups, which are planting special plants with a magic bean, and having infinite flight with a magic potion.
- The magic bean is used in the third stage of the game in Pink Plant Woods, where you have to escape a forest flood by planting multiple special plants to reach multiple platforms.
- The infinite flight power-up is used in the third and fourth worlds of the game, Blue Mountains and Picture City, where you have to fly through and dodge multiple objects as you make your way closer to the end of the stage.
Bad Qualities
- After the second world of the game, Band Land, the game starts to get shorter, since that instead of having four stages for each world, the levels for each world start to reduce to three levels instead.
- The game is often considered too difficult, as the difficulty spike begins as early as the end of the first world, and some of the cages can be very hard to find as well. To make matters even worse, if you want to fight Mr. Dark, it will be mandatory to obtain all 102 cages in the game, and it also feels like all 102 cages are required to access Mr. Dark, so that the game could take longer to complete because of how the worlds beyond Band Land start to get shorter as stated earlier. The knockback can also lead to a ton of cheap deaths as well.
- The GBA port and the Rayman Forever port are missing some of the music tracks from the original game, and both Atari Jaguar (the home cartridge-based version of this game) and the GBA versions of this game also suffer from having a weaker soundtrack. The MS-DOS version of the game also has worse sound quality.
- A few of the sections from some of the ports of the game such as the Atari Jaguar and the Android port of this game are also missing in some of the other ports of this games well, such as the introduction to Band Land.
- You don't really get to fight Mr. Dark at the end of the game, as in his final fight, you just dodge attacks from him until you obtain Rayman's fist, where he decides to run away and sends the bosses that you have previously fought back to fight you, just mixed up and in a weaker form of their original counterparts.
- The ending of the game is a huge letdown, as all that it shows is the same image of Rayman's world at the introduction cutscene being shown, but just with it being set to nighttime instead with everybody celebrating Rayman's victory, with the magician saying "You've done it, you've saved the world!", and then cuts to the credits a few seconds later.
Reception
Rayman received generally positive reviews. Critics praised its impressive graphics, animation, soundtrack, and for proving that the PlayStation can do 2D games well and showing that the Atari Jaguar had some potential. It was criticized for its excessive difficulty, however.
Trivia
- The back cover of the PlayStation game box has several quotes that hint to the game's intense difficulty.
- There were 32X and 3DO versions of this game planned, but both versions were cancelled due to both systems selling very poorly. There is no known footage of the 3DO version of the game, however, there is a 30-second clip of the 32X version of this game, along with early footage of the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation ports of this game as well.
- A SNES version was in the works, but was cancelled, though a prototype of it was eventually released on the internet.[1]
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