Ouch, that hurt, Mickey.
This being said, my buying of Mickey games has since remained cautious. I don't think I picked up a single Mickey thing on the PS1 or 64 (all of it was Mickey Racing or something else rather worthless) and was incredibly skeptical on 3D platformers (to this day there remains a number of abysmal first generation 3D platformers on these systems) and a Mickey one? I didn't want to take a chance on it.
So along comes the Gamecube and what looks to be somewhat like an homage to the past Magical Quest... looks a bit questionable but hey, it's 10 bucks at the used game store and I can't find anything else. (Mind you this was quite a few years ago, when Gamecube was fairly new..) Why not waste 10 bucks on a new Mickey game? Here's why.
The game is an abysmal take on the adventure genre. An already near "obsolete" genre in itself (although I still enjoy it), it didn't need something so child-friendly and as simple as this. I'll admit I played through this game to its end (it took me a little over 2 hours... some demos of incomplete games are longer) but the entire thing was just meant for kids. Bad choice... because any kid I know that would sit through this, is a kid I can admire. There are a bunch of attempts at humor, and I guess a few kids could enjoy atleast that much, but pointing and clicking and doing "tricks" to get Mickey to do them is mindnumbingly boring. Kids would put this away before they even entered the first room.
The game looks great. Mickey looks like Mickey should and he still has those charms that I loved about him as a kid, but those are the single redeeming factors in it.
Would I like a newer Mickey platformer? Probably not, his stints in the past haven't been extremely noteworthy and any developers giving him a serious try isn't very likely anymore. I guess he should just be left to my childhood memories. That way I still like him.