Baud Attitude

The big draw of 3.0 was, really, Star Wars, and I hadn’t even really noticed Inside Out during its theatrical run.

Still, it happened to be in stock at a Redbox on a day when I was browsing for something to rent, so my wife and I watched it and liked it well enough, and then I wound up receiving the playset as a gift and figured I’d better give it a go.

Turns out, it’s probably one of the best implementations of the whole toys-to-life thing AND a solid platformer of the sort that used to come out alongside every kid-focused movie.  It’s also a fairly long playset by Disney Infinity standards and took me the best part of a Sunday to play through, though part of that came from exploring lots of side paths looking for collectibles and the like.  If I’d just held right the entire time, I could probably have burned through it much more quickly – but that seems rather a waste, because the game has a lot of really imaginative landscapes to run and jump through.

…mind you, there’s a particularly annoying gravity-flip mechanic that I could have done with less of, but moving along…

The toys-to-life schtick is handled interestingly.  All of the characters have a special ability – Anger can walk across lava without taking damage, Joy can jump and float for longer distances, Sadness can walk across clouds without falling through and so on.  If you have the two figures that come in the package, you’re going to be able to complete the story without too much difficulty.  I’d personally recommend getting a Sadness as well, just because her special ability trivializes some of the platforming bits, but you don’t NEED to buy all five characters.  I did anyway, because there were many very good Infinity sales over Easter week and I have poor self control, but do not use me as a role model.

Where having Sadness, Disgust, and Fear does come in handy is in opening optional paths and collecting random junk – so if that’s a motivator for you, you’ll need to shell out the extra money.

Of course, one natural reaction to quite liking what Disney did with Inside Out for Infinity is to wonder why they’re not following up with similar playsets for, oh, Zootopia, Frozen, Big Hero 6…

At least we’re getting one for Finding Dory?  Hopefully it will be as good.

Another couple Disney Infinity Toy Box games down, this time the two-pack of “Brave Forest Siege” and “Stitch’s Tropical Rescue” that originally came with the Toy Box edition of 2.0.

These are very much reskins of the “Escape from the Kyln” and “Assault on Asgard” games that were bundled with the Avengers version of the game, just set in more light-hearted environments.  “Escape from the Kyln”, as you might have guessed, gave you the task of breaking out of the high-security prison from Guardians of the Galaxy, beating up an awful lot of assorted villainous types along the way.  “Brave Forest Siege” just has you fighting off hordes of animated wooden bears and collecting cakes, and “Stitch’s Tropical Rescue” has you defending ducklings.

Let’s be honest, these are the “for girls” versions of the Toy Box games, but the candy coating doesn’t extend to the actual gameplay – Brave Forest Siege in particular can get a little brutal if you have underleveled figures, and I wound up cycling quite a few characters on and off the Infinity base before I got my feet under me.

Both were good ways to spend a few hours, and being able to use ANY 1.0 or 2.0 Disney figure in them meant that I got to play some characters that I’d never touched before.

…and that’s how I discovered what is, as far as I’ve seen so far, the most ridiculously imbalanced Disney Infinity figure.

Meet Rapunzel.

If you remember “Tangled”, there was a really enjoyable running gag involving the characters hitting people with, or being hit with, a frying pan, which was effective to the point of absurdity.

Rapunzel, therefore, has a frying pan, which she can hit you with or throw at you.

When thrown, it is fiendishly accurate, has an absurd range, ricochets from target to target after the first hit, and – oh, yes – knocks enemies back, frequently off ledges and into environmental hazards.

To add to the ridiculous nature of the character, her skill tree is set up so that almost all of her damaging skills are front-loaded.  You don’t need to buy a bunch of filler skills to get to her range damage boosts and her melee boosts, so she gets very lethal by, oh, level 8 or so.

When I mentioned that “Brave Forest Siege” had managed to kill me a few times, it’s because I didn’t start with Rapunzel.  She also made plowing through the Lilo and Stitch-themed tower defense game almost shamefully easy – sure, sometimes the various towers I’d set up managed to fend off the attacking robots, but more often than not I could just spam frying pan throw to victory.

Oh, and it makes the most satisfying clanging sounds as it bounces off opponents.  Seriously, it’s music for the soul.

I rather suspect that whoever was responsible for designing the character’s skill set decided that they were going to make the pinkest, blondest, cutest character in the game ALSO the most vicious killer, and I applaud that nameless designer.

Between all of the assorted sales last week and realizing that a 1.0 starter set could be had for well under $20 and came with three complete Playset campaigns, I have added 15 Disney Infinity figures to a bookshelf that is rapidly approaching shameful status.

So, I figured that it might not be a bad idea to actually sit down in front of the PS4 and try some of the recent campaign-style content that Disney has been putting out for the platform.

When Marvel Battlegrounds was announced, there was a fair amount of consternation throughout the Disney Infinity fan community.  It was a new playset, and actually included new content rather than just being an unlock for stuff on the disc, but it was also 30 bucks and only included one figure.

It’s still TECHNICALLY 30 bucks, but every store I’ve ever seen it in has had it at $20 and it’s not hard to find it discounted slightly below that… so it’s really barely more than the cost of the very nice looking Captain America figure.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that, as a single-player playset, it’s a pretty miserable experience, being not much more than a half-dozen disjointed arena fights ending in a cutscene that seems pretty much just designed to be a teaser for future playsets.  I’m really stoked by the implication that future playsets will be playable without needing to buy a 4.0 disc and then a 5.0 disc and so on and so forth, but hopefully they will include more than a half-hour’s worth of play.

If you have three or four kids sitting around and they need a game to play together, ignore most of the previous complaining, because it was made for you, not for bitter 40-somethings with no friends.  In its multiplayer mode, it’s intended to be a Smash Brothers replacement, just using Marvel characters instead of Nintendo mascots… and available for systems that people actually own.

Toy Box Takeover, on the other hand, is the game I wanted from the moment I heard that Disney was cashing in on the whole Toys To Life thing.  It lets you take any of your figures (well, probably not the Cars figures) and sends you through a set of platforming and fighting levels taken from different Disney/Marvel/Star Wars properties.

There’s a little bit of a story to get you going, but really it’s an excuse to run around freezing Venom Symbiotes as Elsa and then mowing down Imperial Stormtroopers as Judy Hopps in a commandeered Scout Walker.

I haven’t tried Toy Box Speedway yet – it’s on my list – but I understand that it includes a Sugar Rush track and I have been wanting to play a Sugar Rush-themed kart racer since roughly 2 minutes after the end credits rolled on Wreck-it Ralph.  I also understand that the AI redefines “cheating bastard” so I may not get TOO much play out of it.  We’ll see.

Next up is probably going to be the Inside Out playset.  I recently got the base set with Joy and Anger as a gift, and the other emotions came home as part of the shopping binge, so I am all set for it.