Disney/Pixar Toy Story: Retro Roundup! - Switch Review
"I see this more as a museum display rather than a game collection"
When this collection was first announced, I bet a lot of people thought, "Who is this for?" Well, I’m here to answer that question; it was made specifically for me. I grew up with a good majority of the games found in Disney/Pixar Toy Story: Retro Roundup! and I couldn’t be happier to be given a chance to relive those memories again on the Switch.
The Good
Not only does Toy Story: Retro Roundup have a multitude of games for you to play but you can also choose which regional versions of those games you want to play. Admittedly this is a pretty niche inclusion for a game collection to add but as we’ll talk about a little later, Toy Story: Retro Roundup was made to be an archive of these early titles and it is very much appreciated.
You are also given a slew of options to customise your gameplay experience in Toy Story: Retro Roundup. For starters, you can add a CRT filter on the gameplay with your choice of either a flat screen or a rounded screen; you can play the games in their original aspect ratio or the modern standard of 16:9; and you can turn on cheat codes for infinite lives, infinite health, etc. There's even an option to watch certain sections of each game be played by the computer and then hop in and take control whenever you want, akin to the “Call Luigi” button in Super Mario Maker 2.
Personally my favourite addition is all of the additional behind-the-scenes content for these games. I grew up playing a lot of tie-in games developed by Traveller’s Tales in my youth, so I had quite the respect for the dev team already but after seeing them describe all of the tricks they used to develop these games, I now legitimately believe Jon Burton is a wizard and he doesn’t get the praise he deserves. On top of that, there are also videos on how Tom Hanks’ brother Jim did all of the voice work for Woody outside of the movies, which, as a voice actor myself, I greatly appreciated, and there is also the inclusion of storyboards, concept art and even 3D models of the game boxes you can mess around with. Toy Story: Retro Roundup is an absolute treat for game historians.
TL;DR
- Multiple regional variations of games
- Extensive filters and gameplay additions
- Archival content is extraordinarily fascinating
The Bad
I kept running into a bug, and not just when I was playing A Bug’s Life (please clap), where all audio would be desynced from the game by a full second or two. It was present in every game in the collection and was extremely distracting. Here’s hoping it gets patched out by release.
When looking through the games on this collection, one game sticks out like a sore thumb. In the middle of this collection of Toy Story tie-in games, there is just A Bug’s Life sitting there like it's one of the gang. If you watch all of the behind-the-scenes content prior to playing any of the games you will learn that it is in this collection because it was an integral part of how the dev team at Traveller’s Tales learnt how to develop games for 3D consoles and with it also being based on a Pixar movie, it needed to be included, but without that knowledge most people will be scratching their head wondering why it's even here in the first place.
Now I will be the first to tell someone that Toy Story Racer is a great game that anyone who is interested in kart racers should try at least once and that Toy Story 2 is one of, if not the best, tie-in games on the original PlayStation but I’m not going to sit here and say that all of the games presented here are worth your time; in fact, a good majority of the collection, I would say, are below average at best. The original Toy Story games for Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo were notoriously difficult for no real reason; the Game Boy ports are clunky and uninteresting; A Bug’s Life is just…ok and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command is downright just a bad game, no buts about it
TL;DR
- Very noticeable audio delay
- A Bug’s Life’s inclusion feels out of place
- Most of the games in the collection aren’t great
Final Score: 6/10
While I enjoyed my time with Toy Story: Retro Roundup, I don’t expect this will be for everyone. I see this more as a museum display rather than a game collection and I feel Digital Eclipse feels the same way since that was clearly their intention. If you want to learn a thing or two about the early days of Traveller’s Tales before they became the go-to dev team for Lego games, then I’d suggest picking this up but if you’re more interested in the games on offer, I think you should just pick up an old PS1 copy of Toy Story 2 if you can find one and leave it at that.
Thank you for checking out our Disney/Pixar Toy Story: Retro Roundup! Switch review, thank you to Atari (via Plan of Attack for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:
- Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
- Bel Cubitt
- Bobby Jack
- Jack Caven
- Nintendo Maniacs
- RedHero