PSX Game Recommendations | mariteaux

[#] Monsters, Inc. Scream Team (Disney-Pixar, PlayStation, 2001)

Quick and lightweight Pixar platformer with lovely levels.

While hardly a commonly-remembered PS1 favorite, Monsters, Inc. Scream Team is a fond one from my childhood. It's a 3D platformer to tie into the Pixar-y misadventures of our favorite fluffy blue bear (not much of a monster, is it?) and a spindly walking green eyeball (that's more like it), complete with fairly decent quality clips from the movie! It's about as you'd expect, and you can 100% it in an afternoon, but it looks and sounds nice and I enjoyed my time revisiting it.

The premise is Sulley and Mike (you can choose to play as either) are tasked to traverse twelve training courses full of homicidal toys in search of eight "nerves". Nerves are robot child substitutes who bounce around, skip rope, and build snowmen, and your goal, naturally, is to reduce them to shivering wrecks (and subsequently piles of metallic rubble!). The courses are divided into urban, desert, and arctic-themed stages you gain access to as you scare the requisite numbers of nerves.

This game is lovely looking for the PS1. Colorful, imaginative locales, clean, noise-free texturework, and the arctic stages even have motion blur on the falling snow. The platforming's good, though Mike sucks to control, so play as Sulley if you like enjoying yourself. You got collectables, button puzzles, trampolines, speed boost arrows, and annoying-but-infrequent slide segments. There's nothing here you can't get from watching a playthrough online, but I've got a soft spot for it.