A lot of what I want as an adult too

If there was one thing I could count on growing up in the 90s, it was the weekly family trip to Blockbuster. While my mom or dad was flipping through the new movies, I took my little sister's hand and went straight to the video game section. More often than not, I didn't know what I was renting: The Great Circus Mystery Starring Mickey & Minnie, a Super Nintendo Entertainment System game released by Capcom in 1994. I was charmed by the fact that I could play as Minnie—and that Minnie could transform into different characters, like a makeshift Ghostbuster with a vacuum that sucks up enemies, a jungle explorer that gave her acrobatic moves, or a cowgirl with a pop gun and a hobby horse. The game was a staple of my childhood playtime until suddenly it was no more.

Several years ago I started thinking about the game again. It took a recipe of keywords — "Minnie," "transformations," "circus" — to find it, but I did. I found a copy of the Game Boy Advance remake (dubbed Disney's Magical Quest 2 starring Mickey & Minnie) at a local used game store and clicked it into my old PDA. Somewhere along the way, however, the magic I had felt while playing the game disappeared. It's a solid, but light, platformer with a charming sense of place, but it failed to evoke the joy I felt when I played it as a kid – something I think a lot of people can relate to when they look back on childhood favourites. That's the thing about nostalgia, right? It is an altered memory of the past, remembering emotions over reality.

I have, here and there, chased the awe and found glimpses of what it felt like to play a magical game. But I hadn't found it until 2024, 30 years later, with Nintendo's Princess Peach: Showtime!.