The thing is, I really didn't get that much mileage out of Game Boy models. Those were always more something that my little brothers got into. They really dug into Pokemon and Fire Emblem, and while I really do love the innovation of quite a few portable games, a lot of that was stuff I played well after the fact. My thing was PC games, but not, like, PC games that you know now. I never got into all the big Blizzard titles, or immersive sims, or adventure games, or any of the stuff you actually think of when you talk about PC gaming. I loved activity centers, interactive storybooks, board games with weird cutscenes and voiceovers, game show home editions, edutainment games, and demo discs for a million games you'll never get to play. If it let you type your name in and waste your parents' printer ink, I probably would love it.
Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games is such a very strange thing to me now because it's a game I played in pieces before ever having its complete edition. This game is actually five minigames, and many if not all of them came on their own CD-ROMs at first, often bundled with other Disney games. Chances are, if you bought, like, any other Disney game for PC, you would also get a bonus disc that had one of the five jungle games. There was also another collection from the same developer, 7th Level, themed off of The Hunchback of Notre Dame which was also split into bonus discs. While I don't quite remember which of the individual jungle games we had, the one that sticks out the most in my mind is the Jungle Pinball disc. But I knew there was a big version. I remember the ad. But we never actually got the full game disc until many years later when they started packing it in with cereal boxes.
I really hate to say "kids today" but, kids today get QR codes on their boxes. Back in the early 2000s we got videogames bundled in on CD-ROMs, and later we even got some crappy old movies on DVD. You weren't gonna get Starcraft with your Corn Pops but you would get things like family board games, Humongous Entertainment adventure games (I legitimately got a copy of the Pajama Sam game where he collects cereal box tops in a box of cereal; if that's not a perfect example of form matching content I will eat my Bachelor of Arts diploma), and even the complete Jungle Games. These games were all quite old by the time they were being packed-in with cereal but I loved playing them.
And Timon and Pumbaa's collection is nothing to sneeze at either. Like, no, I'm probably never going to play this again after trying it out for the first time in 20 years. The minigames are just Timon and Pumbaa-branded versions of actual arcade era classics. As I mentioned earlier, there's a pinball game and it sure is pinball. This is easily my first memory of playing pinball on a computer and I'm not gonna lie, booting it up all these years later, it was the game I played the most because it is a perfectly fine and fun pinball game. But no shit, there's also a Puyo Puyo clone in this collection, "Bug Drop." There's also a vertical shooter, "Burper," a Frogger-esque game called "Hippo Hop," and a single-screen shooter called "Slingshooter." They call the main menu the Jungle Arcade and yeah, it really is kind of an arcade essentials pack. And I think that's kind of neat! It's low-key incredible to look at this game so many years later and realize that it was sort of priming me to explore so many classic genres in one accessible package. I mean the controls are awful but on the whole it's a really solid package.
Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1995:
Earthbound (SNES), Donkey Kong Land (NGB), Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (SNES), Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (SNES), Full Throttle (PC), I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (PC)
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