Princess Peach: Showtime! is everything I wanted in a game as a little girl
polygon.comIf 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 browsed the new movies, I took my baby sister’s hand and headed straight to the video game section. More often than not, I knew 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 hobby horse. The game was a staple in my childhood playtime until it suddenly wasn’t anymore.
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 (renamed as Disney’s Magical Quest 2 Starring Mickey & Minnie) at a local used game store and clicked it into my old handheld. Somewhere along the way, though, the magic I had felt playing the game was lost. It’s a solid, though easy, platformer with a charming sense of place, but it failed to evoke the delight I felt playing it as a kid — something I think a lot of people can relate to when looking back to childhood favorites. That’s the thing with nostalgia, right? It’s an altered memory of the past, remembering feelings over reality.
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I have, here and there, chased the awe and found glimpses of how it felt to play a magical game. But I had not found it until 2024, 30 years later, with Nintendo’s Princess Peach: Showtime!. It’s Nintendo’s first game starring Peach in nearly two decades after the Nintendo DS game Super Princess Peach, and it’s long overdue. The game brings Peach to the Sparkle Theater, where chaos ensues as villain Madame Grape and her minions in the Sour Bunch take over a series of stage plays to
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