Epic Mickey: This is really Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse is making a comeback. Photo / Supplied

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the world's most recognisable rodent had drowned in a sea of modern cartoons that, to this pair of eyes at least, are bordering on totally incomprehensible to anyone over the age of eight.

But Mickey Mouse is making a comeback on Nintendo's Wii as well as Apple's iDevices in an impressive new game, Epic Mickey.

Mickey is thrown into Wasteland, a bizarre alternative Disney world packed with failed and forgotten creative efforts and ruled by the furry fist of Walt Disney's first cartoon star, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

It is produced by Warren Spector, loved in the game world for the cyberpunk classic Deus Ex series. Spector, it seems, has undergone a family-friendly transformation - working for Disney and producing content to slot into the very vanilla Nintendo world.

"I wasn't always a trenchcoat-and-sunglasses kind of guy," he told Wired magazine.

In fact, before the Deux Ex darkness, the self-proclaimed animation junkie produced a thesis on Looney Tunes.

Epic Mickey's deep dive into Disney's archives is surprisingly interesting. Mickey has two major tools in his arsenal, paint and paint thinner, which he uses to alter the Wasteland world around him, and the actions he makes can dynamically alter the direction the game goes in. This is courtesy of the Spector-led Junction "Playstyle Matters" project.

Epic Mickey itself combines action/adventure, platform and light role-playing game elements, jumping from the ever-altering Wasteland environment into platform play inside famous Mickey adventures.

Think back to that vintage cartoon classic Steamboat Willie, back when Mickey was a slightly misogynistic pest with a taste for beer; and then later to the more mature, saccharine and moralistic Mickey who was far less inclined to behave like a spoiled big-eared rat.

The sheer scope of this project - courtesy of Spector's encyclopaedic knowledge of all things cartoony - means that it's essentially a virtual wander through the long-forgotten back catalogue of Disney, involving characters we all grew up with and loved, and others who never made it past the cutting room floor.