DuckTales (NES)
Might solve a mystery
Or rewrite history
Not sure what made me think of DuckTales here but The Disney Afternoon Collection of six Disney NES games by Capcom turned out to be on sale on Steam for $4.99 so seemed worth a shot. Playing the dumped ROM in Mesen gave me access to the infinite lives and time cheat codes; playing on Easy gives you twice as much health–you can take six hits instead of three before losing one of your two starting lives–but doesn’t save you from the plentiful bottomless death pits, and I think I fell multiple times into most of them. I’ve read–didn’t check–that the game offers no continues.
I’m not sure I beat the game when renting it back in the day, but I probably saw every stage, since you can play them in any order–although I didn’t remember the Himalaya stage and its annoying snow/ice at all. If you don’t fall down all the holes like I did it’s probably a pretty short game, and aside from the truly gorgeous sprite work by future Capcom Global Head of Production Keiji Inafune, the enemies, except for the rather nifty little bosses–oh and those mummy ducks in Transylvania–are not very memorable, gameplay-wise, and neither are the stages, really.
(Keiji may not have cared as much about character color as we were trained to by Disney cartoons, in which for instance Scrooge McDuck’s three grand-nephews are ONLY individually identifiable by their colors–but here sometimes there are two green ducklings and a red one, instead of one green, red, and blue; and Webby is red instead of pink, and Glomgold green instead of blue. Also his Launchpad is a bit off, but really who cares.)
The real standout is the music by Hiroshige Tonomura, much of which I still remembered even though I think the last time I played the game WAS back in '89 or so. Modern wikis just mention his Moon stage track as the one for which he’s famous, but except that it draws copyright claims on YouTube, that track wasn’t nearly as striking to me as the title track (adapted from the show but it still rules), stage select track, Amazon track, Transylvania track, and African Mines track. The music really does make this game.
Scrooge’s bizarre pogo-sticking attack / traversal mechanic with his cane is also a standout. It’s oddly tricky to initiate here though: you have to press Jump, then hold Down while pressing and holding Attack; you can then release Down and Jump, and just keep holding Attack to continue pogoing–but if you land on a ledge edge in such a way that your pogo is not quite on it, you abruptly stop pogoing, which got me hit a LOT; should just have kept you pogoing until releasing Attack or being hit. I’ve noticed in my brief play so far of DuckTales 2 (I don’t think I ever knew there WAS a sequel!!) that 2 simplifies it at least in removing the requirement to hold Down while first pressing Attack to start the pogo action; I’m hoping 2 also fixes the edge pogo-halts but I’m not holding my breath.
DuckTales is a pretty fun little game! Thank goodness for cheat codes.
This Disney Afternoon Collection version of the ROM was altered to remove mention of Nintendo from the title screen.
There’s no credits, just a Scrooge END screen.
Wikipedia says DuckTales is called “Naughty Ducks Dream Adventures” in Japan.
