It’s making the rounds that some people from Headcannon, one of the indie teams behind Sonic Mania, pitched a prototype of a new Darkwing Duck game to, uh, Capcom, inspired by/based on Capcom’s 1992 Darkwing Duck game.
There’s a video of the protoype:
Writer Aaron Sparrow and artist James Silvani of the most recent Darkwing Duck comic book series were working with Headcannon on it.
As a ridiculously huge Darkwing Duck fan myself and a pretty big fan of the Capcom game, too… Frankly, the prototype is a chore to play. The addition of a hookshot/swinging mechanic on top of the original game’s grippable platforms feels poorly thought out and shoddy to use. The level design is not particularly interesting, and is fairly brutal right from the start. Most obnoxiously, the level design seems to be completely unconcerned with the size of the screen, requiring constant manual screen panning and, probably, memorization of where hazards and platforms are going to be. Admittedly, it’s a prototype–and a very pretty one–but the prototype didn’t inspire confidence that this would bring anything more than some simple aesthetic joy (I mean, yes, of course, I’d love to see someone pay Jim Cummings to perform Darkwing Duck again, but then again, he’s doing that on neo-DuckTales).
Darkwing Duck fans even more miserable than I are gnashing their teeth about the woeful unfairness of how Capcom didn’t greenlight this. These people, of course, have no idea how anything works.
Also, Darkwing Duck was a minor splash in the NES canon in comparison to DuckTales. (Also also, DuckTales Remastered was most interesting for having Alan Young voice Scrooge one last time.)
Gaming press is picking up pretty big on this, though. I expect it’ll fall out of the news cycle and be forgotten in a week. I don’t think a handful of blog commenters can convince… Capcom and Disney to put money into this.
Anyway. Guess that’s news. Download the prototype before they get a C&D, maybe.