I was super psyched that I'd finally sat down and played through an NES game last week and with that momentum I played through another platformer that I hadn't touched in years and years, which was DuckTales on NES. I hadn't stopped to think about it, but it was an appropriate choice since apparently the game was developed by many of the same people who worked on the Mega Man games. DuckTales is another one of those game I distinctly remember playing as a kid and liking it, although I didn't really remember much about it at all except that you play as Uncle Scrooge and the game's main mechanic is using Scrooge's cane as a pogo stick to jump on enemies' heads.
The game was pretty fun, and the pogo mechanic still feels unique today, and although it doesn't include any continues or cheat codes, it offers up three difficulty settings. The easy setting is useful for learning the ins and outs of the levels, and from there the normal difficulty isn't too hard. The locales were varied, although the levels are a bit same-y as you navigate through various mazes. It's nothing too complicated and and it's on the short side, but that's probably not surprising given its target audience. The game is colorful, and the animation and sprites look great, and it controls well. As someone who also watched the cartoons some when I was a kid, it's a lot of fun to see characters from the cartoon make appearances (albeit mostly cameo roles).
Not a whole lot more needs to be said. In general the game is regarded as one of the best platformers on the NES, although without too much of the nostalgia factor I found it enjoyable, but not particularly sublime. There was a sequel on NES that sells for a lot (i.e. a couple hundred $), and the original game was remastered for modern systems by WayForward not too long ago, including Steam and Wii U. I picked up a copy a while back, so I'll have to give it a spin at some point and see how it compares. Hopefully I can keep this NES roll going a little bit longer also...
DuckTales links (a-whoo-ooh!):
- Article at retronauts.com
- Review at NintendoLife
- The game placed 10th in IGN's top NES games list from a few years ago