But mentally enshrining them in gold, considering them to be sacrosanct and untouchable, is going too far. There's a lot to love about games like the original DuckTales and, yes, things they did better than modern games. But I look at the gold-plated NES game and I wonder if Capcom and Wayforward might not have the wrong idea about classic games. It's an undeniably cool promo item (especially if you love old game cartridges like me). By now you've probably seen that Capcom mailed out an NES cartridge containing the original version of DuckTales, painted gold and issued with a Certificate of Authenticity, like a piece of art to be displayed in a museum. I think Capcom and developer WayForward had good intentions with DuckTales Remastered. I had to just stop for my own sanity, and it didn't matter how good the music was. Difficult is one thing, unfair is another. I can deal with high difficulty, I can deal with big punishments for running out of lives, but I can't deal with a game design that dumps you into a pit and kills you before you have a chance to even see what's going on. Game over.Īt this point I had no ability to get upset with DuckTales Remastered anymore because I knew that this time, for sure, I was not going to play it again. As my eyes are adjusting, Scrooge rides in on the mine cart, which promptly falls into a bottomless pit immediately after the screen finishes fading in but before my eyes can even relay this information up to my freaking brain. I'm looking at the new screen as it fades in, trying to figure out what I'm looking at. Everything is rendered in dark colors that don't contrast very well. The mine cart tracks lead off the side of the screen, and I ride them. Plus I still have four hit points remaining on this life. But, I think, there's still a lot of room for improvement here, so I'll try again. I am losing too many lives, and by the time I enter the mine cart sequence, I realize I have little hope of finishing this level on this run through. This is even longer and more complicated than the Amazon one. This time, I rethink the boss fight and try something different. I am zoning out and thinking about other things. There are no more cool secrets, just seven coins that I have to go pick up one by one, trudging back through the same level for what is now the third time. And the sense of discovery, of finding cool hidden secrets, is totally over. All of those dialogue sequences between Scrooge and Launchpad happen again, and you have to pause the game and select the "Skip Cinematic" option to stop them. It's not fun to keep taking hits not because I screwed up but because the Xbox controller is (I have now decided) piss-poor for this type of game. You have to understand at this point that the Amazon level takes me, I don't know, about 15-20 minutes. This time, the whole level is completely boring. And the boss, the giant, angry head of an Amazon deity statue, stomps around the screen and utterly destroys me once, then twice. I get to the boss with an extra life in reserve. Let's try a game with NES-era difficulty. You can create a fulfilling experience without making a player do the same thing over and over.īut okay. But game design moved away from that, and I think the change has been for the better. Designers made their games really hard because their games were really short, and they had to encourage you to play them over and over. Sure, that's exactly what happens in the NES version of DuckTales, not to mention most older games. All those coins I collected, activating the machine – it's all been wiped, as if I've never been into the level at all. It's all as I remember, just with a modern presentation. The enemies all act just like they did in the original – bees fly in serpentine motions at me, apes jump on top of bricks to chase me, Venus flytraps lie in wait to snap at me. The music is a kicked-up version of the original tune, which I'm loving listening to. Now the game becomes very similar to the NES original. I pick the Amazon, the first on the list. I play through the introductory stage, which is not difficult, and get to the point where the game asks me to which of its five areas I would like to travel. But I can get over that, I think, as long as the game as designed doesn't ask me to be more exactingly precise than the controller is capable of. The standard Xbox 360 controller to me seems a little impractical for playing a 2-D platformer, since neither the stick nor the D-pad on the controller feel as precise as the good old NES pad. I'm just getting started with DuckTales Remastered on Xbox 360.
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