Darkwing Duck (TurboGrafx-16 Review)

Darkwing Duck
Platform: TurboGrafx-16
Developed by Radiance Software & Interactive Designs
First Released June, 1992
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

The only amusement I got from this game was standing still to snap this pic.

I don’t hate Darkwing Duck on the TurboGrafx-16 so much that I’m willing to take back everything I said about the NES game. But, I thought about it. This version of Darkwing Duck is notorious for being one of the worst Disney games ever and one of the worst games on the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine. It’s a well-earned reputation, but I’m guessing most who name it as such haven’t played the other Disney Afternoon game on the TG16. Following TaleSpin, this is the second butchering of a beloved animated series by Radiance Software, and the best thing I can say about Darkwing Duck is that it’s better than that piece of crap. How did TaleSpin slip through so many “worst of” lists while Darkwing Duck factors so heavily onto them? Y’all got it wrong: TaleSpin is the really bad one, and Darkwing Duck is merely a badly coded children’s platformer with phoned-in level design. Oh, it’s horrible. One of the worst games I’ve ever reviewed, and certainly near the bottom of platformers. It’s especially damning of Radiance that this is their other bad Disney game.

On the NORMAL difficulty, if you don’t progress fast enough, you spontaneously combust. This wouldn’t be bad if not for the fact that moving platforms have no synchronization logic to them, and you might end up having to wait a while for them to work, which means automatic death no matter how much life you have. Okay, so maybe it is possibly the worst game I’ve ever played.

Like Fantasia before it, I started out unaware that there’s a butt stomp. There’s no extra animation for it, so when you perform the move, you can’t actually tell you’re doing it. When I first attempted a basic “jump on their head” hop-and-bop attack, I took damage. I really need to get into a habit of reading the instruction book for these types of games, because I didn’t figure out to hold DOWN to perform a butt stomp until I restarted the game on the easy difficulty. Oh, I did eventually go back and try to play this on normal, and during my first boss battle, the damn thing glitched right off the screen. This left me soft-locked. Suddenly, standing still wouldn’t kill me. I’ve got this uncanny knack for finding the strangest glitches in games, but holy crap, that’s a new one.

Stick to easy mode, where I can report that no bosses opted out of the fight and left me stuck in purgatory. Oh, and I never just died from standing around. Once I understood that I could butt-stomp enemies, I ignored using the gun and only died twice, actually. Once from running out of health during an extended stretch where these giant tank things with horrible collision boxes charged at me, and a single instakill death at the start of the fourth and final level. YES, Darkwing Duck TG16 only has four levels. Not even long levels, mind you. It’s not entirely a conventional point-A to point-B platformer. You have to find puzzle pieces in the stages, and if you don’t find them all, you have to replay the stage. This would have been fine if the stages were labyrinths, but they really aren’t. In one of them, you can fall underground, but all the puzzle pieces are along the top of the stage. I only know this because I had to go back and replay it to see what happened if you fell into a hole. I never did the first time around.

This is one of the times that I actually died. It would have been exciting if they hadn’t been a completely flat hallway where this giant tank thing attacks a couple dozen times.

Darkwing Duck on the TurboGrafx-16 has HORRIBLE, sluggish play control. This includes a delay in jumping to kneel down first. I guess that was done to “add realism” because, in real life, you have to bend your knees to jump. In practice, it just makes playing this miserable. Dee-Dubbya also proves that collision detection is something Radiance never got the hang of following TaleSpin. Like TaleSpin, it’s not consistent. Sometimes I’d take damage even though I wasn’t near an enemy, and sometimes my sprite would make contact with an enemy sprite and pass harmlessly right through it. On the plus side, the whole thing takes about thirty minutes to finish. If you’re going to be a terrible game, be a terrible game that’s over with quickly. Oh, and those puzzle pieces? You have to put together a puzzle with them. Actually that was a welcome break from playing the platforming part.

As I played this section, the theme song to Full House was running on loop in my head. Now it will run in your head too. You’re welcome.

Any time Darkwing Duck tried to change up the rudimentary platforming design, like a stage set on a slope, it repeats the same sequence of obstacles several times in a row. As badly developed as the game is, and it’s really bad, it would have been boring even if the gameplay wasn’t glitchy and broken. This feels like the type of game made by someone who rolled their eyes while watching children play an NES game. It fundamentally doesn’t understand basic level design, enemy placement, platforming, or boss battles. Moving platforms aren’t synced-up. You often take damage when performing the butt stomp. Sometimes the gas gun kills an enemy and sometimes it just.. does nothing. There’s a variety of bullet types, but since they all seem like they randomly work (or not work) I stuck to using my butt. There’s no OOMPH either way. That’s what happens when collision detection is crap.

The final boss, a battle against a giant robotic Darkwing Duck, had me legitimately LOLing. It has no animation at all, so when it moves around the room between attacks, the sprite just lifelessly glides around. Calling this amateur hour is too kind. I doubt the people who made this had any clue at all what they were doing. By the way, this boss was the only ALMOST moderately-decent part of the entire game and disqualifying of worst game ever status by itself.

I remember when I was a kid and grown-ups would call lives “tries.” I always found that annoying. They’re LIVES, old people. Well, guess what Darkwing Duck calls lives? Yep. That really says it all. I still think TaleSpin is worse. Darkwing Duck feels like the designers of that game were like “well, we better not try to get fancy again, like we did with TaleSpin. Let’s just make a basic game!” They didn’t have the talent to do that right, either. But hey, if their goal was to make a better game, Darkwing Duck on the TurboGrafx-16 is better than TaleSpin on the TurboGrafx-16, and all that required was to surgically remove anything resembling ambition. So, if you MUST play one of the two NEC Disney games, play this one. That’s like choosing between getting stung a thousand times by fire ants or struck by lightning. You’re getting hospitalized either way.
Verdict: NO!

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