DuckTales 2 and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 (NES Review) BONUS – Disney Afternoon Collection Final Verdict + Rankings!

March 5, 2024 by Indie Gamer Chick 2 Comments

DuckTales 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released April 23, 1993
Included in Disney Afternoon Collection

Rescue Rangers 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released December 10, 1993
Included in Disney Afternoon Collection

In DuckTales 2, you can upgrade your cane. Remember the episode of House where he gets a cane with flames on it so that it looks like he’s “going fast?” It’s like that, only it actually works. Actually, DuckTales is basically exactly like House, what with all the racial stereotyping and verbal abuse of employees. Presumably a lot less pill-popping though. It’s a children’s television show, after all.

It’s not exactly Earth-shattering to call DuckTales and Rescue Rangers two of the best games on the NES and two of the best licensed games of all-time. Oddly, both games got sequels that nobody talks about. This is largely chalked up to the fact that both games were released late in the Nintendo Entertainment System’s life cycle. In the case of Rescue Rangers, very late, as in it and Bonk’s Adventure ushered in the final year of its active support. Now that we’re in the future and have access to the Information Super Highway, you’d think that wouldn’t matter anymore, but these sequels still get almost no attention. They don’t make “best of” lists, except the occasional “hidden gems” ranking. It felt a little bit like a red flag to me. Maybe fans of the originals know something I don’t. Since they used the same engine as the originals, appeared to use the same sprites, were made by the same developers, and feature the same gameplay (more or less), I was kind of figuring DuckTales 2 and Rescue Rangers 2 would feel more like expansion packs for the previous NES games.

In Rescue Rangers 2, the red ball is missing from the boss fights, having been demoted to “bonus game novelty.”

In the case of Rescue Rangers 2, it’s remarkable how much it feels like a modern DLC expansion pack made up of levels deleted from the original release. By that, I mean the levels deleted for a reason. These levels are bland, the enemies are placed in uninspired ways, and there’s an overall sense that the energy from the original is missing. There’s nine stages this time instead of eleven, but in the entire play through, there was only one single moment that made me sit up in my chair and say “okay, this is different!” It involves operating a mine cart. Even this was sloppy, as whether or not you’re “bound” to the controller of the cart was touch and go. I lost a life by walking right off the cart when I meant to use the brakes.

When this worked, it worked REALLY well, as far as 8-bit set pieces go. However, when it didn’t work, it meant death.

Meanwhile, DuckTales 2 feels like a legitimate sequel with level design that easily avoids having a “deleted scene” quality about it. A few new moves have been added. You can pull certain blocks with your cane by doing the golf swing into them, and speaking of that, you can do the golf club swing with your cane mid-jump. The jumping swing never feels “right” and was my least favorite aspect of the sequel, but at least one big hidden object requires you to do it. There’s also hoops and other assorted platforms your cane can hook onto, which is such an obvious idea that I’m kind of surprised it wasn’t in the original game. Like the original game, there’s only five main levels, one of which doubles as the setting for the final boss of the game. Really good levels, but they’ll leave you wanting a lot more. If Mega Man games can have 8 bosses PLUS Dr. Wily’s stage, why can’t a DuckTales game get over the five-main-stage hump?

You’re not just walking into walls to find secrets anymore, either.

Instead of finding the two expansions for your health capacity somewhere in the levels, you have to purchase them in a store that you visit between the levels. You can also buy 1ups, extra continues, cake that restores your health any time you want (which you use by pausing the game) and a safe that lets you keep all the gems you collect if you lose a life. While I miss finding the health upgrades in the levels, Capcom replaced them by hiding upgrades to your cane in three levels. The upgrades allow you to pull larger objects with the cane or break formerly indestructible blocks. It’s actually a cool idea that’s very underutilized here. I think it would have been better to have those upgrades be rewards for beating stages. Maybe they couldn’t come up with two more. That’s probably more likely, since they barely managed to create excuses to use the upgraded cane.

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However, props to Capcom for going all-in on level exploration and hidden rooms. Remember the two “hidden treasures” in the first game, and how it was weird to only have two hidden treasures in a game with five levels? Well, there’s only two high-valued hidden treasures in the sequel too. HOWEVER, each level also has a hidden map piece somewhere in it. You start the game with one piece, and there’s a piece that must be purchased from the store. The other five are hidden in the levels. Upon grabbing the seventh and final piece, you are immediately teleported from whatever level you’re in to the hidden area under the castle. This is a sixth stage that has a repeat of the boss from the Scotland level, but the level getting there is an entirely new one. No having to go back and forth to Transylvania, like in the first game. Well actually, you do briefly return to the pirate ship for the final battle. Again, they could have done a Dr. Wily-like final trial, but no, just a return to the pirate ship and a relatively straight walk to the final boss. DuckTales 2 rights a lot of wrongs, but it still feels like Capcom left a LOT on the table with the franchise.

The bonus area is one of the best parts of the game, too. Nice.

Since the best aspect of DuckTales 1 was the level design and how exhilarating it was to find the hidden trinkets, I’m really happy that it plays such a big part in the sequel. I sort of wish it didn’t immediately kick you out of the level when you find the seventh one. Also, you actually do have to get the seven map pieces before fighting whatever is your fifth boss, since it would appear the game takes you immediately to the final battle against Glumgold after you get the five primary treasures from beating the bosses. It’s sloppy, especially for Capcom, but otherwise, there’s nothing about DuckTales 2 that makes it a lesser game than the original. The level design is stellar and, despite using the same engine as the original, it worked in a few puzzles and surprises along the way. Besides Little Samson, I can’t think of any NES game that got the shaft worse than DuckTales 2. Okay, so the soundtrack isn’t as good, but that shouldn’t matter when the gameplay is quantifiable better. This is probably the best “hidden gem” on the NES.

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I wish I could say the same about Rescue Rangers 2, but it’s just not as good as the original. Besides being able to pick up stunned enemies and use them as weapons, the one and only added move (at least that I could find) is being able to power-throw the crates if you get a running start. That sounds like a fine idea, but in practice, the amount of times I found it useful were few and far between. You can’t jump and throw a power shot, nor can you angle it in any direction but straight forward, and any deviation besides walking straight forward takes away the power. Since most enemies, you know, move, moments where I was able to build up the momentum for a power shot without falling off a ledge, walking into another box (or an enemy), or having the enemy simply jump out of range were so rare that I spent the entire forty-or-so minute run time questioning why they even bothered with this move. Most enemies die from one normal hit anyway, and the ones who don’t? Well, it’s fun to pick up stunned enemies and throw them at the next baddie. There’s no point in the game where several enemies are in a row, either. It’s one of the most worthless video game moves ever invented.

The throwing of stunned enemies was, admittedly, very fun.

What’s most notable about Rescue Rangers 2 is all the stuff removed from the original formula. The map is gone. The salt and pepper shakers are gone, but then again, so are the apples and other heavy objects that the shakers make lighter for you. On the other hand, a positive removal was most of the indestructible metal boxes. They were so overpowered that they all but ended the challenge for the original game, but in Rescue Rangers 2, they’re a true rarity (and there’s even a gag where one gets taken from you via a magnet). It’s weird they made these changes but kept the “ducking into a crate and letting the enemies walk into you to kill them” thing that severely nerfed the first Rescue Rangers. Oh, and the red ball you fight the bosses with that was SO FUN to use is gone. You fight bosses with crates or other assorted debris. Decent bosses, mind you, but they all lack that feeling of BIGNESS or finality that the first game did better than just about any Capcom Disney game. Hell, maybe better than any NES game.

The best “set piece” isn’t really even a set piece. The most fun I had in Rescue Rangers 2 was using the baseball, which is thrown in a high arc, like a lawn dart. I almost wish they had eliminated the crates entirely and instead required players to carry a single item through the levels like this. THAT would have been cool and different and made up for the ho-hum level design. Some ROM hacker ought to get on this idea. Dear NES development community: I freely give you the idea of a Rescue Rangers game where you have to manage a single item across whole levels with no crates or other throwing objects. Make me proud!

Bosses were never DuckTales’ strong suit, so the fact that DuckTales 2 has a couple marginally decent bosses is actually a really big improvement. I even died fighting one of them (the pirate ship’s boss), as opposed to DuckTales 1, where I think I took two or three hits of damage total the first time I ever played it (this doesn’t count Remastered, where the boss fights were scaled-up to the level of OMG awesome!) I only died against one boss in Rescue Rangers 2, and like what happened with the mine cart, that was largely due to haphazard design. Rescue Rangers 2 is just a fundamentally forgettable game. The level design is much more conservative. The enemies aren’t as menacing. The themes for the levels are mostly a big step down. In the first game, there’s multiple unforgettable characters and moments. I’m having trouble remembering anything in the sequel AND I JUST PLAYED IT! Besides the mine cart, the biggest twist is one stage runs on a three minute timer., and I beat that level with over two minutes left on my first attempt. Admittedly, I figured the game would cut it close and so I bolted for the exit, ignoring enemies and items, but it turns out, there was no need to rush.

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Only a complete hater would call Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 a bad game. It’s not bad. It just feels like a step down from the first game. Actually, a really big step down. The levels aren’t exciting in the same way the original game’s were. I’m confident that nearly any player who experienced both Rescue Rangers titles for the first time back-to-back would rank most of the sequel’s levels on the bottom. It’s telling how fun the basic Rescue Rangers gameplay is that it’s still an okay game (see Mickey’s Dangerous Chase for an example of the formula being outright bad), but even hitting enemies with crates feels less thrilling this time EVEN THOUGH THE CRATES break on impact. The satisfying WOOOSH sound design of slaying baddies is replaced with an incredibly underwhelming “ppf” sound. Oh, the WOOSH is still there, but it’s limited to when you daze an enemy. Why’d they do that? Eh, Rescue Rangers 2 is fine, but I can totally understand why it never became a big deal.
Rescue Rangers 2 Verdict: YES!

For the first time, an NES version of a DuckTales boss got me. I lost a life fighting Quackbeard. I don’t know if that’s its name, but it’s DuckTales, so I’m guessing so. (Checks) Apparently no, it’s just called Cap’n. That’s lame.

The game that really got screwed historically was DuckTales 2. It’s just a better game than the original. Yep, I went there. It’s more bold with its level design. Its bosses are (marginally) more cunning. There’s a LOT more hidden stuff. Even the controls are improved. Transitioning to and from the pogo hopping is so much smoother this time around. It’s why the jumping golf swing stood out so much. It’s the only janky element left. Otherwise, DuckTales 2 is the superior DuckTales game and one of the biggest casualties of the 16-bit era. If this had come out a year after the original, I have no doubt in my mind it would be universally regarded as the best Disney game by Capcom on the NES. A lot of late NES games got done dirty by being ignored in the face of 16-bit gaming, but none got quacked-over quite like the sequel to DuckTales, a great game that nobody talks about.
DuckTales 2 Verdict: YES!

DISNEY AFTERNOON COLLECTION
BONUS FEATURES

I know they couldn’t use a picture of an NES controller, but wow, this looks like the bumper for a cartoon series in 1990 got drunk and threw up on your monitor.

Disney Afternoon Collection has TONS of bonus features. There’s a gallery that includes box art, concept art, advertisements (that usually feature the same art from other galleries) and even a few references to the Game Boy ports of these games. The Game Boy references are actually annoying since those versions of the games aren’t included. Hey, I didn’t like DuckTales at all on the Game Boy and I’m not even going to bother playing Darkwing Duck, TaleSpin, or DuckTales 2’s GB ports, but having them would have added value even as a curio. Disney Afternoon also allows you to listen to the full soundtracks for the games, and holy crap, I appreciate it because it confirmed to me how bad the soundtrack for DuckTales 2 is. It’s one of the worst soundtracks for a quality game ever, and you would NEVER expect that from Capcom. I have a tin ear so nobody should listen to me about anything music related, but seriously, this soundtrack is BAD. Awesome feature though.

I wish there was a lot more behind-the-scenes stuff for the games, but what’s here is, you know, fine.

Along with the absolutely essential button mapping, the two biggest features are a time attack mode and a boss rush mode for each game. Both features have online leaderboards that allow you to watch replays of any recorded run. Awesome. I’m not so much into speed running, but I’m left gobsmacked by how good some people get at cheesing games. If you’re not into speed running and just want to own the six Disney Afternoon NES games, you’ll have the option to rewind and use save states. It’s one of the best versions of rewind I’ve seen in a collection like this, too. Just hold the button down and you can go back as far as you want. That’s how it should be. Awesome. For all the special features, I’m crediting $10 in value to Disney Afternoon. I’d credit it more, but half the MSRP is the max value for a retro collection.

FINAL VERDICT ON DISNEY AFTERNOON

The full game is going to get a YES! either way, but I’ve set a value of $5 per quality game because that’s usually where I put NES games at. At $5 per quality game, it needed just two out of six games to get a YES! for me to recommend Disney Afternoon Collection. If you read this review, you already know it won, but for the record, the final tally was:

YES!: 4 – $20 in Value
NO!: 2
Bonus Value: $10
MSRP of Disney Afternoon Collection: $19.99
Final Value: $30
Final Verdict: YES!

DISNEY AFTERNOON RANKINGS!

It’s still a game about two billionaires fighting over $5,000,000 worth of stolen plunder.

DuckTales 2
Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers
DuckTales
Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2
**TERMINATOR LINE**
Darkwing Duck
TaleSpin

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2, Disney Afternoon Collection, Disney Afternoon Review, DuckTales, DuckTales 2, DuckTales 2 Review, DuckTales NES, Rescue Rangers 2, Rescue Rangers 2 NES, Rescue Rangers 2 Review

Disney’s Aladdin (Sega Genesis Review)

March 2, 2024 by Indie Gamer Chick 5 Comments

Disney’s Aladdin
Platform: Sega Genesis
Developed by Virgin
Published by Sega
First Released November 11, 1993
Included in Disney Classic Games Collection
SPECIAL NOTE: This review is of the FINAL CUT version.
Read the Video Game History Foundation’s article.

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If I was told I could only make one change to the Sega version of Aladdin, I think I’d have defeated enemies fall off the screen, like they do in the SNES game. Poofing them out of existence hurts the sword-based combat, which is the defining difference between the two 16-bit versions of Aladdin. I’m a big fan of Capcom’s version, while I’ve never really cared for the Sega Genesis version, and the combat is a big reason why. It’s some of the most inelegant and feathery sword combat I’ve experienced. My father enjoyed the game and told me I was expecting too much, but nuts to that. 2D games could do sword fighting pretty good by this point, and while it’s not Wizards & Warriors levels of bad, it’s nowhere near as swashbuckling as they were aiming for. Unlike the SNES game, apples are lethal in Aladdin for Genesis, so if I was facing a more aggressive enemy, I opted to use them. You also have to use apples to defeat the bosses. In a game that puts such a premium on sword combat, closing with the apples tells me they knew the sword was no good.

The final battle against Jafar is one of the worst in the entire history of 2D gaming. In the first phase, he sucks you in with his magic staff (kinky) and you have to scratch out distance and throw apples. Then, in his final form, you have to stand with the giant snake off-screen to be able to jump up and hit it until it says LEVEL COMPLETE. Oof. Horrible.

In general, I don’t like Virgin’s style of level design. It always has the feel of using a plug-and-play template of platforms and walls to create a zig-zaggy maze from point A to point B. That’s fine if the combat is fun enough to carry the workload, but if it’s not, you’re left with repetitive gameplay and no stand-out set pieces to make up for it. Which isn’t to say there were never moments where I wasn’t enjoying this alternate take on Aladdin. I liked the magic ropes that fly you up to different platforms. I liked the Abu mini-games. And uh.. that’s about it. The fast, flowing action of the SNES game is gone, and instead, Sega’s Aladdin’s level design is so basic, samey, and lacking in set pieces. Even something like hanging from ledges would have helped. Genesis Aladdin never feels spontaneous, which is why it never feels like an Aladdin game.

The escape from the Cave of Wonders scene might as well cut to Dragon’s Lair. The genie’s fingers point where the rock is coming. Well, unless it flashes a “?” and then it’s pure random chance if you live or die.

It’s not like they never got experimental. Actually, this version had better ideas for level themes than the SNES version did. Instead of a stage based around Ancient Egypt, there’s a stage based around Aladdin escaping the dungeon, which sort of happens in the movie. Capcom could have used that for a level and didn’t, and Capcom could have used the magic carpet for the actual platforming levels, another omission that Virgin was wise to include in their game. That said, the similarities are astonishing. Both companies had the same idea about setting the post-Cave of Wonders level inside the lamp. But, whereas the SNES version of this concept is surreal, colorful, and creative, the Genesis version is really drab, cold, and kind of janky. The main platform is this blue substance that’s functionally like quicksand that you sink through if you don’t keep jumping. Granted, I imagine the inside of his lamp would be more like the Genesis version, since it explains why he wouldn’t want to go back to it.

It’s basically magic quicksand. This is a reminder that original ideas aren’t necessarily good ideas.

I don’t really have much more to say about Disney’s Aladdin on the Genesis since I already sort of reviewed it once when I reviewed the original Disney Classics Collection. It’s pretty, I guess, but the much-touted hand drawn animation cost the game weighty combat and accurate collision detection. I’d rather have both those things than “cartoon” animation. Besides, the animation wasn’t on par with the film. It was more like a really cheap Saturday morning cartoon. Cutting edge for 1993, but fated to age badly. Ultimately, it’s just really boring. I have a whole list of Disney games I have to play for this marathon, and the ones I dread most are those by Virgin. Their games are all style and little substance, and certainly nothing worth celebrating. The most frustrating part of their involvement with Sega’s Disney games is that Sega produced one of the all-time greats in Castle of Illusion. Why did they turn to a third party for this, and especially why Virgin of all studios? Apparently it was because Global Gladiators impressed them. So, as with most things in life, blame the most overrated 16 bit game ever made on McDonald’s.
Verdict: NO!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Aladdin game, Aladdin Genesis, Sega Aladdin, Sega Aladdin Review, Virgin Aladdin

Disney’s Aladdin (SNES Review)

March 2, 2024 by Indie Gamer Chick 6 Comments

Disney’s Aladdin
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 21, 1993
Designed by Shinji Mikami
Developed by Capcom
Included in Disney Classic Games Collection

In a game loaded with entertaining hop ‘n bop action, there’s something about swinging off a peg and kicking a baddie that is SO satisfying. I put a lot of stock in combat that feels weighty.

I’m not a big fan of the Sega Genesis version of Aladdin. It’s not horrid or anything, but it ain’t all that. This is very much a minority opinion. Get this: even Shinji Mikami, certifiable legend of gaming and lead designer of the SNES version of Aladdin, says the Genesis version is superior, citing the animation and the sword. Seriously? Because the Genesis version of Aladdin also has GOTCHA cheap shots galore, boring level design, and the animation comes at the cost of having no OOMPH to the combat. Meanwhile, the acrobatic antics of Aladdin on the SNES makes for one of the best children’s games in the history of the medium. As close to perfection as a platform game gets. It’s actually one of the few games where the biggest problem is what’s missing, not what’s here. What’s here is nearly flawless.

There’s more “punch” in the act of springing off pegs than there is in the entire Genesis cart.

Make no mistake: Aladdin on the SNES is a children’s game. I’m a huge advocate for games aimed at young people, because, get this, I used to be young myself. But, being a game directly aimed at young children doesn’t have to mean “fun for only the target demographic.” I think the best family games are ones that nobody can be bored with. If you can cruise through a game designed with 9 year olds in mind without ever risking a game over and still have a good time, isn’t THAT the mark of a great game? And that’s Aladdin on the SNES. Unlike the Genesis game, combat here is traditional “jump on the bad guys” hop ‘n bop action. There’s no sword, and while you can throw apples, they don’t take out every enemy. For the human baddies, the apples daze them and open them up to attack. I prefer that to throwing apples that poof the enemies out of existence. You can also kick enemies if you’re swinging on pegs.

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Combat isn’t the focus on the SNES. If there’s a pointy object sticking out of the ground, Aladdin can probably do a handstand-flip off it. On the Super Nintendo, Aladdin’s acrobatic gameplay feels more spontaneous than on the Genesis, and that’s why I think it feels like the better version of Aladdin. Unlike yesterday’s game, Mickey Mouse III, the level design in Aladdin is fully optimized for the handspring, and it’s awesome. This is probably the closest any 2D platformer of this era came to feeling like a genuine parkour-focused game. Aladdin can hang from ledges, swing from rings or pegs, and transition seamlessly from bouncing off pegs to bouncing off the heads of enemies. It really helps that the controls are smooth and responsive. When you miss a leap, it’s always on you. My one knock is that the parachute that allows you to glide is an item that must be found. Once you have it, you keep it until you die, but there’s always one lingering around near checkpoints. Making it a collectible was a mistake and they’d been better served adding replay value by hiding more trinkets to find.

The auto-scrolling area of the Cave of Wonders level is one of the best of its breed, and I say that HATING auto-scrolling in games.

For me, the biggest problem with Aladdin isn’t what the game does, but what it doesn’t do. There’s only seven “worlds” and one of those is a glorified bonus stage based around the iconic Whole New World scene. I’d say Aladdin on the SNES is one of the most true-to-movies video games ever made, but then you have an entire world that takes place inside the Genie’s lamp (it’s the highlight of the game, easily) and a stage set in what appears to be ancient Egypt. I checked my notes and I’m almost certain Egypt is not, in fact, close to Baghdad, the setting of Aladdin (technically it’s a fictional version of Baghdad, but that’s only because Disney changed it due to the Gulf War). Great levels, mind you, but the game is too short. After the first world’s boss, you don’t fight another until a two-part battle with Jafar at the end of the game. You mean to tell me they couldn’t come up with some wacky, creative boss for inside the Genie’s lamp, or the Cave of Wonders? Really, the only “extra effort” incentive is an alternate ending if you collect over half of the red gems scattered throughout the game. The whole thing takes under an hour to complete, and while it’s an hour of non-stop fun, it’s also such a massive let down when you reach the end of an area and it does the “here’s your password” thing without any pomp or circumstance for clearing an entire stage.

There’s two magic carpet sequences. One is the harrowing escape from the Cave of Wonders. The other is this, a non-level with no enemies and no way to fail. I really do think the way the gems are placed on the stage could have been more elegant.

The Genesis version of Aladdin is famous for being rushed, but I get the impression the SNES version probably was too. It would explain why the game is so short, and especially why levels end anticlimactically. Capcom, famous for their boss fights, could only do three bosses? Really? I don’t buy it. Then again, maybe they realized that the levels and gameplay that made the final cut was as close to perfection as platforming in this era got and walked away winners. Maybe. It’s also entirely possible that, knowing the Sega Genesis was marketed towards preteens and older, Capcom decided to hedge their bets on a game that was easier, less frustrating, and more conventional than what Virgin was coming up with for their take on Aladdin. For all the talk about Aladdin’s “superior, hand-drawn visuals/animation” on the Genesis, I really don’t think the Sega version looks better than the SNES game. It looks different, but I actually prefer the traditional sprite work of the SNES version to the hand-drawn animation of the Genny’s Aladdin. Ironically, it feels more alive, and it certainly aged better. Plus, the SNES Aladdin using sprites means it doesn’t have the issues with collision detection the Genesis version does.

Since the movie didn’t have enough action scenes, they had to add content. Oddly, both games had similar ideas, like literally traveling inside the lamp. The Super NES version leans heavily into the surreal and is easily the best level in the game. The Sega Genesis version of “inside the lamp” is a complete disaster.

I’m not a big fan of the “Virgin Interactive” level design style, where levels are sprawling and you zigzag up and down walled-off sections of a gigantic stage. They did it with Aladdin, Lion King, and Jungle Book. Those games feature much fewer stand-out moments or set pieces and it gets boring doing the same stuff from point A to point B. Virgin’s Disney output always feels so.. generic. Meanwhile, I’ve played the original Prince of Persia, and I really think Aladdin accomplishes what it was trying to pull off, only better. Quick paced platforming action that’s fast, fluid, and thrilling, and it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. I had to remind myself that there’s very few games I’ve played where being too short is a bad thing. This is one of the few where that’s frustrating largely because what’s here is sublime.

Seriously though, this could have used more bosses.

Maybe critics and players voted for the Genesis Aladdin with their wallets thirty years ago, but if the same two games were put head-to-head today, I think the Capcom game would win. So what if this is made for little kids? Isn’t that quintessentially Disney? And most importantly, would players today prefer Capcom or Virgin’s take on Aladdin now that the whole “hand animated” thing is no longer a technological marvel? I was curious, so I put Aladdin to the test with my nieces and nephew, ages 8 to 12. They unanimously voted for the SNES game and questioned how long the levels went on for in the Genesis game. By the time they found the lamp in the Sega version, they wanted to do anything else with their time. Having just replayed both myself, I can’t believe anyone picked the Genesis game over the SNES game. That’s why Capcom’s Aladdin is the winner of the only test that I care about: the test of time.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Aladdin Capcom, Aladdin Nintendo, Aladdin SNES, Aladdin Super NES, Capcom Aladdin Review, Disney's Aladdin SNES, Nintendo Aladdin Review, SNES Aladdin Review

Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen/Kid Klown in Night Mayor World (Famicom/NES Review)

March 1, 2024 by Indie Gamer Chick 2 Comments

Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen
aka Kid Klown in Night Mayor World
Platform: Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Kemco
First Released September 30, 1992
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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I’m pretty pissed about one specific moment in Mickey III. I’ve had a ripper of a headache ever since I fought the boss of the second world, which has the most extreme strobe effect I’ve experienced on the NES so far. The full screen violently strobes for three to five seconds per hit, and it takes several hits to get past that part. That’s shameful even by the standards of 1992. These days, thanks to the right balance of medications, it’s much, much rarer for me to have a seizure as a result of being “triggered.” Instead, I get pounding headaches, and I had a doozy of one while I waited for the Advil to kick-in following this. After just the first hit, I had to pass the controller off to Angela to beat the boss for me. Thankfully, this is the only part of the game that does that. I don’t think this factored into my final verdict, but in the interest of full disclosure, I’m kinda peeved about it.

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With that out of the way, why exactly is this a number three? Well, because this is considered part of the Crazy Castle franchise. I’ve done the first two games in that franchise here, here, and here. I don’t get why they bothered with tying this specific Mickey game to that particular franchise. Those were puzzle games. This is a platformer through and through. You practically need a flow chart to keep up with this stuff, especially since this splintered off into yet ANOTHER franchise: Kid Klown. Now Kid Klown isn’t exactly the most beloved NES game, but honestly, I didn’t think this was THAT bad. It certainly stands out from most generic NES games thanks to the way the balloons work.

They’re like Swiss Army Balloons. There’s all kinds of uses for them.

The balloons do almost everything in this game. They act as a weapon that you throw at enemies. You can even aim them up and diagonally. If you hold the attack button down, instead of throwing the balloon, you can hold onto it and use it to glide across large gaps. Or, you can drop a balloon on the ground and use it to spring up to a high platform. That’s a lot of flexibility for a single weapon over the course of one NES game. Mind you, there’s no upgrades to the balloons. Everything I just said they could do is there from the start, and you can even throw a few at a time. Sometimes the levels are actually designed around them, too. The above picture? Holding onto the balloon in that current lifts you up to the next platform. For a game with such a bad reputation, this is a lot better than I thought it would be.

The treasure chests occasionally have ?s in them that have genuinely random items. The ? could also give you a whammy in the form of reversing the movement controls for about ten seconds. So annoying.

The balloons sound too good to be true. There’s gotta be a catch, right? Yep. Mickey III came out following Sonic The Hedgehog, and I get the impression the movement physics were changed after development started because someone panicked and said “kids want games with characters that run fast! Make Mickey move fast and control like Sonic!” So, after running in a straight line for a couple seconds, you’ll suddenly pick up a lot of speed, only the controls become pretty unresponsive once you build up momentum. When that happens, jumping becomes especially laggy. In a game where the level layouts occasionally require precision jumping, that’s hugely frustrating. To Kemco’s credit, there’s a set piece or two tailored around running really fast, but they feel so tacked-on and forced (the one I’m thinking of even places the temporary invincibility item right next to the door) that it’s not exciting at all.

They used up all their original ideas with the balloons, so at one point, the designers said “screw it” and just copied the beams that fly out of the wall from Quick Man’s stage in Mega Man 2.

I had my expectations for Mickey III/Kid Klown set really low, so imagine my surprise that, whether or not I liked the game wasn’t immediately obvious. The level design isn’t phoned-in, but there’s no set pieces that made me sit up in my chair, like the Genesis and SMS versions of Castle of Illusion both managed to pull off. What they needed to do was have more of the platforming utilize the balloons. For the most part, you don’t have to use them to reach higher platforms or clear gaps. I didn’t even realize you could use them for jumping boosts until I was about halfway through the game. That tells you how often you need them. Since they’re the only unique aspect of Mickey III, that was almost certainly a mistake.

The last level is one of those “figure it out” NES mazes where, without any clues or context, you have to take the correct path to find a boss. I’m honestly not even sure how I found it, since I seemed to have been repeating the same section of the game for a good twenty minutes. Thankfully, there’s no time limit.

On the other hand, using them to fight baddies was satisfying enough. A lot of NES games don’t have diagonal projectiles. Here, there’s a couple bosses where it sure feels like they were designed with angling your attacks in mind. I just wish bosses required more finesse. If you have full life, you can spam attacks on the bosses with little to no effort. Even though your life doesn’t restore between stages, there’s plenty of health refills and a very clockable bonus game. I lost two lives the entire time and ultimately finished with over two dozen lives, beating every single boss on my first try. Mickey III feels like a game for younger children. That’s fine, by the way. Little kids need games suitable for them too. I just question whether they’ll find this exciting or not. It’s telling to me that Angela didn’t come close to dying when she took over for me after one hit against the giant fish. The bosses are too easy.

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There’s seven levels and eight boss fights, putting Mickey III at about an hour to complete. Maybe it doesn’t fit in with the Crazy Castle franchise, but really, I don’t think this was as bad as everyone made it out to be. I made it all the way to this paragraph before I rendered my final decision. Ultimately, I still was mostly bored playing Mickey III, which is why I’m leaning towards NO! If the basic enemies had been more dynamic or if the levels had made better use of the balloons, it probably would have been enough to save this. Sure, the unexpected sensory headache was annoying, but that’s not why I’m avoiding recommending Mickey III or Kid Klown or whatever the hell it wants to be called. There’s a lack of polish to the movement that I just can’t look past. Why on Earth did they do the movement the way they did? Without the strange momentum-based movement, I really think the whole balloon-based gameplay would have earned universal acclaim. Instead, Mickey III goes down in history as that weird Japanese Mickey Mouse game that was turned into a generic clown game that nobody likes.
Verdict: NO!

Minnie.. why are you bleeding from your eyes?!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Crazy Castle Series Review, Kid Klown in Night Mayor World, Kid Klown review, Mickey Mouse Famicom, Mickey Mouse III Review, Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen, Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen Review, Mickey Mouse NES, Mickey Mouse Nintendo

Darkwing Duck (TurboGrafx-16 Review)

February 29, 2024 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

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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Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Darkwing Duck, Darkwing Duck Game, Darkwing Duck NEC, Darkwing Duck review, Darkwing Duck TG16, Darkwing Duck TG16 Review, Darkwing Duck TurboGrafx, Darkwing Duck TurboGrafx-16

Darkwing Duck (NES Review)

February 29, 2024 by Indie Gamer Chick 2 Comments

Darkwing Duck
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released June, 1992
Included in The Disney Afternoon Collection

You can hang from certain platforms and use your cape to block certain projectiles. Well, that totally makes up for being a bland Mega Man knock-off with mediocre-at-best level design and forgettable bosses.

I suppose I just spoiled my opinion of Darkwing Duck in its entirety in the very first caption. I didn’t grow up with the property, as it was off the air soon after I turned 3 years old. But hell, I didn’t grow up with DuckTales or Rescue Rangers either, and I liked those games just fine. The difference is those stand on their own AND hold up to the test of time. And then there’s Darkwing Duck, which is a low rent Mega Man, only without any of the elements that made Mega Man popular and timeless. Instead of collecting a variety of fun weapons from beating bosses, you can only carry one secondary weapon at a time, and they’re found just laying around the stages. They’re decent enough guns, I guess. One is a toilet plunger bullet that sticks to walls, creating a platform. One explodes on the ground into small projectiles, and the third fires two bullets diagonally. That last one I found to be nearly worthless in the stages themselves, and overpowered when dealing with bosses. Go figure.

The Mega Man comparison wasn’t just based on this being a platform-shooter with a generic pea shooter. Even the enemies are close to Mega Man in design. These guys are functionally identical to Mega Man’s Sniper Joe enemies, right down to requiring multiple cycles of standing around and waiting for them to shoot again so you can attack. You’ll encounter other familiar reskins along the way.

Darkwing Duck really does try hard to have clever set pieces and utilize the hanging mechanic as often as possible. But, this is completely negated by spongy basic enemies that either take FOREVER to open themselves up to attack or are placed in a way where the hanging platform shoots just over them. They combine to give Darkwing Duck the slowest pace of the Disney Afternoon games. I get the impression that this was trying to be harder than previous Disney platformers on the NES, but the way they went about doing it was just about the least exciting way possible. Instead of being “harder” it’s more about waiting around and dodging a lot. The enemies became so boring to engage that, if skipping past them was an option, I usually took it.

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There’s seven levels in Darkwing Duck, but it feels like they ran out of ideas about three levels in. Levels one through three can be taken in any order, then the same goes for levels four through six. It doesn’t really help. Once you realize that, whether you’re hanging and shooting or running and shooting, the enemies are going to be placed in a way that assures you don’t have a clean shot at them, it doesn’t really matter what level you’re in. You might as well be fighting identical enemies for all the jumping and shooting you have to do. I don’t know a lot about Darkwing Duck, but the game needed more. Gadgets, a grappling hook, SOMETHING! None of that’s here. Do you know what is here? Banana peels, which temporarily stun you if you walk into one. This feels like a game that’s facepalming itself. When you have to use the hanging mechanic to avoid spikes, even that manages to be uninspired. I really walked away from Darkwing Duck feeling that Capcom was all gung-ho to make another awesome Disney Afternoon game, watched a season worth of episodes, and said “yea.. I’ve got nothing.”

You pretty much have to trial-and-error your way through figuring out which projectiles your cape actually blocks.

And then there’s the bosses, which are easily the most underwhelming in the Disney Afternoon. All but one utilize hanging from the platforms they jump around, and since that’s the primary mechanic that sets Darkwing Duck apart from most NES platformers, I suppose that should be a good thing. But, they’re dull encounters that lack the finality of a decent boss battle. They’re challenging enough, I guess. These were the only parts of the game I lost lives on. But all but one boil down to “use the platform/hook to hang and avoid projectiles.” Like with the placement of most basic enemies, the bosses are just short enough for your basic pea shooter bullets to fly over their heads while hanging, so you actually have to let go and put yourself in the line of fire to also get a viable shot off. That is, unless you have the double diagonal shot, which completely nerfs the fights. I started taking it for granted that was the weapon I wanted when I figured I was reaching the end of a stage. Then I got to the final boss, who is angled in a way that the gun I was used to working with isn’t that effective. After losing a pair of lives to him, I made a beeline for the upper left hook and ended his first phase in about five seconds with the basic pea shooter. His second phase was probably the easiest boss in the game. So easy, in fact, that I didn’t even bother getting the life refill he dropped.

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Much like other games in the Disney Afternoon “franchise” I’m sure the enemies are references to characters from the TV series. I’m guessing this killed with fans of the TV series in 1992. But, it’s not 1992 anymore, and I’m not remotely a fan of Darkwing Duck. Maybe if I had been, I would have been charmed instead of bored for most of the experience. Like most Disney games from Capcom, it looks great. Nice sprite work. That’s all Dee-Dubbya has going for it. It’s easily the worst of the Disney Afternoon games. At least Talespin had some memorable boss encounters. Darkwing Duck doesn’t even have that going for it. The most memorable aspect of it for me was a basic enemy that seems to have been a satire of the Terminator, and even that gag is run into the ground by being too spongy and giving it a third form that was essentially an automatic point of damage against me. There’s a reason why nobody was clamoring for a remake of this from Wayforward. DARKWING SUCKS! Let’s get monotonous!
Verdict: NO!

Darkwing Duck later died of injuries sustained during his game’s ending.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Darkwing Duck, Darkwing Duck Capcom, Darkwing Duck NES, Darkwing Duck NES Review

Parodius! (MSX Review)

February 12, 2024 by Indie Gamer Chick 7 Comments

Parodius
aka Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth
Platform: MSX
Developed by Konami
First Released April 28, 1988
NO MODERN RE-RELEASE

I wish I had picked a different game to be the first MSX title I’ve done.

It’s not often I quit a game because it’s so physically painful to play that it’s not enjoyable, but that’s where I’ve been with Parodius for the MSX. It’s the first game in the Parodius series, and it ain’t very good. Parodius, for those new to the series, is a Konami shmup franchise that satirizes the genre and specifically Konami’s own titles like Gradius or Life Force. I’m a huge fan of the series, to the point that I might consider it the most underrated series in the industry, but I’d never played the MSX original. Now that I have, well, thank God they didn’t quit after one. Parodius in arcades or non-MSX consoles? Awesome. This? Not so awesome, but it actually isn’t due to the technical limitations. It’s just badly designed, with horrendous levels and the spongiest bosses I’ve ever seen in a shmup. And I had no autofire, which would have been so useful. I did end up finishing it, but I had to break-up the session throughout the day. A game that should have taken me a couple hours at most took almost ten hours to finish, all thanks to PAIN.

Sponge is a huge problem with this edition of Parodius. It’s absurd how much non-basic enemies take to kill even fully powered with two options.

The basic gameplay of Parodius as a franchise is functionally identical to Konami’s Gradius/Salamander titles. But, instead of fights with alien spaceships, gigantic eyeballs, the sarcophagus of King Tut, or fire breathing dragons, it’s a “cute ’em up” with silly bosses like giant penguins or, later in the series, boobies and the women attached to those boobies. I’m not even joking. The last game in the franchise that’s a space shooter is called “Sexy Parodius” which I’ve not yet played but I’m really looking forward to it. Despite the novelty of fighting enemies that mock the entire shmup premise, these Parodius games are among the best of their breed in the genre. In fact, all three Parodius releases on the Super Famicom are in my top 25 for the SNES. They’re better versions of Gradius or Life Force, right down to the item upgrade system, only with a high premium anarchist fun. That all started here, on the MSX in 1988, but really, the series didn’t get good until the second game in the franchise, which I have five ports of that to play this week.

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Honestly, despite the lack of finer details for characters, Parodius looks good for a game subject to so many technical hurdles. But, the first problem with the game is that the five characters you can pick from are all functionally the same. In later games in the series, each hero has a different type of laser gun. The top guns this go around are always lasers, and while those lasers can be upgraded, it makes the whole “choose your character” aspect that I love about the series functionally useless. On the other hand, the game is pretty generous with collision detection. it sort of has to be, since tight squeezes are a large part of the level design. This is especially true in “bonus stages” of which I seemed to have found by accident.

Literally half my body is in the lethal breakaway wall. This section sucked, by the way, and if you lose in the bonus room, you lose your entire load out.

Given the lower detailed graphics, I figured the enemy design would be too bland, but actually, the variety of enemies is fine. It’s annoying that they often attack from behind, which is a pet peeve of mine, but that wouldn’t be a deal breaker. Actually, the set pieces have that proof of concept feel to them that I sort of expected from this first installment, but what I wasn’t expecting was how dazzling they can be. There’s gigantic encounters with Moai, moles that pop up and down, moving gravestones, and GOTCHA dead ends that kill you if you don’t have clairvoyance. Wait, what? Yea, that’s a thing in the last stage of Parodius, which has level design so audacious that I feel like the designers should be ashamed of themselves. Look at this.

Haha GIT GUD. Unreal. No, that’s not a “git gud” thing. That’s just the designer being a complete asshole thing.

So, in order to get past this, you have to collect a white bell. An enemy will drop a bell before this. You have to shoot that bell enough to turn it white. Doing this allows you to go through one side of the screen and out the other. But, the only way you can actually know this is coming is to encounter it and die. That’s not a challenge. I’m sorry, but it’s not. That’s turning a shmup into busy work. Gaming has come a long way and I don’t think anyone would be vile enough to make level design like this anymore, which takes away the potential for excitement and glory by just ending a player’s run so unceremoniously. Especially when the challenge leading up to this is a series of extremely tight squeezes. Like, seriously, this is what players had to deal with BEFORE this instakill wall, and what they then have to replay after the wall kills them (which it almost certainly will).

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Now my buddy, pinball designer Dave Sanders, insists to me that it’s supposed to be a satire of Gradius/Life Force’s “final door” because you literally fight the last boss after that dead end and instead of being walled into fighting, a wall just straight-up blocks you. Well, that’s not funny. It’s just not. It’s just being a dickhead for the sake of it, and not remotely funny. None of this original Parodius is, frankly. It’s kind of amazing it ever got as many installments as it did, given how terrible a game this is. It’s practically a bullet hell at times, and unlike future editions of Parodius, it doesn’t have a whole lot of charm to negate the evil design. Putting a literal brick wall you have to gain a temporary power-up to pass would be enough to push this into a NO! verdict, but actually, Parodius had already earned a NO! from the boss fights.

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The bosses in Parodius would be fun to do battle with if they didn’t suck up bullets like you’ve never seen any boss suck up bullets before. I’m not even exaggerating when I say I fought the first big boss (the penguin) without the lasers and, after five minutes of pumping it with bullets, it still hadn’t died. Oh, my hand did. It still hurts, actually, and that ain’t a bit I’m doing for laughs. It hurts. A lot. They’re pretty much all this way. Oddly enough, the last two bosses had the least sponginess about them, and that’s especially strange considering that I didn’t even have a full load out fighting them. I get that it’s supposed to be a satire, but the sheer amount of shots these things take only had me laughing in awkward disgust. And mind you, I missed the real boss for the graveyard scene because I entered the bonus room for that stage (which became the second one I found completely accidentally), and that’s frustrating. I wouldn’t want to ever play this again to experience it. I can’t stress enough: if they do a Parodius collection, this NEEDS to be included, if only to allow players to see a proof of concept for what might be the most underrated franchise in video game history. But, is it still fun to play today? Are you joking? It’s hard to tell with this game.
Verdict: NO!

Post Retro Review Fun Fact: The last game in the Parodius series came out in 1997, and it wasn’t even a shmup. Paro Wars is a turn-based strategy game that was released only in Japan.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Parodius, Parodius MSX, Parodius MSX Review, Parodius Review, Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth

The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout (NES Review)

January 27, 2024 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout
Platform: NES
Developed by Kemco
First Released August 3, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

I think this HAS to set the record for most 1ups you can earn from a bonus game. I got a 50up from this bingo. Good lord. Why not just cut straight to the ending?

After being a little more generous with Wizards & Warriors than I probably should have been, I need a game where I have NOTHING good to say about it. How about a game that was supposed to celebrate Bugs Bunny’s 50th birthday, but missed the date by over two years? Well, apparently it didn’t. Despite the fact that Bugs Bunny debuted in 1938, meaning 1988 should have been the 50th birthday, Warner Bros. celebrated Bugs’ birthday in 1990. So, instead of being two years late and sucking, this game was rushed to release and sucks. The end result is the same: The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout is one of the worst games on the NES, and certainly one of the worst licensed games on the platform. What’s really infuriating is that the Wikipedia page says, exact quote, “The gameplay is very similar to that of Super Mario Bros. 2.” Are you f*cking kidding me? Who the hell writes these things and how many times did they have to headbutt a brick wall for that statement to sound accurate? Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout and Super Mario Bros. 2 have NOTHING in common besides being on the same platform and being the same genre. It’d be like saying a Formula One game has similar gameplay to Mario Kart. Only a complete moron would say that, and that’s not even accounting for Super Mario 2 withstanding the test of time better than 99% of all games and Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout feeling like a barely functioning and very unfinished prototype.

Look how far I am from this enemy, but my hammer scored a successful kill here. The collision is embarrassing.

The first thing that stands out about Bugs Bunny is how badly the scrolling looks. This isn’t a smoothly animated game at all.. which is pretty damn sad given the fact that it’s based on a global cartoon icon. It seems to load the action one slice at a time, with a “slice” being between 1/3 and 1/4 the length of Bugs’ character sprite. It never goes away, either, so the game has this unavoidable jerkiness to the action. The characters, be it you (Bugs) or the enemies also all look jerky and crappy too. Actually, it almost looks like stop animation. And all characters have collision boxes that could double as aircraft carriers. It feels like they created an engine for Blowout that just never worked right. There’s a chance that it’s using a modified version of the same engine Kemco used for their historically god-awful Superman game. After completing Blowout, I threw on Superman and noticed it had the same “slice-scrolling” with poor collision and a similar vibe to the sound effects and music. Is it really THAT big a stretch to assume that they just had no idea what they were doing by this point in their existence?

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Well, actually, it is a stretch. I gave Roger Rabbit on the Famicom Disk System, the game that was released stateside as the Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, a YES!, along with the Game Boy version, aka Mickey Mouse in Japan. And if side scrollers aren’t your thing, Nintendo fans seem to like Kemco’s NES ports of Shadowgate and Déjà Vu as well. So, it’s not like Kemco were completely clueless. But maybe they should have cut their losses with Birthday Blowout. The action is limited to a flimsy hammer that you don’t even need to be anywhere near enemies to score a hit using. Not that it matters, since there’s no OOMPH to the action whether or not the sprite for the hammer makes contact with the enemies or is nearly a full character length away from them. There’s something despicable about Bugs Bunny, one of the most violent cartoon characters, having his video game violence reduced to having all the impact of a tardigrade landing on a cotton ball.

I’ll spare you a bad Foghorn Leghorn impression and just say that you can ignore confrontation with him because, to win the battle against him, you just have to smack Henery Hawk. Now son, I SAY SON, that’s a joke.

The level design is super bland and relatively straight forward, with the same handful of generic enemies. A clock that explodes when you hit is stood out because usually after you blow one up, another falls out the sky as soon as its sprite vanishes from the screen. Oh, you don’t have to worry about dying. You’re giving so many hit points that it’s nearly impossible to die via enemy damage. I lost two lives the entire time due to mistimed jumps. Jumps that I could have easily hit but I just had run out of patience and wanted the game to be over with. Which, technically I reached that point by the end of the third of twenty-four levels, but I pressed on because I have no life.

This is about as ambitious as Birthday Blowout gets with level design: no warning Simon’s Quest-like illusion flooring late in the game. I **HATE** this platforming trope in general. It’s just such a lazy and imaginative GOTCHA, you know?

Weirdly, the only enemies that dropped life were these faces made of fire. What a strange decision. They seem to have programmed one specific enemy, and only one, to have an item drop. Even weirder is they ALWAYS dropped hearts when I killed them. It’s so amateurish. This whole game is. The main highlight is the “boss” encounters with other Looney Tunes characters that happen at the end of every stage. Sometimes it’s Daffy Duck, and those suck because you don’t even have to hit him with the hammer.. which given how bad the hammer is, might be a blessing. Seriously, I can’t stress enough: it’s one of the worst primary weapons on the NES. Bugs is a wabbit. MAKE JUMPING ON ENEMIES LETHAL YOU NUMBSKULLS! It was right there! Yeesh. Anyway, to beat Daffy, you just have to touch the giant carrot. I usually needed only a couple seconds to “win” those battles. They’re so underwhelming.

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The remaining battles are against Tweety, the Coyote, Sylvester, Pepé Le Pew, Foghorn Leghorn, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, and the Tasmanian Devil. On the plus side, they’re actual fights. However, they’re not fun encounters at all, and it’s not just because of the complete lack of weight to both your attack and theirs. When you blink from taking damage in Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout, it takes FOREVER for you to stop blinking. You’re seeing stars, and while this happens, you can’t attack. You’re also blinking in the literal sense, which is annoying. You’d think seeing stars alone should be enough to signal the point the game is trying to make, but nope. So, for bosses like Tweety, Pepé, and Elmer who fire projectiles, if you take a hit, you have to wait for the blinking to stop. But, the blinking doesn’t “wind down” so timing when you’ll be able to attack again is an exercise in frustration. The only interesting boss is the final one, Taz at the end of level 6-4. He throws footballs at you that you have to knock back at him. Why footballs? Why Taz for the last boss? Why Taz and footballs? Is that from one of the cartoons? Apparently not.

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You have to wonder if they ever thought about cutting their losses with this one. They got rid of some ambitious ideas, presumably because the development team couldn’t get them working. Speedy Gonzales was originally going to be in the game. He’s not in it. Porky Pig is on the cover but he’s not in it, either. There were going to be spiked balls. Those didn’t make the cut. Okay, so maybe “ambitious” might be a stretch because spiked balls are as boilerplate and mundane a staple of platforming as it gets. The fact that they were cut tells me they knew the collision detection wasn’t up to snuff, but they didn’t have a clue how to fix it. That’s probably why the game that actually came out still feels like a prototype that’s barely not collapsing under its own weight. According to Cutting Room Floor, they originally wanted to have rotating blocks. In the final build, the platforms are instead flat, personality-free lines that just vanish sometimes. No animation to warn of this. I couldn’t even use the phrase “poof, it’s gone” because there’s not even a “poof.” They just vanish sometimes. And that’s the Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout canary in the coal mine. The “Tweety in the coal mine” if you will. It feels like a game made with no love or care. Even if the technical foibles were fixed, it’d still be one of the most boring games on the NES. MAYBE little kids in 1990 would have liked it. It’s not very challenging, so I suppose the kiddie set might have liked this more. Except those technical hang-ups are there, and compared to Nintendo’s smoothly animated offerings, it feels like a major technical regression. I might not be a big Bugs Bunny fan, but jeez, he deserved better than this.
Verdict: NO!

Post Retro Review Fun Fact: The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout’s title screen directly copies the actual logo for Bugs Bunny’s 50th birthday special. Have a look below. You know what? Dang, that’s some good sprite work there. So I do have ONE good thing to say about Birthday Blowout. Of course, when the most impressive aspect of a game is its title screen, you might want to reevaluate.. well.. everything. Still, S-tier title screen that is.

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Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout, Bugs Bunny games, Bugs Bunny NES, Bugs Bunny video games, The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout NES, The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout NES Review

Wizards & Warriors (NES Review)

January 9, 2024 by Indie Gamer Chick 14 Comments

Wizards & Warriors
aka Densetsu no Kishi Elrond (Japan)
Platform: NES
Developed by Rare Ltd.
Published by Acclaim
First Released December, 1987
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

The Japanese version, Densetsu no Kishi Elrond, has some differences from the US release, the most important of which is that your life is represented by a numeric value and can actually become higher than the 1,500 life points you start with. The first level has no enemies in the overworld, but the Potion of Levitation is obtainable faster. Finally, bosses are reordered, and the last boss battle ends with the cave collapsing on you. This part kind of sucks because the rocks that fall on you cause 500 damage, and my favorite spot to fight the boss is quite far from the final door. I wish I’d played this version first instead of last while making this review. Like the US version, there’s unlimited continues, so it’s not really harder, but by the time I got around to playing it, I was a bit burned-out on Wizards & Warriors. I’ll review Ironsword eventually. (UPDATE: Ironsword is reviewed!)

While it was the PlayStation I got for Christmas in 1996 that started my gaming life, there were video games in my house before then. I just didn’t really care about them. I liked watching TV, but for whatever reason, playing games on a TV didn’t catch my attention until I played Crash Bandicoot on a PlayStation kiosk when I was 7. But, my father owned a few consoles, each with a couple launch-window games and usually a baseball game or two in the mix. He’d play them once or twice, get busy at the office, and never touch them again. Sometimes he’d see games for those consoles on clearance and buy them, but they’d stay unopened (Zombies Ate My Neighbors was such a game). After marrying my mother and moving into an actual house, the game consoles would linger around to occupy any visiting children while my parents entertained guests. At one point, he even grabbed the tag to buy a 3DO at Costco before my mother put her foot down and said “it’s $600! You’re going to spend that kind of money on a game you’ll play TODAY and never again?” And that was the end of his frivolous console buying. Among those consoles he had a handful of games for was an NES. One of those games became the first “retro game” that I remember beating, when I was 10. In fact, I know the exact date I beat Wizards & Warriors. It was September 8, 1999. I only remember it because this is how I passed the slowest day of my childhood while waiting to leave to pick up my preorder of the Sega Dreamcast at a midnight launch, which was my first ever day one console.

In the US version of Wizards & Warriors, you have to spring off an enemy to get on top of the trees. In Japan, you should have the potion by this point. Also, the sky has clouds. Clouds are pretty.

I once called StarTropics the “absolute stupidest good game ever made.” Wizards & Warriors is giving it a run for its money. By all rights, this should be a terrible game. There’s items that just plain don’t work. There’s nonsensical level design. There’s a lot of busy work. Most damning of all is that Wizards & Warriors has one of the most flimsy and unimpactful primary weapons in the history of gaming. A sword so weak that it’s genuinely embarrassing. It barely extends beyond your character sprite and really has no range beyond what is directly next to you. Hell, not just next to you, but ON you, actively damaging you. That’s when you press the attack button. The best way to use it is by jumping. When he jumps, Kuros, the hero of the game, stiffens up in the same pose I make when I step barefooted on a cold floor. As if a shock wave is running up your body. THE HERO JUMPS LIKE THAT! When you do this, your sword is facing upward and any enemies who run into it are skewered. It’s still not satisfying. The sword has no sense of weight or gravity or violence at all. That SHOULD be a deal breaker, and for the three Wizards & Warriors sequels (how the hell did THIS of all games get three f’n sequels?) it’s probably going to be. They don’t have the item(s) that acted as the savior of the original game.

“Items that don’t work?” Yea, I’m not being snotty here. The items LITERALLY DO NOT WORK, and the behind the scenes story on how that happened has never been told. I’m guessing Rare Ltd. intended for them to behave differently, but by time they realized it just wasn’t going to happen, it was also too late to remove them from the game. There’s two items that they crapped the bed with. Above is the Cloak of Darkness, which makes you invisible. As in YOU, the player, can’t see where you’re at. Oh, the enemies can. Most of the enemy design in Wizards & Warriors is basically “heat-seek and make a bee-line towards the hero.” It’s not very intelligent, but that’s how the game works, and in theory, the Cloak of Darkness would screw up that algorithm. But, it doesn’t. The enemies still see and attack you. It also reduces damage done by basic enemies (not bosses) to one single hit point. By the way, almost every basic enemy only deals one hit point already. The other broken item is the “Boots of Lava Walk” which you’d think would allow you to walk on the lava. But, you take damage from the lava anyway, because presumably they forgot to program the immunity that’s right in the item’s name. Unbelievable.

But, the original game has one item.. well, two but they’re functionally the same.. that saves the day. It’s called the Dagger of Throwing, and it’s basically a boomerang that (1) has a sense of OOMPH that the sword doesn’t have and (2) has range. You get it just minutes after starting the game, too. Later in the game, you might find an upgraded version of the dagger called the Battle Axe of Agor that also works like a boomerang but does double the damage. Not only do these work, but they’re FUN! It’s a silly dagger/axe that circles around and cuts everything down in its path. It’s awesome, and it does actually manage to turn Wizards & Warriors into a serviceable action game, and one that allows you to appreciate all the other neat ideas that actually work.

This is odd: you can also use the dagger/axe to remotely collect any items that were placed by the designers on the map. See a gem? Throw the weapon at it and you’ll collect it. HOWEVER, if an enemy drops an item, including the gems, it doesn’t work. Your dagger/axe will pass right through it. It’s yet another example of Wizards & Warriors being inconsistently sloppy.

At its heart, Wizards & Warriors is about searching for keys and gems to open doors. There’s up to three colored keys that are hidden in each level, usually in a specific order. Find the red key to open the red door, inside which you’ll find the pink key for a pink door that contains the blue key, etc. Finding the keys is your main objective, but you also have to collect gems. Every level has a knight with a little cartoon word bubble that tells you how many gems you need for them to move aside. Gems are all over, including bundles of them in treasure chests. I played through Wizards & Warriors three times in the making of this review, and having enough gems was never an issue until the final stage of the game. In that stage, the target is 100 gems. But, the stage itself maxes-out at about half that. You have to grind-up the rest defeating enemies, who drop gems completely 100% at random. So random, in fact, that if you rewind, the item dropped might change to something else. Gems aren’t the only drops, either. There’s three different potions that temporarily grant hero Kuros special abilities, power-ups for the dagger/axe, screen-clearing magic eggs, and cuckoo clocks that freeze everything on screen for a few seconds. In all three sessions, it took me quite a while to build up 100 gems to fight the last boss, and it’s so boring and a terrible way to usher in the ending of the game. What were they thinking?

Sometimes the level design is truly wonky. Here, you can’t make the jump up to this next platform unless you have the pink potion (dropped AT RANDOM by an enemy, mind you), which allows Kuros to jump higher and also brings much needed attention to breast cancer research. There’s also a blue potion, which makes Kuros run faster at the cost of implied depression, and a red potion, which makes him temporarily invincible and also allows him to access the overpowered Tyrannosaurus-Red Dragon Thunderzord. A Zord so OP that sometimes it beat Lord Zedd’s monsters by itself. Thunder Megazord is just it with armor on.

One of the main themes of Wizards & Warriors’ level design is climbing. Although stages can be sprawling, you’ll usually be platforming around vertically instead of horizontally. This includes a humongous castle near the end of the game that has retracting platforms. It’s not quite as annoying as Mega Man’s disappearing/reappearing blocks. There’s two items that assist with this style of gameplay. The first is the Potion of Levitation, which allows you to float about a character length in the air as long as you hold UP on the D-pad. Yes, you can then jump from this position, giving you a little extra lift. If you’re on those retracting platforms, holding UP will also allow you to wait while the platform is once again usable. The other item is so badly named I would have guessed this game was badly translated Japanese if I didn’t already know it was Rare Ltd. that made it. It’s called, I kid you not, “The Feather of Feather Fall.” With it, if you hold UP while falling, you glide slowly, which can allow for you to clear larger gaps with ease. Again, FUN items. No notes. And they really help raise Wizards & Warriors to the level of decent.

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Of course, neither of these items help Wizards & Warriors as much as the ability to rewind mistakes. Wizards & Warriors has unlimited continues, and if you game over, you restart on the same spot you died, with no penalty except a loss of points. And now you know how 10 year old me managed to beat the NES cart. But, I almost quit as a child, especially on the giant castle. One mistimed jump can cost you several minutes of climbing. By the time I finished my third session of Wizards & Warriors yesterday, I wasn’t missing any jumps and didn’t need to rewind, but those first two sessions? Oh, I was missing. Good lord, was I ever missing. And, just to experience true agony, in the second of my three play sessions, I didn’t allow myself to rewind jumping mistakes. In some jurisdictions, this would qualify as self-harm. The shafts you’re climbing up are MASSIVE too. As a child, I fell to the bottom of the castle stage twice. That I remember that to this day gives you an idea of how painful that climb can be.

If you jump on these the roots, you slide, and there’s nothing you can do to stop yourself. So, naturally, in this section they did things like put hidden gems that stop your jump below the normal height in a way specifically designed to cause you to slide down several stories of roots.

Movement in general is weird in Wizards & Warriors. The controls are fine, truly, but the levels are designed to throw off your judgment for what platforms you can and cannot reach. Sometimes in a good way, and other times, not so much. It varies. Sliding off sloped surfaces is part of the physics of the game, and it’s especially annoying in some of the stages, but rewinding fixed me from having to climb back up and start over. Most importantly, rewinding allowed me to undo item pick-ups I didn’t want. Those useless items I mentioned above? Yea, they’re actually worse than useless, because getting them means LOSING a more valuable item. Namely, the overpowered Boots of Force, which allow you to kick open treasure chests instead of needing to find the right colored keys. While the shield, throwing knife/axe, Potion of Levitation, and Feather of Feather Fall are permanent upgrades, the Boots can be lost by opening the wrong chest for an item you don’t want. Trust me, you don’t want ANY other item until late in the game, where you MIGHT want to swap it for the Wand of Power. That’s an item that allows you to do massive damage, and by that point, you have to fight enemies to get gems anyway.

The end game has some real mean-spirited enemy placement. These skulls are indestructible and sit on platforms you need to use. They really didn’t stick the landing on Wizards & Warriors’ end game at all, but that’s fine. The overall experience should take even a first-timer less than two hours to complete. It goes by quickly. Less quickly if you’re a 10 year old girl hyped to play Sonic Adventure and Soulcalibur on her first ever launch day game console.

History hasn’t been kind to Wizards & Warriors, but then again, it never really got a chance at redemption. The last release in the franchise was Wizards & Warriors III: Kuros: Visions of Power. Nobody really talks about it anymore. The owners of the Acclaim library aren’t doing anything with it. It wasn’t included in Rare Replay. It’s one of those IPs that just vanished off the face of the Earth. Now, I’ve played Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II and Wizards & Warriors III, and I get why the franchise is done. Those were terrible games that took away the projectile weapon that made the first game tolerable, leaving only the flimsy sword that was horrible to begin with. However, we have to remember that the first game was at least good enough to spawn all those terrible sequels in the first place. And it’s not that bad, people. It’s messy and the music is awful and the sound effects are terrible and the noise the game makes when you’re almost dead could make a person want to puncture their eardrums with a cotton swab. But, the throwing weapons are fun, the sense of exploration is very well done, and the boss fights are satisfying. If this were re-released today, it’d NEED rewind, but with it, I think it’d be weird if the average gamer didn’t have fun. Wizards & Warriors: an unlikely NBA Finals, but a decent enough NES adventure.
Verdict: YES!

Kuros was in a bad Captain N: The Game Master-like cartoon called Video Power, in a segment called The Power Team with other Acclaim game stars. And you thought Captain N was bad. Kuros teams with Max Force from NARC, Tyrone from Arch Rivals, Kwirk, a sentient tomato from an obscure Game Boy puzzle game, and finally.. Bigfoot. As in the famous original monster truck that they had the rights to because he was in an Acclaim video game. Unbelievably, Video Power lasted into a second season, and even weirder, the second season dropped the cartoon and became a game show instead. I wish they’d had shows like this when I was a kid. My mother and I watched a WHOLE LOT of Nickelodeon Gas as a child. I miss Gas. A whole network of children’s game shows that were so fun to watch. OH GOD, I’m nostalgic now. I’ve reached that age. Now I feel bad for making fun of my readers for being nostalgic for so long. Forgive me, friends!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Wizards & Warriors, Wizards & Warriors NES, Wizards & Warriors Nintendo, Wizards & Warriors Review, Wizards and Warriors NES, Wizards and Warriors Review

Mouse Trap (1981 Arcade Review)

January 1, 2024 by Indie Gamer Chick 2 Comments

Mouse Trap
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Exidy
First Released December, 1981
NO MODERN RELEASE

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Yesterday, I looked at Lady Bug, which can lazily and inaccurately be boiled down to “Pac-Man, only with turnstiles.” Today, I’m kicking off 2024 with “Pac-Man, only with color-coded turnstiles.” Which is lazy and inaccurate. Among other reasons, they’re really more like gates instead of turnstiles. Mouse Trap has four buttons to control the action, which would be startling for any game in 1981, but it’s especially bonkers for a maze chase. Three of the buttons control the different colored gates. So, for example, if you press the red button, all the red gates shift position. It works well and requires players to memorize the entire layout of the maze and plan ahead. Each gate only has two different configurations. Unlike Lady Bug, the placement and layout of the gates allows you to either create fully-fortified barriers between you and the enemies or outright trap them. This is especially true in the center of the screen. It opens-up flexibility to create your own strategy for how you want to play Mouse Trap. Do you want to use the gates offensively to bunch-up the cats and score points when you turn into the dog, or do you want to use them defensively and keep a distance between you and the cats while you collect the dots and/or bonus items? I’m all about games from this era opening up strategy options to players, and Mouse Trap is all about it too.

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The turn-the-tables element in Mouse Trap is one of the most unique of this era for multiple reasons. The dog bones you collect aren’t instantly used but rather banked. You can carry up to six of them. The fourth action button uses the bones to transform you into a dog, which allows you to eat the cats. Like Pac-Man, there’s a bonus for eating a string of them before you change back. Besides the fact that you can store the power pellets and use them at an opportune time, there’s three BIG differences between these and Pac-Man’s. (1) Whatever bones you don’t use carry-over between stages and lives. (2) The window for you to eat the enemies is much smaller right from the start. (3) Eating the cats comes at a horrible cost. When the cats respawn, they’re faster and seemingly more aggressive than they were before. They also outnumber you 6 to 1 and have four respawn locations. While bones are plentiful, after a certain point, they’re best used for defensive-only purposes. It’s not just the fact that the cats get quite fast by the third board, but especially because eaten cats return to the playfield very pissed off at you. HEY, IT WASN’T ME! IT WAS THE DOG! By the way, if you’re the dog when you collect the last dot, you’ll get all the remaining time as the dog when you start the next stage. Okay, that’s awesome. Come on, man. This game is WONDERFUL! It’s just so original and layered, and yet nobody talks about it. Sad.

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The other danger element of Mouse Trap are the hawks. They bypass the walls of the maze and make a beeline straight for you. No sweat, you say? Because you’ve stored plenty of dog bones, you say? HAH! Yea, sorry, but the hawks are immune to the dog as well. When you hear the CAW CAW CAW noise (and Mouse Trap has EXCELLENT sound design) you have to run like the dickens to the center of the maze and enter the IN door, which teleports you completely randomly to one of the four corners of the screen. Doing this makes the hawk “stupid” (yes, it actually says this on the instruction screen) and it’ll fly off the screen. At first, I didn’t like this aspect of Mouse Trap. It’s not just the random teleportation, which I’m just not a fan of random chance in this kind of game. But, it’s mostly because I felt the hawk was too overpowered and the maze too cramped for a stalker-type enemy that can circumvent the walls. But, I was wrong. The hawk makes the game work. It takes a while to get the hang of using the gates, but once you do, the cats aren’t that hard to deal with. However, the hawk makes them relevant again, as you have a very limited amount of time to get to the center when it starts coming for you, and if there’s cats in the way and you have no dog bones, they’re going to be a problem. Without the hawk, Mouse Trap would have become too easy eventually. With it? It’s right up there with Lady Bug as the most underrated game of its breed and generation. Also, I don’t know if I got lucky or what, but the random teleporter never outright screwed me over by putting me in an unwinnable situation. Well I’ll be damned! It works!

The Colecovision port of Mouse Trap, which is VERY impressive. My only knock is that the mouse moves a little too fast, but the rest of the game is an astonishingly accurate port of the coin-op.

What sealed Mouse Trap’s status as a bonafide lost gem is the bonus items. Unlike Pac-Man, they stay on the screen until you collect them. The first one, a wedge of cheese, scores 1,000 points. Now, here’s the twist: as soon as you collect it, another bonus item appears on the screen, a paperclip. This scores 1,200 points. This continues until you die, at which point, the cycle starts over. How many different bonus items are there? THIRTY TWO! What? And your chain carries over between levels. If you just collected the item worth 2,000 points before collecting the final dot, the 2,200 point item will be waiting for you in the next level. It’s so rewarding to chase these items down, and it lends strategy to the game. There’s no penalty I could detect for taking your time to clear a maze, so you can wander back and forth collecting the items in the first maze if you want, or if you’re out of dog bones and no longer feeling confident in your chances of survival, grab the last dot and go to the next level, where more dog bones await. Awesome. Simply awesome. Mouse Trap is awesome. Why did this vanish off the face of the Earth?

Now that I understand the arcade game better, wow, Mouse Trap 2600, which I reviewed in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include Part Two, feels like an even bigger mockery of the original game. Lady Bug was RIGHT THERE and required not a single button besides the joystick to play! Mouse Trap 2600 has no teleporter in the center of the maze, no hawk, no tri-colored gates, and only three cats. It might be the most stripped-down-for-VCS game ever made. Awful.

It’s certainly not for the faint of heart. When the cats build up speed, it’s one of the most challenging maze chase games out there. That’s why the kids, aged 8 to 12, all preferred Lady Bug to Mouse Trap. Well, actually they preferred Ms. Pac-Man or Jr. Pac-Man, but choosing between Lady Bug or Mouse Trap, there was no hesitation: Lady Bug won hands down. Yesterday, I was with them, but now that I’ve dove deeper into Mouse Trap and understand the scoring system better, I might actually prefer it. You know what? Both games are amazing for different reasons, and they’re certainly deserving of a better standing in gaming history than they presently have. Playing Lady Bug and Mouse Trap back-to-back like I did was a thrill, but it was also heartbreaking. Forty years later and these games are total non-entities in modern gaming. That’s a sad fate for games that hold up amazingly to the test of time. Both understood that the maze and the chase is what makes the genre fun and exciting, and they have EXCELLENTLY designed mazes. So many releases in this genre languished in Pac-Man’s shadow because they failed to grasp that turning the tables on the ghosts wasn’t why Pac-Man was popular. It was the thrill of the chase. Mouse Trap gets that, and it’s actually optimized for it like few games in this genre are. What a great game to start my 2024 off.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Mouse Trap, Mouse Trap 1981, Mouse Trap Arcade, Mouse Trap Arcade Game, Mouse Trap Arcade Review, Mouse Trap Colecovision, Mouse Trap Exidy, Mouse Trap Exidy Review, Mouse Trap Game, Mouse Trap Review, Mouse Trap Video Game

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DuckTales 2 and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 (NES Review) BONUS – Disney Afternoon Collection Final Verdict + Rankings!

DuckTales 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released April 23, 1993
Included in Disney Afternoon Collection

Rescue Rangers 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released December 10, 1993
Included in Disney Afternoon Collection

DISNEY AFTERNOON COLLECTION
BONUS FEATURES

FINAL VERDICT ON DISNEY AFTERNOON

DISNEY AFTERNOON RANKINGS!

Disney’s Aladdin (Sega Genesis Review)

Disney’s Aladdin
Platform: Sega Genesis
Developed by Virgin
Published by Sega
First Released November 11, 1993
Included in Disney Classic Games Collection
SPECIAL NOTE: This review is of the FINAL CUT version.
Read the Video Game History Foundation’s article.

Disney’s Aladdin (SNES Review)

Disney’s Aladdin
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 21, 1993
Designed by Shinji Mikami
Developed by Capcom
Included in Disney Classic Games Collection

Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen/Kid Klown in Night Mayor World (Famicom/NES Review)

Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen
aka Kid Klown in Night Mayor World
Platform: Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Kemco
First Released September 30, 1992
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Darkwing Duck (TurboGrafx-16 Review)

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

Darkwing Duck (NES Review)

Darkwing Duck
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released June, 1992
Included in The Disney Afternoon Collection

Parodius! (MSX Review)

Parodius
aka Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth
Platform: MSX
Developed by Konami
First Released April 28, 1988
NO MODERN RE-RELEASE

The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout (NES Review)

Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout
Platform: NES
Developed by Kemco
First Released August 3, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Wizards & Warriors (NES Review)

Wizards & Warriors
aka Densetsu no Kishi Elrond (Japan)
Platform: NES
Developed by Rare Ltd.
Published by Acclaim
First Released December, 1987
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Mouse Trap (1981 Arcade Review)

Mouse Trap
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Exidy
First Released December, 1981
NO MODERN RELEASE

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DuckTales 2 Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Capcom First Released April 23, 1993 Included in Disney Afternoon Collection

Rescue Rangers 2 Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Capcom First Released December 10, 1993 Included in Disney Afternoon Collection

DISNEY AFTERNOON COLLECTION BONUS FEATURES

FINAL VERDICT ON DISNEY AFTERNOON

DISNEY AFTERNOON RANKINGS!

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Disney’s Aladdin Platform: Sega Genesis Developed by Virgin Published by Sega First Released November 11, 1993 Included in Disney Classic Games Collection SPECIAL NOTE: This review is of the FINAL CUT version. Read the Video Game History Foundation’s article.

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Disney’s Aladdin Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System First Released November 21, 1993 Designed by Shinji Mikami Developed by Capcom Included in Disney Classic Games Collection

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Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen aka Kid Klown in Night Mayor World Platform: Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Kemco First Released September 30, 1992 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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

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Darkwing Duck Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Capcom First Released June, 1992 Included in The Disney Afternoon Collection

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Parodius aka Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth Platform: MSX Developed by Konami First Released April 28, 1988 NO MODERN RE-RELEASE

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Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout Platform: NES Developed by Kemco First Released August 3, 1990 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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Wizards & Warriors aka Densetsu no Kishi Elrond (Japan) Platform: NES Developed by Rare Ltd. Published by Acclaim First Released December, 1987 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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Mouse Trap Platform: Arcade Developed by Exidy First Released December, 1981 NO MODERN RELEASE

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DuckTales 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released April 23, 1993
Included in Disney Afternoon Collection

Rescue Rangers 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released December 10, 1993
Included in Disney Afternoon Collection

DISNEY AFTERNOON COLLECTION
BONUS FEATURES

Disney’s Aladdin
Platform: Sega Genesis
Developed by Virgin
Published by Sega
First Released November 11, 1993
Included in Disney Classic Games Collection
SPECIAL NOTE: This review is of the FINAL CUT version.
Read the Video Game History Foundation’s article.

Disney’s Aladdin
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 21, 1993
Designed by Shinji Mikami
Developed by Capcom
Included in Disney Classic Games Collection

Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen
aka Kid Klown in Night Mayor World
Platform: Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Kemco
First Released September 30, 1992
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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

Darkwing Duck
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Capcom
First Released June, 1992
Included in The Disney Afternoon Collection

Parodius
aka Parodius: The Octopus Saves the Earth
Platform: MSX
Developed by Konami
First Released April 28, 1988
NO MODERN RE-RELEASE

Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout
Platform: NES
Developed by Kemco
First Released August 3, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Wizards & Warriors
aka Densetsu no Kishi Elrond (Japan)
Platform: NES
Developed by Rare Ltd.
Published by Acclaim
First Released December, 1987
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Mouse Trap
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Exidy
First Released December, 1981
NO MODERN RELEASE