Darkwing Duck (TurboGrafx-16 Review)

February 29, 2024 by 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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Darkwing Duck (NES Review)

February 29, 2024 by 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.

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