There are all kinds of gamers out there, with all kinds of game passions. There are many people who play videogames, who want more knowledge of games of the past; they want history, and review. So a series of articles was born: The Retro Review Series. The games covered in this series of articles are going to be gems; games that are beloved to some, which are not necessarily the best or most popular games. During the past two months, our first two Episodes have covered PS1 JRPGs, but for this third month, I promised something completely different: NES platforming majesty, in the form of DuckTales… ooo-oo!
I first played DuckTales when I was very young, probably 7 years old-ish. I know that a major part of its early appeal for me was that it had tons of challenge, but wasn’t impossibly difficult. A lot of the games for the NES were ports of arcade games. Those games, for the most part, were designed to eat people’s money, and the way they did that was by being insanely difficult, and by charging money to continue playing after death. Most of the great Nintendo games were not arcade ports: Super Mario Bros., The Legend Of Zelda, Castlevania, Final Fantasy, and Mega Man were all games created for the home console market, and although those games are all difficult, they are not unreasonably so. Mega Man, in particular, is hailed as a shining example of the early NES game which punished payers for their own mistakes; deaths weren’t cheap, rather they were entirely due to the player’s lack of skill.
Another very appealing part of DuckTales, was that it was based on the DuckTales cartoon. There were some very good cartoons on TV in the late 80s to early 90s, but DuckTales was definitely in the upper echelon of kids programming. It had epic stories, was well-animated, was hilarious, and oozed a quality that was superior to almost anything else offered at the time. Most licensed games (up until recently) were garbage. It was kind of a marketing joke that crappy video games were a staple of any kind of multimedia merchandising attempt. Check out the sad story of the Atari E.T. game for a prime example. But DuckTales was fantastic! And it was based on DuckTales… ooo-oo!
Platformers were also a staple genre of NES-era videogames. For those who might not know, platforming is a term used for video games that have core gameplay mechanics that involve jumping from platform to platform. Many of the all-time great Nintendo games have platforming elements: Super Mario Bros., Castlevania, Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, Bubble Bobble, Kirby’s Adventure, etc. DuckTales is arguably the pinnacle of the NES platformer, but more on that next week…
These articles will be released every month on COGconnected, and split up into 4 weekly parts: The Intro, The History, The Review, and The Verdict. So here ends The Intro. Next week: The History of one of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s finest games: DuckTales… ooo-oo! (I’ll try to not do that again)…