"Ducktales Remastered" (from 1989) in HD this summer

[Holdfast]

I was a Sega kid rather than NES, so I didn't play Duck Tales (apart from maybe for a short time at friends' houses; I can't really remember). But I did enjoy Quackshot on the Mega Drive/Genesis. That featured Donald rather than Scrooge and was a pretty cool Indiana Jones influenced platformer.

The conversation above about difficulty was true in that game too. It wasn't particularly difficult, but challenging enough that you did have to learn the sequence a bit. In Quackshot's case, they got the difficulty about right, because without the difficulty, it could be completed in probably under an hour/hour and a half. It took a while to learn it, but it never felt ridiculously hard. Good balance.

 

[DigificWriter]

There were days during the summer where I'd go over to some friends' house and do nothing but watch them play - and beat -NES games, so, yeah, there were a lot of games on the console that could be completed fairly quickly if you knew what you were doing.

 

[Aldo]

It's great from a collector's standpoint, but unless they seriously improve the number/structure of the levels it'll suffer the same fate as the original, which could be completed in under an hour.

Suffer the same fate as the original? Dude, the NES Duck Tales is widely considered one of the best games on the NES and sold well enough to receive a sequel. All NES games, with the exception of RPGs like Dragon Quest, were about an hour long. Short games are awesome.

Super Mario games and other in under an hour? You'd have to take every shortcut available and do a speed run to manage that. Just because Duktales was TOO FUCKING SHORT doesn't mean all platform games from that era were.

I can beat the first Super Mario. Bros. in under ten minutes. It's not terribly difficult.

 

[R. Star]

Beat Blaster Master or Castlevania in ten minutes.

 

[Aldo]

Castlevania's so frustrating to me I can only handle it in ten minute spurts

Thanks to the Wii's function of suspending games, I was able to make it to the penultimate level of the game. But it was just too frustrating for me to attempt to go on.

 

[Kelthaz]

I've beaten Castlevania once, but I've never been able to replicate that feat. The first four levels are fairly easy, but the 5th level with Death is just insane. Not only is he the hardest boss of the game, but you also have the Axe Knight/Medusa Head corridor right before him that'll kill you 4 times out of 5. And even if you manage to survive the corridor of death, you won't have any health left to deal with Death.

And of course, Konami somehow managed to make Castlevania III even harder.

 

[Newspaper Taxi]

The games were alot shorter back then, but people generally played through them multiple times. I remember my baby sitter had a copy of Duck Tales for the NES and one of the older kids would beat it once a day for like a month straight. He was a fun guy; he let a different kid play the final 'race' against Glumgold everytime so technically that kid 'beat' the game.

I wonder; do kids today re-play games very often? I know I don't but I foolishly became an adult at some point and got really into my hobby of paying the rent every month.

 

[Chris3123]

Here's some live gameplay of the Transylvania level from E3 today:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoyGoTZ7_XI[/yt]

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I wonder; do kids today re-play games very often? I know I don't but I foolishly became an adult at some point and got really into my hobby of paying the rent every month.

I think that line's probably where FPS multiplayer comes in. Not really my thing but my nephew always seems to be playing what looks to me like the same maps over and over.

 

[Kelthaz]

The game's been out for a couple of days now. Has anyone purchased it yet? I was planning on buying it day one, but the reviews have been mixed. Sure, you have the expected handful of reviewers complaining because it's a NES game, but other reviewers seem to consider it inferior to the NES original. Since I have the NES cart and 8,000 different ways to emulate the game, I don't really see the point in buying this.

What do you guys think?

 

[Brendan Moody]

I bought it. I have only hazy memories of the NES original, so I can't really compare it to that-- the reviews I've read seem split on whether the changes improve the game or chip away at its distinctiveness. But I'm having fun. It's still a challenging game, certainly, if the African Mines are anything to go by. I'll have to try a different level tonight.

I agree with the reviews arguing that the constant cutscenes get a little grating, and I say that as someone who has a lot of nostalgia for the TV show and loves hearing Alan Young do Scrooge. (But then I feel that a lot of modern games get the cutscene/gameplay balance wrong.) The backgrounds are nice, and the character models are very good... when they're static. When they're moving in cutscenes, they can seem a bit stiff, as if they're those little felt puppets being moved around. It seems cheap, which the rest of the game doesn't. Overall, if you're not a big enough fan of the show to get a kick out of the new story material, it may not be worth a purchase.