LesmoThoughts - Ducktales Remastered

Hey you guys know Ducktales on the NES? That game's alright, I'm not sure if I'd call it a classic or rank it Number 10 on a "Best NES Games Ever" list like IGN did, but it's basically okay. You probably also know that those guys over at Wayforward made a remake of it last year and everyone loved it.

I didn't love it.

I wrote a "meh" review of it at the time, knowing full well it was a game I didn't especially enjoy but everyone else was all over. That's the weird thing about writing reviews, a strange little psychological current that you have to swim upstream against. Even if you're not writing a "publisher approved" review you're still going to look pretty gosh darn silly if everyone else in the world gave a game 8s and 9s and you're sitting on a solid 3. Of course, it would be even sillier to care about this, after all if everyone was truly subjective to their OWN opinions in videogame reviews this wouldn't be a problem in the first place. FIGHT THE SYSTEM.

Anyway, Ducktales Remastered, it sucks! A ha! Don't even have to be vaguely professional in this environment I love it. Okay let's be a little fairer, it's got that annoying aura to it that all WayForward games have where I really want to like it honest! They have Jake Kaufman on staff who is possibly my favourite composer working in videogames today, and he knocks it out of the park again with his remix of the original Ducktales NES soundtrack, and as ever the visuals are packed with colour and charm and I just want to gobble it all up. But here's two problems that almost every WayForward game (that I've played) has:

1. Constant, unrelenting nostalgia-bating and intentionally archaic design.
2. GOD AWFUL/non-existent level design

There's a bit in Ducktales Remastered that highlights both these problems at once, and I laughed out loud when it happened during my first time through this game. On the Amazon stage there's a bit where you navigate across some floating rocks with Launchpad flying above you on a helicopter, with a little rope dangling out the side for you to hold onto. I can't even explain how god damn ridiculous this looks, it's like 4 screens worth of seemingly randomly placed square blocks floating around in nothingness, some of them even have duck-eating carnivorous plants growing out of them for god's sake. Here's the thing, there is absolutely NO REASON to use the platforms to continue the level, you can just hold on to the rope and get carried to the next bit of the game. The only reason for the blocks is to drop down onto them, jump to the next one, a previously invisible and unattainable little gem will drop onto the last block and you jump back onto it to boost your high score.

THIS IS ACTUALLY A THING THAT IS IN A VIDEOGAME THAT WAS RELEASED IN 2013.

Why is this there? I can actually tell you right now, it's because it's a thing that's in the NES original game and WayForward didn't have the guts to take it out. And yea, that's right, I said THE GUTS, because either you were too afraid to "change a classic" or you were incapable of fighting your inherent nostalgia blindness to not see how absurdly RIDICULOUS this section is. When you put a ton of really great work into making the game look and sound amazing, you can't then also keep the NES "blocky" layout level design. Or I guess you can, but then you get Ducktales Remastered and a generally terrible videogame. 

Non-sequitur: What is even with the appearing treasure thing? It's like someone made a game entirely based around those stupid invisible coins in New Super Mario Bros that no-one liked.

The biggest issue with this game is the cutscenes thing that constantly interrupt the already incredibly short levels, which brings the game to a crashing halt every 20 seconds. It's god-damn-un-be-lee-va-bull, I actually got in an argument/debate/catfight with a couple of the WayForward developers during an Ask Us Anything thread they did on Reddit just after the game's release about this. One developer that didn't even work on the game told me he thought the design decision was "perfect", which terrified me, like this dude gets paid real world money to make videogames and he thinks Ducktales Remastered has PERFECT DESIGN. Another developer who actually did work on the game explained to me that they did consider having an option to skip the cutscenes, but there was some bug or something that stopped them from doing it.

And now they've patched it in! The patch was like 175mb though so it must have taken a lot of work to fix this gamebreaking issue. Unfortunately a lot of work went into the cutscenes and they kind of accidentally based the entire game around them, so you still have to play the game the terrible stupid way before you can unlock the option to turn the cutscenes off. But for the record, I played a bit of the game again without the cutscenes and it was a LOT better, mostly because the music stopped getting interrupted which is absolutely the best part of this game. Let's not forget though, WayForward made a concerted effort to keep Ducktales Remastered as pathetically retro as possible, then thought it would be really intelligent to constantly interrupt the game with terrible cutscenes where character sprites stand around and don't actually move their bills to talk to each other. Unbelievable.

Even without the cutscene thing I still don't like the game, the appearing gem thing is just annoying and pads the gameplay out. The game has a potentially great mechanic with the pogo cane thing, but the challenge comes from putting the player in narrow corridors and tall enemies so it just becomes frustrating. And it's really really short, and the bosses suck, and the hit detection is weird, and yadda yadda, this is just Tumblresque bitching now, I'll knock it off. 

More like SUCKtales Remastered, you know what I'm saying? (Jake Kaufman I love you btw)