Retro Game of the Week: Duck Tales

Years ago, I was a great fan of the cartoon Duck Tales. I never really understood the point behind the show. Why ducks? I mean, couldn’t it have been just as good if it were anything? Monkeys, rhinos, parakeets, did it really fucking matter? In any case, the show follows the adventures of Uncle McScrooge, the richest duck in the world. For whatever reason he wants to constantly earn more money. In the show this means that McScrooge has to defend his hoard of money from villains or go on grand adventures to gather more money. The NES game that we’re looking at today is based upon these adventures.

The first thing that I’ll say about this game is that the music is excellent. The 8-bit rendition of the Duck Tales theme song couldn't be any better. Right away when the game starts up, you see one of the worst start screens ever. The whole thing is this terrible blue color with green, orange, and red splattered all over like some first graders rejected art project. The only option that you get to set with this screen anyway is difficulty.

Of course ducks can use supercomputers.

As soon as you choose how hard you want to get your ass spanked, you get dropped into a McScrooge’s base of operations with his fucking huge supercomputer. 

Getting your ass spanked...By a duck dominatrix no less.

Here you get to select one of five areas to search for treasure: The Amazon, Transylvania, African Mines, The Himalayas, and The Moon. The levels are all fairly detailed and the graphics in the game are very impressive for the time. Take McScrooge for instance, he’s well done and looks just like he does in the cartoon. His attack is ridiculous. The fucking duck jumps around on his cane like a damn pogo stick or whacks things with it like a damn golf club, and that’s it. You do that to kill Gorillas, break rocks, and open chests that contain treasure. The levels are structured in that you run around and collect all of the “small treasure” that adds slight amounts to your dollar total, running in the upper left hand corner of the screen, but the ultimate goal is to find the “big” treasure at the end of the level and kill the boss. Once that happens, you chat with some crazy pelican pilot and he flies your ass back to Duckburg to do it all over again in the next area.

Ducks.

Each level proceeds in the same manner, but the layouts are different. This is a great platformer game, and it plays very well. My main problem with it is that it’s just fucking weird. That really just goes back to the original idea behind the cartoons. Why the fuck is it ducks?

So let’s jump ahead to the final level, or at least the one that most people save for last, The Moon.  Here you’re a duck in space pogo jumping on aliens.  I don’t fucking get it.  Why are you looking for treasure in space?  This isn’t Uncharted, its god damn Duck Tales.

Wow, space.  Just great.

 So at the end of the game you have to go back to Dracula Duck Manor and beat the vampire duck.  After that you end up in a race to the top of a rope and you get your treasure.  The final screen of the game is McScrooge having some kind of fucking seizure on top of all of his money wearing a crown.  What this game all comes down to to me is what frontiers the NES was able to explore with popular titles.  Where else would you find a Duck Tales video game where they travel to space and fight vampire ducks?  Though this game is completely fucked up, it really shows the power of video games to explore and exploit cultural phenomenons as well as stretch the limits of imagination and creativity.  Even with my frustration with the fucking ducks, I have to admit that without this game there's no way that I could play games like Fallout New Vegas on a regular basis.