Darkwing Duck (Demo) (PC)

Developer:

Headcannon

|

Release Date:

2019 (or never I suppose)

|

Systems:

Windows, Mac, Linux

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing Darkwing Duck! Not the NES game, I played that already way back in the first year of my site. In fact it was so long ago that I'm scared to check what I wrote about it. Probably best to forget I told you about it actually. (It's not the Game Boy or Turbografx game either by the way.)

What this is, is a 1 level prototype demo thing inspired by the NES game, developed as a pitch to Capcom and then released to the world for free last month when that didn't work out. There's so many amazing AAA games in my Steam backlog, so many indie games fighting for exposure on Steam and Itch.io, and yet I'm spending my time playing a game that won't ever exist.

The demo was developed by at least one of the people who worked on the similar Sonic Mania, though it uses the Headcannon Game Engine instead of the Retro Engine. Incidentally the original Darkwing Dark on the NES was basically built on Mega Man's engine, so there's some Wikipedia trivia for you I expect my past self completely neglected to mention in his article back in 2011. In fact I bet that article is just him spending like 30 minutes failing to beat the first stage, whining a bit about it being too hard and then quitting.

Speaking of running into unexpected challenges, for classic platformers I usually display my screenshots at exactly double the resolution to keep them sharp, but the game has too wide a resolution for that so I had to decide whether I wanted to leave the screens tiny, make them a fuzzy mess, or crop them. Or make the site wider. I figured that cropping them would be the least painful of those options so I went with that, but if you click an image the original uncut screenshot will pop up.

---

It seems kind of insane for anyone to try pitching a game to Capcom based on a Disney license, but to be fair we only just got the Disney Afternoon Collection which included a port of the NES Darkwing Duck, plus WayForward's DuckTales: Remastered came out a few years earlier, so maybe it could've worked out. Though it seems like there's a lesson in here about waiting for people to respond to your emails before spending a month or so working on a demo to show them.

There’s your video options by the way. I like my pixels sharp so I left them all alone and set the window size to double. Plus the game doesn't seem to want me to use my trusty old Xbox 360 controller, as the input config screen is just a list of keys I can redefine. I am therefore going to use the controller anyway, using my trusty old JoyToKey to map it to keys.

(Note: my trusty old Xbox 360 controller broke a few days later.)

Damn, they only made the one stage and it's a bloody sewer level? These people really do get what classic platformers were about! Doesn't seem like I'm going to be forced to collect a certain number of those brown posters along the way though as he's got no interest in picking it up.

This is an original uncropped screenshot to show you what the game really looks like before I start cutting bits of the screen off. It's basically imitating a Mega Drive game visually, though 16:9 widescreen is giving me a lot more room to see enemies coming than I'd get in an old 4:3 game.

Darkwing Duck (NES)

Here's the original Darkwing Duck on the NES for comparison. Though it's a bit of a crap comparison, as the image is too small to see anything and the dimensions are wrong because the NES and SNES stretch their video output 14% horizontally. You can see that they didn't just rip the sprites and backgrounds for the new demo at least.

I hadn't seen the Darkwing Duck cartoon back in 2011 when I played the NES game, and I knew absolutely nothing about the character. Eight years later and I still haven't seen it... but I did see the movie The Shadow, so I'm just going assume he's 80% that and 20% Batman.

Anyway, I don't usually check manuals before playing a game, but I noticed a picture in the install folder with instructions so I'm going to make an exception this time.

Wow, that's actual size of the instruction sheet huh? Uh… never mind then, I’ll figure it out myself.

Here's a cropped shot of me failing to collect another one of those bits of brown paper and shooting a rat.

I've discovered that bullets kill things... eventually (it takes a few shots). So it's basically the same as the NES game, except now firing the gun uses up gas and I have to wait a couple of seconds for it to recharge afterwards.

I've also discovered that they haven't added a double jump, and Darkwing's no Mario when it comes to jump height, so I'm going to resist the instinct to immediately leap over that pile of broken glass to the right. There's plenty of harmless trash scattered around these sewers, but I'm taking the spikiness and the flashing as a hint that this pile of garbage is there to punish players arrogant enough to think they can make it up onto that ledge.

NES Darkwing Duck has a move where he can grab hold of the bottom of certain platforms, so I'm going to try to grab that one above me and leap up onto there instead.

It turns out that grabbing has been replaced by grappling! Man, swinging around all these pipes reminds me of that Batman game on the Amiga. Except this lets me swing around properly.

Though it took me a few tries to get up here without swinging into a rat or falling onto glass (which is where two of my hitpoints went). The first thing that threw me off is that pressing the jump button just makes me disconnect and fall. To get any height I have to press the grappling hook button again to wind it in. The second thing that threw me off is that the grappling gun uses the same recharging gas source as the actual gun (I’m not even going to speculate where the gas refill is coming from), so I have to wait a couple of seconds after firing either of them before I can grapple again. I understand  that it's designed like this to stop players from indiscriminately blasting every enemy and swinging everywhere, but that actually sounds like fun and what I'm doing here is less fun.

Anyway I get the impression I’m supposed to jump down that pit on the right, so I’m going to go do that. But I’m also going to be really careful not to swing, jump or walk into that nasty looking steam jet coming from a broken pipe right there in front of me. I didn’t catch it on the screenshot, it flickers on and off, so you’ll just have to trust me that it’s there.

Crap!

I successfully made it down the hole without getting my fedora steam cleaned along the way, but then this massive duck went and charged at me! I whipped out my pistol and started firing the moment I saw him, but he was so tough that I ran out of gas power and the gun started quacking. Seriously, my gun quacks when it’s empty.

The game credits reveal that the quack's been borrowed from MacOS, so now I've got my hopes up that I'll come across some classic Windows sound effects as well. Like how Forza Horizon 4 features the Windows XP shutdown sound as a car horn. The credits also reveal that the music and sound effects are straight out of the NES game, along with some of the item graphics. So that explains why the soundtrack's so catchy.

Darkwing sadly died from his wounds, but fortunately it turns out that today's Groundhog Day as he just reappeared back at the beginning of the sewers like nothing had happened. I repeated all the grappling and got back down here, but this time I used a cunning trick to escape being crushed to death by the charging mighty duck: I got up to him with enough hearts left to survive taking the hit.

But then I got killed by his identical mate about 300 or so pixels further on.

It's partially/entirely my own fault though, as I was checking to see if using my block move against him could save me from taking damage (the answer was 'no'). Maybe one day I'll meet someone who shoots stuff at me and then I can try the block button again, but for now it seems like I should leave my cape alone.

On my third attempt I got killed by the same dude while trying to jump over him, because Darkwing's jump is a bit crap. But on my fourth attempt...

… I finally got a screenshot of that steam jet at the start! See I told you it was there. Weirdly the pipe is also leaking green drips, so it must be containing some very hot sewage.

This isn't an in-game screen filter by the way, the picture's just blurry because I resized it to be 50% bigger instead of doubling the size and cropping it like the rest. Doesn't actually look as bad as I thought it would.

I've found a way to get past these dudes without sacrificing a hit point. What I do is fire the grappling gun into the ceiling, then pull myself up at the last moment to get some extra height then drop down behind him. Then I just have to wait for the waterfall to stop for a moment and I'm free to make my getaway.

Oh, wait. It turns out you can just jump over these guys normally, if you're better at timing it than I am.

SECONDS LATER

I landed on the broken glass, are you kidding me? How did I even mess up that jump so badly? Could it be that I'm... bad at games?

And thus ends the legend of Darkwing Duck. Plot twist: it turned out to be a cautionary tale about jumping around in sewers with no shoes on.

Well at least now I know that I have limited lives. Had lives, I mean. They've thoughtfully included a count of how many lives I still have left, which is a feature you don't see on game over screens often. I guess it makes sense if this doubles as a 'Level Completed' screen.

I can also see that I killed just one enemy per minute, which seems a bit crap. In my defence I was spending a lot of time writing notes, taking screenshots, and getting my indigo-clad duck of mystery killed by everything.

On my second attempt I made it through that whole gauntlet in one minute without taking a single hit, then I shot some flies to steal their treasure! I got a health kit out of one of them... which I don’t need because I made it through without taking a single hit, but I also got a G canister and I could always use more G I guess.

Immediately afterwards I found my route blocked by a chasm, so I figured I might as well jump into it. Nowhere else to go. My blind leap of faith paid off as there was more level below... where I got trampled by another one of those hulking ducks and swarmed to death by flies. Fortunately there was also an invisible checkpoint down there so I wasn't sent back far this time.

I really need to get the hang of this grappling gun though, as it's taking me way too many tries to get him to leap from the bottom of these moving lift platforms when I'm at my destination. If I can just stop pressing 'jump' instead of 'grapple' when I want to jump off, that would be a start.

The path up there seems to be a dead end so I’m carefully investigating the bottomless pit I jumped over. Turns out that much like the other pit there is actually a bottom to it. It also turns out that I can grapple onto walls just as well as ceilings, so that’s sure to be handy.

A LITTLE FURTHER ON

No, grapple onto the hanging hook you dumb duck! It’s right there directly above you, how is this difficult? I'm not sure how grabbing onto it instead of the ceiling's going to help me exactly, but it must be there for a reason. Like maybe it's a switch!

Great, I've spent so long moving back and forth and firing my grappling gun into air the that the lift's dropping back down and leaving me hanging here. Fine, I'll just wait for it to come back up and then I'll give this another try.

AGH I GOT RATTED! How did I not see that coming? I was fully aware that these guys don't hang around on their platforms forever. Well, there goes another life.

Annoyingly when I made it back here and got up onto the ledge I discovered that the room's actually a dead end. There are two narrow tunnels leading up on either side, but they're no good to me because I can't grapple from wall to wall to climb up. I just don't get enough height from reeling the cable in to leap over and hook onto to a higher point on the opposite wall.

But, I ain't got nothing else to do here but keep trying.

2 MINUTES OF GRAPPLING AT WALLS LATER

I figured it out! Turns out the trick is that I need to fire the rope diagonally from a distance when I'm latching onto the first wall. That way the cable is longer when I start pulling myself in, meaning I’m accelerating for longer and I get more height from it. The other trick is that I have to remember to wait a couple of seconds before reeling myself in for gas to recharge, otherwise nothing will happen when I fire the grappling gun again and I’ll fall right back down again.

Man, I hit the mother lode of Gs up here. Collecting G canisters fills up the tank next to the recharging gas gun meter, and as far as I can tell, its purpose is to run out after I’ve used the grapple gun a few times. I dunno, maybe it gives me longer grappling shots, or perhaps it lets me kill a rat in two shots instead of three, but I haven’t noticed any difference.

Oh, turns out it makes the gas recharge faster for a bit.

Well I reached the top and I'm currently headed left, hoping that I'm making progress and not heading the wrong way down an alternate path to the G treasure room. Trouble is, I'm kind of stuck as I can't get up onto this wall. Plus I'm not even sure I want to, as those look like Ronald McDonald's legs up there.

Crap, I fell off and missed the platform on the way down!

Now I'm all the way back down here at the not-quite-bottomless pit. Man, I really don't feel like doing all that grappling again to give the ledge another try.

But hang on, every time I've fallen down a hole so far I've found myself on another path. Maybe if I take another leap of faith and drop further down I'll find myself on an easier route requiring less grapple gymnastics. Worth a try I reckon.

Nope, turns out that was one of them instant death holes I just jumped into, not a 'blind leap of faith leading somewhere good' hole. Really hard to tell those two apart. But this time I got almost 3 kills per minute and I actually found items! So I’m pretty happy with that outcome.

My genius maths skills also tell me that I’ve been playing for about 20 minutes in total. I should really keep playing until I’ve lasted a full hour, to give it a fair chance, but I don't want to.


CONCLUSION

---

Looking at a YouTube video it seems I got about halfway through Darkwing Duck before quitting. Halfway through a single-level demo you can finish in three minutes. I'm sure this says as much about me as it does about the game, but it has to say something about the game.

They did do a great job of taking the tight responsive gameplay from the NES game and making it into something I could believe was a lost Mega Drive prototype, as it really looks and feels the part. Well, aside from being widescreen. But man I got tired of fighting with the grappling gun and there's no way of getting anywhere without it. I've seen a video of someone swinging around a lot more skilfully than I ever managed, but even an expert has to wait a couple of seconds for it to recharge between shots.

You basically do three things in this game: jump around, shoot enemies, and grapple onto things, and two of those three things require waiting for a refill. I suppose it could've been worse, they could've made jumping require the recharging gas supply as well, but it's plenty awkward as it is. Maybe I'm just spoiled because I've played Terraria, but as far as I'm concerned grappling hooks should bring nothing but joy, and getting up onto platforms shouldn't be so much of a struggle.

There was also some weird slowdown for me at times, but maybe I'm just finally being punished for not turning off my antivirus while playing games. On the plus side the game's not an obnoxious collect 'em up, there is at least one checkpoint to save you from replaying the whole stage if you die, there's no nightmare of a boss fight waiting at the end, and the cool NES music sounds like cool NES music. I feel like this could've had real potential if they kept refining it during development, but sadly this is all we get.

But if it looks interesting to you, you can download it for free from the developer's website by clicking these words and check it out for yourself. Personally though I'd rather give the NES game another try.

My Xbox 360 Wired Controller (2010-2019)

This article is dedicated to the memory of my favourite Xbox 360 pad, which I used as my PC controller from year one of Super Adventures until it broke shortly after I played Darkwing Duck. It wasn't as stylish as a Mega Drive pad or as iconic as a NES pad, and that d-pad would never make it to the top of any 'Best d-pads ever' lists, but overall it was possibly the finest controller that I've ever owned and I'm going to miss using it.

But hey it's only the right bumper that's gone so maybe I can fix it.

---

Thanks for reading! But now it's your turn to write something, as that comments section down there always looks really empty and miserable until it gets some opinions in it. Or you could impress everyone and demonstrate your extensive gaming knowledge by identifying what the next game will be.