Yo Capcom, bring on the "Disney Afternoon for Game Boy Collection"
I've been working on a review of The Disney Afternoon Collection. It should be up sometime this week; I'd been wanting to hold off on posting until I'd had a chance to put this video together:
And now that I have, I feel like a hold a slightly more informed perspective with which to judge the Collection. Well, OK, not really. This is a mere footnote, not some essential magnifying lens.
DuckTales for Game Boy is, in broad strokes, the same game as the NES release that serves as the crown jewel of the Collection. Look at the details, however, and it's more of a remix: Same overall goals, same control scheme, same enemies and challenges and general flow, but with all the individual pieces of each stage shuffled around. The game moves a little more slowly and its physical locales are somewhat more compact, and weirdly enough this all works in its favor. DuckTales on Game Boy works (at least, aside from the awful mine cart physics, which are bad on NES and intolerable on GB to the point of nearly breaking the game), and it offers a rare example of an NES game adapted to the diminutive handheld without needless compromise. It's not perfect, but it gets a lot of things right that many, many other developers fumbled back in the day.
It's a different enough game, and bodes well for Capcom's other NES-to-Game Boy Disney conversions, that I'd really like to see a follow-up Afternoon Collection focused strictly on those ports. I doubt Capcom would ever go to the trouble of licensing those releases for reissue; we're far more likely to see a compilation of their other Disney titles. But a boy can dream, right?
Anyway, DuckTales was a welcome point of light in my efforts to chronicle the Game Boy library. I'll be taking a break from Game Boy Works for a couple of months in order to wrap up NES Works 1986 and put together the corresponding print edition compilation, but there are some interesting releases on tap once we get back to handhelds.
