Review: The Disney Afternoon Collection

Introduction

Let’s try something. Complete the following sentence: “Licensed video games are….” If you’re a gamer, you probably used a synonym for the word “awful.”

That’s why I find it fascinating when a licensed game becomes a genuine classic. More remarkable still is when one company manages to make several such games. Capcom is one of those companies. Their Disney titles are probably the most beloved non-Final-Fantasy-crossover video games to spring from the house that Walt built.

Earlier this year, Digital Eclipse released a compilation of some of the most renown: The Disney Afternoon Collection. This set, available on the standard XBox One/Playstation 4/Microsoft Windows trio, consists entirely of NES games based on TV shows from Disney’s weekday cartoon block, the Disney Afternoon. Capcom’s work with Disney includes a number of quality games that aren’t on this collection—Mickey’s Magical Quest and Goof Troop being some of my personal favourites—but even a collection of just the NES games provides a great lineup.

These games work because they’re video games first and licensed games second. They're all pleasantly cartoony, with a good variety of classically video gamey stock environments and bestiaries consisting mostly of animals from both sides of the anthropomorphic spectrum. But you could have put any other duck, pilot, or small mammal in any of these games and you’d never know any better.

And yet every one is a blast to play. These may not be good adaptations, but they are good—sometimes even great—video games.

DuckTales (1989)

Of all the games in this collection, DuckTales is my personal favourite. Popular culture remembers this game for three things: having particularly good music on the moon stage, having a moon stage in the first place, and letting Scrooge McDuck bounce around using his cane like a pogo-stick. But behind all that is a solid, original 8-bit platformer.

It's also surprisingly true to the source material, in spirit if not in body. In the comics and the cartoon, Scrooge travels to exotic locations, seeking out treasure and collecting money. In the game, that’s the story: Scrooge sets out to collect treasures and keep any money he grabs along the way. He can’t even spend the money in stores because then he wouldn’t have anything to swim in. 

The levels are open-ended, with lots of hidden treasures and alternate routes. Aside from the five main treasures that you get just by beating each stage, there are two moderately-hard-to-get hidden ones, and two slightly-easier-to-find power-ups that increase your maximum health. You can rush through the game, but to get the best ending you have to seek out the two hidden treasures and collect ten million dollars, which will probably require visiting each stage twice. A lot of the treasure is invisible until you get near it, which means that you’ll want Scrooge to search every nook and caress every wall. This is not a quest for impatient gamers who loathe exploration.

Granted, the pogo-cane is ridiculous and not something Scrooge would be likely to muck about with in the cartoon or the comics. Who the hell cares? It’s fun. At first glance, it may seem indistinguishable from any other video game's jump attack—”hold down and press B to damage whatever you land on” doesn’t seem like a big improvement over “land on the enemy to damage it” on paper—but there’s just something so satisfying about bouncing along, making that little “boing” sound as you go. Some games just feel right—and the pogo cane feels very right indeed.

Despite everything the game does well, it does falter in two areas: the bosses and Transylvania.  The former are so simple and unremarkable that they may as well have not been there at all; the latter is admittedly one of the game’s better levels, but wears out its welcome by demanding the player visit it three (!) times to beat the game. (Most levels only require one visit, though they allow two if you have Launchpad pull you out of the stage early.) These flaws aren’t deal-breakers, but you can’t shake the idea that the mediocrity could have made room for something better.

Despite these bouts of laziness, DuckTales is still one of the best NES platformers, and a must-play for any fan of retrogaming, whether you’re familiar with the source material or not.

Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (1990)

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers was the second video game based on a Disney Afternoon franchise, and remains the silver-medalist of the Capcom/Disney Afternoon family. With its unique gameplay and frantic two-player action, Rescue Rangers is easily one of the best licensed games of the 8-bit era.

The game is a 2D platformer, but forgoes direct hop-n-hurt combat for a grab-n-throw mechanic, similar to Super Mario Brothers 2 without the ability to grab enemies. It fits the license well because, in the cartoons, the Rangers always relied on their environment rather than their bodies to defeat their adversaries.

(Interestingly, Capcom’s Goof Troop game would later reuse both the cooperative two-player and the grab-n-throw ideas, albeit in an overhead Zelda-like action-adventure game.)

The levels are exactly what you’d expect: kitchens, trees, alleys, and other everyday locations, swollen to Brobdingnagian proportions in our heroes’s lilliputian eyes. The enemies, however, often feel hilariously out of place. Anyone taller than Chip ‘n Dale is forced to wait in the boss room. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of ‘munk-sized hooligans, including ‘munk-sized kangaroos and ‘munk-sized rhinoceroses, to stand in your way.

Chip and Dale have been some of the animated world’s greatest frenemies since their theatrical days, and this game keeps up the tradition splendidly. Although players are technically supposed to work together, accidentally bonking your buddy with a block will stun him for a few seconds. It won’t damage him, but don’t worry—that’s what picking him up and throwing him off the nearest cliff is for.

Unfortunately, the bosses are still pretty lame. In the centre of the arena is a red sphere. You must hurl this sphere, which cannot leave the arena, at the boss, who is usually near the top of the screen and is in a few cases (including, sadly, the last boss) completely stationary. Every boss takes five hits from this ball to defeat, whether he, she, or it is a giant robot or a spacecraft or an owl or a cat or a centipede.

As I said, many people think that Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is the second-best of the Capcom/Disney titles. I find the non-DuckTales games a little harder to rank, but I will admit that this adventure is more distinctive than TaleSpin or Darkwing Duck, and, even on single-player, is more worth playing for that reason.

TaleSpin (1991)

I rented TaleSpin once or twice when I was younger, but didn’t beat it, or even think about it that much, until I got this collection. For that reason, I decided to play it first.

The video game version of TaleSpin resembles the Disney version about as closely as Disney’s The Jungle Book resembled Kipling’s. Baloo is a pilot, as in the TV show, but the Sea Duck (his iconic plane) is now smaller and has an exposed cockpit and a gun. He still delivers packages, but, in this game, that means picking up boxes that just happen to be lying around. 

While most of the titles in this collection are platformers, TaleSpin is a shmup, which may not be a perfect match but is as good as one could expect from an NES title based off a cartoon. Baloo is a better pilot than athlete, so seeing him engaging in dogfights is more appropriate than watching him trying the sort of acrobatics that Scrooge McDuck or Chip and Dale can justify.

One of this game’s features is that, unlike most Gradius-style shmups, it lets you turn around with the press of a button. This game is still moderately challenging, but collecting packages is a lot easier than it would be in a one-way game, and, since you can fire to either the left or right, the bosses can attack from either side. That makes this game the first in this collection with interesting bosses.

Like Ducktales, TaleSpin puts an emphasis on exploration. Aside from all the packages laying around in plain sight, there are a lot of invisible goodies—including invisible bonus rounds—scattered about. Most of the Capcom/Disney games didn’t copy these particular features from DuckTales, but I’m glad that TaleSpin did; the exploration adds an extra layer to the game, and helps make each subsequent playthough (when you know where those prizes are) just a bit easier.

Between levels, Baloo visits Wildcat’s shop to purchase upgrades for his plane. I like this feature; it's a tricky balancing act to decide whether to buy a weaker power-up or save for a better one. There’s an upgrade that allows you to fire two shots at once, while another (far more expensive) one allows you to fire four. Note that you get a big end-of-level bonus for collecting all the packages, so missing even one will leave a mighty big dent in Baloo’s pocketbook, move that shiny new power-up back a level or two, and possibly cost you the game.

As fun as the game is, there are some places where the art and story can get pretty dumb. Much as Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers doesn’t care if the enemies are the right size, TaleSpin doesn’t care if its environments are. Having levels set over an ocean or in the clouds makes some sense, but watching a plane fly through a baseball arena or a haunted house is almost halfway into Parodius territory.

This might actually be the least-remembered game in this collection, but I think it’s under-appreciated. It’s not on DuckTales' or Chip n' Dales' level, but it still makes for a fun, addictive little game.

Darkwing Duck (1992)

Darkwing Duck was one of my favourite cartoons as a kid, and this game was the only one I owned (rather than rented) before the age of twenty-five. It's usually dismissed as Mega Man lite, but it actually has enough personality to stand on its own two webbed feet.

Darkwing feels like an enhanced Mega Man. His gas gun now fires long-range pellets, like the Mega Buster, but he can also inexplicably use his cape to block projectiles. The best addition, however, is Darkwing’s ability to hang off of and leap from hooks, girders, and other objects. Granted, it’s not nearly as neat a gimmick as Scrooge’s pogo-cane, but it adds a more vertical, acrobatic feeling that helps Darkwing Duck stand out from Mega Man just a bit more. 

This game’s story, like that of every game in this collection and most from the era, is simple and generic. There are seven levels and seven crooks, and Darkwing must visit the levels to capture the crooks. Most bosses are taken directly from the cartoon; the exception is a lycanthrope named Wolf Duck, who is original to this game. 

Unlike the bosses in DuckTales and Rescue Rangers, these ones are actually pretty well-thought-out and fun. My favourite is Professor Moliarty. His boss arena is full of annoying-but-destructible flamethrowers. Moliarty usually tries to stay away from you and your gun, but if you bust one of his weapons, he’ll step into the path of your bullet to repair it. Most of the boss arenas also have platforms for Darkwing and his adversary to climb to, making each one feel just a little bit different.

Sadly, I wish I could speak so highly of the endboss, Steel Beak. His first form is a standard Wily-esque Large Machine on the Side of the Screen, and is tricky enough, but his final form is simply a machineless Steel Beak running (not jumping) around tossing steel plates at you. 

It’s not nearly as awesome as it sounds.

Comparisons to the Mega Man series are neither avoidable nor desirable for this game. Ditto with comparisons to DuckTales. But if you judge the game on its own merits, or are simply in the mood for a Diet Mega Man, Darkwing Duck is a perfect way to kill a rainy afternoon.

DuckTales 2 (1993)

Like many Capcom sequels, DuckTales 2 is basically the first game with a few minor additions. Scrooge copied Darkwing's ability to hang and jump from some background objects, but other than that he controls pretty much the same as before. There are three upgrades hidden in the five stages, but these don’t really grant new abilities so much as allow the old abilities to work on more things. You can also visit shops between levels to buy power-ups, but nothing too interesting—mostly things that let you take more hits before dying, or die more times, or keep more of your money after dying. For the most part, this game is more of a polish-job than a step forward.

Whereas DuckTales 1 encourages you to explore everywhere to gather as much money as possible, DuckTales 2 encourages you to seek out much more specific treasures. Since you can now spend your cash rather than merely sit on it, and you can revisit stages to gather more wealth, your net worth isn’t factored into your ending. Instead, you unlock the best ending by finding all seven pieces of the treasure map. One piece is given to you at the start of the game, one is purchased at the shop, and the other five are hidden in the stages. Many of them require the completion of a simple puzzle to find, while others are a mere matter of rubbing up against the walls until you phase through something. In these post-Rare days, unlocking a better ending by collecting stuff is pretty much the norm for a platformer, but in DuckTales 2's time it wasn't as common. The only real kink is that you’re automatically taken towards the endgame after you beat all five levels, which means that if you want the best ending, you can’t beat the fifth level until you’ve cleared out the other four. A minor quibble, but it feels weird after so many later-era platformers let you visit the final stage when you choose.

I’m not sure why this game isn’t more well-loved, since it has so much of the original game’s charm, but with just enough polish to really make it shine. I may not have as much nostalgia for this game as its predecessor, but I do think that, in a lot of ways, it’s better.

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 (1994)

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 is the only game in this collection that I've never played on an actual NES. Like Scrooge’s second outing, Chip ‘n Dale’s is essentially their first with a few minor changes. Chip and Dale can charge items before throwing them (though doing so is just difficult enough to not be quite worth it), and they can increase their maximum health when they get enough points. But there are no new side-quests and no significant overhauls to the gameplay; it’s basically more of the same.

In fact, the only change that I’d really consider worth mentioning is that the bosses are far better. They are no longer just targets that perch themselves in the air of an empty arena and take red orbs to the face. The bosses often have more unique arenas. Some of them still fly, but many of them now walk around on the same platforms as you. Most of them are far more mobile. And that damned red ball is gone—you now have to wait for the bosses to produce something that you can throw back at them. It’s never hard to figure out what your weapon is, but being forced to play defence until that weapon becomes available makes the fight more interesting.

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2, like DuckTales 2, never quite earned its predecessors’ acclaim, but it's a solid classic and a must-play for fans of the original. 

Final Thoughts

I had a lot of fun playing and replaying every game on this collection. The rewind feature, although doubtless appealing to some gamers, did not appeal to me. I understand and agree with the rationale that anyone who buys a game should be able to beat it, but I think that, when you play an older game, the “game over” screen should function as an ending, not merely a delay. The time attacks and boss rushes were a neat addition, though I’ve never personally been a fan of rushing through games.

I bought this collection for the original, unedited games. They’re simple, they’re short, and they’re silly, but they are so much fun to play. I still believe that the DuckTales titles are the best, but everything in here is worth at least an hour of fun. If you like retro gaming, and do not consider yourself above a bit of harmless nostalgia, you need to buy this collection.

Review: Legends of Localization Book 2: EarthBound

Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin is one of the English-speaking world's foremost experts on the classic video game EarthBound, and with his book Legends of Localization Book 2: EarthBound, he channelled that expertise into something inspirational and educational. I’m a regular visitor to Mato's Legends of Localization website, which compares the English versions of various video games to the Japanese versions, and I read his first book (Legends of Localization Book 1: The Legend of Zelda) in a single weekend. He did good work with the first book, but next to the sophomore installment, it felt like a practice run. There are few video games whose localization deserves an in-depth, book-length analysis more than EarthBound’s does, and no one more qualified to write such a book than Mato. Legends of Localization Book 2: EarthBound told me everything I could ever hope to know about EarthBound, and quite a lot of things I never thought to wonder.

EarthBound is the English version of the second entry in copywriter Shigesato Itoi’s MOTHER trilogy and, until EarthBound Beginning’s Virtual Console release in July 2015, the only one legally available in English. EarthBound was notoriously underappreciated at first, but its dedicated fanbase kept it alive as a cult classic for over two decades. However brilliant Shigesato Itoi’s work was, however, most of it would have never shone through in EarthBound without Marcus Lindblom, who localized the game. One of the great things about Mato's book is that it never forgets that. It’s common to hear people whine about every little change and imperfection in a translation, but Mato is a localizer himself, and it’s obvious that he’s as much a fan of Lindblom’s work as of Itoi’s.

A perfect translation of MOTHER 2--or anything, really--is impossible. About a month before reading this book, I read The Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri but translated from the original Italian by John Ciardi. In the introduction, Ciardi says, “Obviously no sane translator can allow himself to dream of success. He asks only for the best possible failure.” Word choice is a big part of writing, and different languages don’t have perfect equivalents for each other’s words or expressions, so translating a text is the same as rewriting it. And that's just concerning the meaning of a word--what about the intention? What if someone in a Japanese video game mentions a type of food that is common in Japan but exotic in America? Or what if someone makes a pun? Should the localizer translate the feeling the writer intended by completely rewriting the text, or go for a literal translation that creates a completely different feeling? No localization, however good, can ever perfectly reflect the tone and nuances of the original, so it falls to the localization team to figure out how to best convey the original writer's intention, which makes every translator an artist in their own right. This is the mindset that one should approach (and almost certainly will leave) Legends of Localization with.

The most important part of this book is its layman-friendly insight into the Japanese language. I’m purely monolingual myself, but I enjoyed reading about the Japanese language, its nuances, and how they worked in MOTHER 2. There's a lot of interesting information about Japanese puns in this book, but I personally preferred hearing about some of those words with no simple English equivalent, such as makyou (which, in Japanese, refers to an evil or dangerous place; translated in EarthBound as Deep Darkness) or nushi (which a Google search suggests simply means “owner,” and was translated as such in EarthBound, but Mato says often refers to the biggest and baddest beast in a particular area--a giant alligator in a swamp, for example). In all of these cases, Mato explains the connotation of each word, and talks about some other ways the word has been translated.

What I enjoyed the most about this book, though, was its insight into all of MOTHER 2's cultural references. Lindblom seems to have spent quite a bit of time cutting or changing Itoi’s allusions to TV, music, literature, comedy, and history. The odd Beatles nod got through, but the Japanese version has a wide range of references ranging from those familiar in the west (Superman) to those little-know outside Japan (Natsume Sōseki’s I Am a Cat). Many of the lines containing Japanese cultural references were literally translated, losing their cultural significance in the process (the gang member in Onett who recites a poem about gum and spit falls into this category), while western references were often cut entirely, presumably for legal reasons. It seems like such a small detail, but learning about these references gave me a different impression of MOTHER 2 than I had of EarthBound. The English version of the game usually feels familiar but still like another world, in the same way Middle-earth resembles our own past without being set there, so when a blatant pop culture reference does slide through, it’s jarring. MOTHER 2 knows so much about our world that, for all its obvious fantasy elements, it may as well take place here.  Considering one of the game’s initial selling points was that it's set in modern times, I think it sounds like MOTHER 2 gets that feeling across a bit more effectively.

And the research that went into this book--both in depth and breadth--is incredible. This is the main difference between the book and the website--sentence-long descriptions from the web often grow into paragraphs and adopt photos on the page. Anything mentioned in either language is fair game, regardless of how minor. For one example, there’s a vendor in Fourside who becomes enraged and calls Ness a “mod-boy jerk” if the player talks to him without buying anything. On the website, Mato says that this is a reference to the United Kingdom’s mod subculture and provides a Wikipedia link; in the book, he explains in detail what that subculture is and why it would seem like a good insult for that particular shopkeeper.

There’s also plenty of info in the book that is completely absent from the website. Take the lady in EarthBound’s Onett who expresses a fondness for cottage cheese. In MOTHER 2’s Onett, she prefers a different food item. I won’t tell you what, but if you buy the book, you'll get a description of that food item, a picture, a bonus picture of cottage cheese, and an explanation of why that particular snack would be turned into cottage cheese. All this for one inconsequential line from a minor NPC.

Of course, everyone makes mistakes, and Mato provides plenty of insight into where and why the EarthBound localization messed up. There are a few typos, and a few lines that were translated without proper context, resulting in someone saying something that is just a bit off. But even when pointing out a mistake or an oversight (in either the translation or the original!) Mato prefers to understand and explain the mistake rather than just snark about it. I find that approach far more insightful and interesting.

It’s difficult to think of anything negative to say about this book, especially since there are no alternatives on this subject, but one thing does come to mind: the book sometimes feels a little incomplete. The website has nice lists of all the weapons, items, and enemies in the game, as well as their Japanese names. I was surprised to see this was missing from the book. Granted, this information is freely available on the web, and it’s not the sort of thing that most people would sit down and read through anyway, but, frankly, the lost list was missed.

But then that is pretty much the very model of a minor quibble. I can definitely recommend this book without hesitation to anyone with even the slightest bit of interest on any of the subjects it covers. If you’re a fan of video games, then you’ll learn a lot. If you’re a fan of EarthBound, you will learn a bit less but probably value what you do learn a lot more. And if you’re interested in becoming a localizer yourself, you need this book. When people write about something they love, it's easy to degenerate into so much fanboyish gushing, but Mato has written an insightful book that is both loving and honest, a look at what makes this translation great and what makes it imperfect. There are no other books quite like this one, but if there were, I doubt they’d match the competition.