August 10, 2010, at 05:32 PM

Mini Review: Daffy Duck in Hollywood

Yay! Yet another late Europe-only Probe licensed platformer! I'm a glutton for punishment...

Graphics

Daffy has loads of movement and animation frames, special animations, etc. that convey the character pretty faithfully to the cartoon. Sprites are all larger than average, but on the other hand that means you rarely get more than two on-screen at the same time (to avoid the sprite limit). Backgrounds are very nicely done as you'd expect from a game of this vintage.

Sound

Matt Furniss does his usual magic. It's all plinky-plonky stuff but that's what we want, isn't it?

Longevity

There's 18 fairly large levels split into six movie-themed groups of three. The game is pretty much the same through them all, except the kung-fu level briefly has you performing martial arts and over-the-top spinning jumps (which is nice), before you get a gun anyway and it's back to normal.

You play through the whole game (takes about an hour) and then you get

YOU VARMINT DUCK! YOU CAN'T FINISH THE GAME UNLESS YOU PLAY IT ON HARD DIFFICULTY SETTING!... NOW GO BACK AND TRY AGAIN!

...so you do that and you get

YOU VARMINT DUCK! YOU DIDN'T GET ALL OF MY GOLDEN MOVIE AWARDS ... NOW GO BACK AND TRY AGAIN!

...so you say "screw that" and look up the "good ending" text in the ROM.

Plot

Well, apparently it was something to do with getting golden movie awards?

Fun

It's not too bad. The large sprites mean the world is correspondingly large and as a result you can't see very far ahead, so there's rather too many blind jumps (although a decent look up/down facility mitigates that). There's some stupid jump-out-as-you-walk-past enemies, and some stupid hide-behind-foreground-scenery enemies (like Chuck Rock). But overall, it's a polished platformer.

Also, when Daffy runs into a wall, the screen shakes and his beak is bent. What else could you want?

Innovation

Not really.

Conclusion

Polished platformer but nothing more. Nevertheless, an engrossing time-passer.


Mini Review Ratings