3 hearts only. 3 lives only. Restart levels on death. Design remains the same. On the plus side, anything that was a heart in easier levels is now a treasure worth a lot of money.
If you’re a DuckTales aficionado ad love everything about the series, or even just the game – this is an absolute must buy. If you’re not, but enjoy challenging, aesthetically pleasing platformers that don’t overstay their welcomes there’s a good chance you’ll still enjoy DuckTales: Remastered.
Four games in four weeks — Sony's dropped the release schedule and games coming in its summer 2013 PlayStation Network PLAY promotion: Stealth Inc.: A Clone In The Dark (July 26), Cloudberry Kingdom (July 30), the delightful ibb & obb (above, August 6) and DuckTales Remastered (August 13). Check out pricing and more info here.
For many, DuckTales is a beloved game—and I imagine that the mere idea of messing with it isn't an appealing one. But after a chat at E3 with Matt Bozon, dreative director at WayForward, and Austin Ivansmith, director, it seems that many of the changes in the remastered version of DuckTales are things that fans can look forward to.
"Everything that was good about the original is still there," WayForward reassured me. "We used the original NES game as a template…about 60% follows the original perfectly, and then about 40% is new content. For the level design itself, it has to do with adding more of what was already there in the original NES game—some of the levels the a little short, you know? In a couple of spots, you might run into only one enemy type twice, and there's really mean enemies, and there's really mean puzzles there that we wanted to give the player more of that to experience."
While some of these changes mean altered or expanded levels with more to experience and collect, some of the enemies are also a tad different.
"We didn't create any new enemies, all the enemies are there, and a couple of them have a few lil' tricks to them that they didn't have before—like the skeleton duck leaves a skull behind and that becomes a puzzle mechanic you use…with some bosses, the bosses in the original game were really short, and you could beat them really quickly, and we sort of brought our WayForward flair to them and gave them more patterns, and a little more challenge, and really building on what their behaviors and patterns were in the original game."
Returning players who are looking for a challenge can look forward to not only a new extreme difficulty mode, which requires you to beat DuckTales in one sitting, but also a new final stage which takes place in Mt Vesuvius.
What else? You can compare your high score with your friends, which although standard, is neat to have. Those uber fans that loved the show might be delighted to hear that there's also a new gallery with a ton of concept art from the show and comics, songs from the game, and more. I'm told that some of that material is super rare stuff.
DuckTales has changed a bit, and hopefully it's all for the better. You'll be able to judge for yourself later this summer. If nothing else, you can look forward to the return of the cast on the original show.
