Stumbling through Ducktales

[davidn]

This idea is actually picking up! I've got a queue of games I'm planning to do and everything now. This time, it's Ducktales, for no reason at all, obviously. In this game, unlike most millionaires, Scrooge McDuck jets around various countries and steals their treasures directly with his own hands. Or he would if I could ever get anywhere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvByrWrtRY4

This one's a little longer than the last two at 22 minutes, though I only discover how to effectively play it in the last five of those. It will be either hilarious or excruciating if you've played it before.

The choice exasperated moment probably comes at 7:10, but the general level of it stays high throughout the entire effort. Thank you for fuelling that, ravenworks!

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Okay, well, you singing the ducktales theme is my new hypothetical ringtone ;)

"There's diamonds appearing out of thin air! No wonder he's a millionaire" XD So that's why he has to go to all these places himself; he doesn't want anyone else finding out that it's full of randomly-materializing diamonds. :)

"A tiny bit of slowdown" - frankly, the fact that it's a TINY bit is more of an accomplishment than the fact that there's slowdown is a detriment, probably ;) (Then again, I've been playing Gargoyle's Quest, which might have set a particularly low bar for technical achievement in the field of combating slowdown..)

"They can't be spiders because they have six legs", says the man controlling a talking duck with a top hat.

Am I crazy, or is that the same vine-climbing noise as in Little Nemo?

"and then you sort of _______ the chest across the room, as we say in Scotland"?

Did you notice that when he ducks, his hat plops back onto his head a moment after? (Good old 30fps youtube seems to not show it half the time, but, I THINK it's not just a screen-tearing issue, right?) Cute touch :)

"You can't argue with the Nintendo" - god, I wish I'd thought of that phrase when I was a kid, sitting as my friend yelled at the big glass screen...

Cripes! The bridge starts melting whether or not you're even touching it! That's a cruel twist on player expectations :S

"I can't remember HIS name" Did you eventually realise that you had just finished making a big deal about how you CAN remember his name? Or is your vision of Launchpad so wrapped up in his piloting aircraft that you didn't even realise it was him when you saw him with his feet on the ground :)

... hahah, spoke a moment too soon ;)

"I'm not sure what Easy does, it didn't help me getting hit by him" - but did you notice, it takes TWO hits before one of your life bar changes from red to orange?

... hahah, his tail wiggles when he's winding up to take a swing, and if you swing against a solid object, his eyes vibrate from the impact...! I love when developers are actually enthused enough about what they're doing to bother with details like that..

Hahahah, I love how even after you swore to stop making startled noises at ghosts, it happens again almost immediately when you hit the chest, twice as emphatic. :D C'mon, getting into it is the entire point of a video game! ;) Don't apologize for it :D

..... oh my god, that interlude was better than like half of the videos on youtube. (Hang on, that might not be saying as much as I hoped to.)

So did you actually look at the ORIGINAL manual? Like, did you dig up a PDF?

Man, in light of this, I REALLY can't decide if you should read the manual or not on future playthroughs! I almost feel like you should have kjorteo on Skype as your emergency co-pilot to give you a nudge in the right direction when you're accidentally flushing all the power crystals out into space or some such videogamey nonsense... (y'know, just in case your recording setup wasn't complex enough already. :D)

[davidn]

I'm not sure how to feel about the way that during my Launchpad recognition failure, you immediately went for the conclusion of chronic short-term memory loss! It really was because I only remembered that he appeared in the game in his... helicopter of weirdness that looks like a futuristic chaise-longue with a rotor bolted to the top.

You'd be surprised at the amount that you only notice when you're watching the game rather than playing it and trying to talk constantly about what you're doing - at the back of my mind I was convinced, on Easy, that the number of hits I thought I'd taken didn't match up to my health bar, but it was only after playing it back to myself that I noticed the difference for sure. I also didn't notice the top hat and tail waggle when I was playing, but they're definitely there - little things like that definitely add to how good the whole game seems, even if you sometimes don't immediately pick them up consciously.

I did look up a PDF of the original manual - http://www.replacementdocs.com has been absolutely invaluable for a couple of older games that I've been playing recently and haven't been able to work out how to play. I've never found one missing yet :) I didn't look further than the controls bit, to realize how to do the pogo-jump, so there might be even more I don't know about.

The missing word is "gowf". Like the slightly longer stream of gibberish that I recite later on, these are things that I never actually said in Scotland because I didn't speak any of the dialect, but that I've only found myself starting to mention now that people around me seem to have expectations of it.

I'm really glad you're enjoying these so much :) They're a lot of fun to do, and knowing that I'm creating something that isn't totally obnoxious out of them is a nice extra.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Anyway, if videos like this are what happen when I make flippant comments about your accent, expect there to be a drastic upturn. :D

[igorium.livejournal.com]

From what I remember, jumping on enemies with the stick out kills them, and chests are opened this way.

[davidn]

I found out eventually, but it took a look at the manual to do it! That's a major difference between then and now - there could be vital information in the manual that isn't painstakingly explained in the game.

[igorium.livejournal.com]

Discovering such controls by yourself can be a very rewarding experience when you have only one or two games to play.

BTW, lack of manuals and amount of effort put into discovering controls are the reasons that create cult of PC games in ex-USSR in early 1990-es. That and low amount of games that were available.

Metaphysics of this phenomenon are covered here: http://www.popuw.com/pocp.html :)

[davidn]

Prince of Persia is actually interesting to bring up, because for the longest time I had no idea about the controls for that either! I could move around, but for the longest time I couldn't escape from level 1 because I had no idea that Shift was used to attack, walk, cling on... I got up to the first guard by a string of coincidences, and it was a major revelation when I suddenly hit him for the first time.

And that sounds an absolutely fascinating concept for a story, particularly as he picked that game for it... I'm looking at the Google translation of the short story, though it doesn't quite convey it as it must have been intended.

[igorium.livejournal.com]

There is an official translation, I thought the link lead to it

[igorium.livejournal.com]

Some pages are here in google preview
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/774837.A_Werewolf_Problem_in_Central_Russia_and_Other_Stories

[davidn]

That's amazing - I'd really love to get hold of the rest :) The way that it describes elements of the game so casually within the normal world makes it read bizarrely like the computer game sort of... fanfiction that I wrote in primary school when we were given vague creative writing tasks.

The choice of the name 'Sasha' was also an intriguing one, just for the reason that there's a guitarist in Helloween called Sascha Gerstner who I've always thought has a bit of a Sands of Time-era Prince of Persia thing going.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Heh, I'm loving this series - you should keep it up!

Also, because it would amuse me immensely, I'd like to second Ravenworks' suggestion that you should sing the theme. :P In case you feel like mocking something up (and because it'll cause everyone reading this to have the song on the brain for the rest of the evening - I'm evil like that :P), the lyrics:

Life is like a hurricane,
Here in, Duckburg,
Race-cars, lasers, aeroplanes,
It's a, duck-blur,

Might solve a mystery (do-do-doo)
Or rewrite history,

Duck Tales! (Woo-oo!)
Every day they're out there making
Duck Tales! (Woo-oo!)
Tales of derring-do
Bad and good luck Tales!

When it seems they're heading for the
Final, Curtain,
Cool deduction never fails,
That's for, certain,

The worst of messes,
Become successes,

Duck Tales! (Woo-oo!)
Every day they're out there making
Duck Tales! (Woo-oo!)
Tales of derring-do
Bad and good luck Tales! (Woo-oo!)

D-D-D-Danger! (Watch behind you!)
There's a stranger! (Out to find you!)
What to do? Just grab on to some

Duck Tales! (Woo-oo!)
Every day they're out there making
Duck Tales! (Woo-oo!)
Tales of derring-do
Bad and good luck Tales! (Woo-oo!)

Not pony tales or cotton tails, no,
Duck Tales! (Woo-oo!)

D.F.

[davidn]

You'd have to come up with some pretty amazing sort of bribe before you got all of that out of me! ;)

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I can think of something. ;)

In another note, I've just noticed the world map is a giant Pangaea-like landmass that apparently contains the Amazon, Transylvania and Africa all together on one super-continent, but still has Britain floating off in one corner. :P For some reason (probably the fact I have a head cold right now, and thus, my thoughts are coming out strangely) I find this hilarious. :P

D.F.

[kjorteo]

If you teach me how to do all the screen capturing and audio capturing stuff, including sync issues, and basically walk me through how to do these things myself, then I might just have some way of responding and joining in on the blind playthrough challenge someday..! In fact, maybe we can do a green rabbit furry trade; I do Jazz Jackrabbit if you do Bucky O'Hare. Or something.

[davidn]

The entire recording setup is pretty much detailed in this post of me screaming like a big pansy - Camstudio is free, and so is Audacity, and you'd just need to set up the former to record a screen area (I use NEStopia on the 2x screen setting, so that it's visible but the raw video isn't too large) and the latter to capture sound from the microphone. Camstudio can record sound as well, but seems to suffer from synchronization issues, and I get around those by matching up the individual voice track from Audacity with the video later.

The science of capturing the game audio at the same time took a while, but I got around it with the use of my second sound device... however, I've since discovered that NEStopia has a sound recording option that just writes to a WAV file on your hard drive as it goes, so you could just use that instead. (I don't know about any timing issues, or lack of them, with it.)

I actually go across to the Mac to use iMovie to finalize the video, but I don't think that I do anything that couldn't be done in the free Windows Movie Maker instead. However, that would also be a part you were on your own for!

If you ever desire to get that lot working together... a rabbit trade sounds like fun :)