Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow

The 351ELEC Discord server is having a thing called “Game of the Moment” where some game (emulatable on a RG351x device, of course) is chosen to be a game that everyone is invited to play and have a chat about, just for funsies. This game is the first one, and actually they chose the Mega Drive version, but SNES does what Mega Don’t in terms of sound quality, so I went with that version instead. Actually I have it on Steam, and the Windows 9x port is just the Mega Drive version with CD audio, but running games of that era on modern computers is never really fun to set up.

So, here we have the most obscure Donald Duck game. A game that Disney didn’t want to admit is a Donald Duck game, at least in the USA release. Because Donald Duck… has a gun!! And there are dark themes like zombies and getting dragged into hell when you die, and also one of those bat enemies exploded into blood I think? Also, while the protagonist is ostensibly Donald Duck, he’s also some Magnum PI parody called Maui Mallard for no reason, and Donald Duck is never referred to by that name in the game. And he transforms into a ninja named Cold Shadow (who is never referred to by name in anywhere except the Brazilian Mega Drive version, apparently), for some reason.

Is he supposed to be Donald Duck in a costume? Is it an alternate universe version of Donald Duck where he just happens to be a detective? Maybe if the cartoon series actually became a thing, we could have known that. But it didn’t end up happening. This game didn’t sell well, probably because it didn’t have the words Donald Duck on it, and in the USA the SNES game was released in 1997 which is a tad late. Anyway, it has quite a cult following from what I can tell. So, let’s get into the good, the bad, and the complete arse cheeks.

The good: the presentation. It’s actually one of the best looking games for the SNES, despite otherwise seeming like an average 2D platformer. Lots of nice visual effects everywhere like fog and translucent goop and shit (no mode 7 scaling, but I guess they didn’t feel the need to chuck that in just to show off), lots of colours, high quality music and sound effects where sometimes if you’re in a caverny area it echoes, I can’t imagine unironically playing this on a Mega Drive. That’s half the fun! Also, you have to appreciate the cool concept. It’s certainly a cool idea. Also you can go inside duck mechas in one level. Well kind of. They’re more like duck statues. It aims to be some kind of exploration-based platformer where you go around really big levels to get some treasures and not have a time limit. Which is not a bad idea. Puzzle solving sounds like a good idea too.

So then there’s the bad. It’s just not as cool as its concept makes it sound. Everything about the gameplay is just a little bit off. The game is kind of unforgiving with going through the levels, because often you’ll miss a bit of treasure and you’ll find that you simply aren’t allowed to go back to go and get it. That gets closed off. Also for a duck Maui jumps like shit. Nowhere near enough height compared to what you might expect, I’ve heard some people call this game “floaty” but more floatiness would actually be a welcome addition and I think “floaty” is just a word people use sometimes when a game has crap jumping but they don’t know the words to say that. If anything, it feels too heavy. Being a SNES game where a small company like Nintendo (who published the SNES version) or Disney can’t possibly afford such extravagant luxuries as batteries to hold your save file, this game uses hella passwords. You only get your passwords if you beat the bonus stages though, which you only get to access if you manage to get enough treasure in a world, and once you do they’re just irritating vertical platform stages where you will probably just fall all the way to the bottom and give up. I’d recommend skipping those and just using savestates, honestly, though I guess that annoys internet tough guys who think they have a point to prove. The ninja just kind of sucks. He doesn’t move like a ninja at all, and really he just kind of moves in the same way as Maui, so the only point is when the game forces you to use him with parts of levels where you need to swing on stuff, or enemies that just don’t take damage from the gun for no reason, but his staff is kinda short and the spin attack is completely useless because of how slow it is. Combat in general kind of sucks because there’s no way to dodge enemy attacks, especially as the ninja who doesn’t have a projectile, so you just kinda have to take damage and accept it. Sometimes the graphics just blend in with each other too much, the swinging points for the ninja sometimes are just entirely missable and you have to go back to a walkthrough to avoid being stuck and then you’re like… what the hell, there was a skull there that I could swing from? I personally couldn’t really see it apart from the background until it was pointed out. Also the hit detection on those is really clunky and sometimes you just press the button to grab onto it, and the game decides it doesn’t like you enough to let you do that.

The arse cheeks is that this game was a game made by Disney in the 90s, and that was when rentals were a thing, so they made the game bullshit so you wouldn’t have time to beat the game within a rental period and you’d have to buy the full game I guess? Well that was the logic they admitted to in The Lion King but now I have to accuse them of doing that with this game too. It starts off alright but some of these levels are just frustration city and aren’t fun at all and I can’t comprehend a hypothetical situation where someone finds them fun. There’s an autoscrolling lava level where you have to ride on a platform that goes on for just too long, level 5-3 where you have to be on a bungee cord and navigate through spikes and take 6 baby ducks to the other side and you WILL take damage and that took me a long time to get through and I almost considered ragequitting the game right there… the second to last level where you have an escort mission where you have to kill annoying small hard to hit enemies to progress and if you take too long the poison gas that is continuously rising kills you… there are a lot of moments that ruin the game for me. I’m not the frickin AVGN but this game really tested me.

I think this game almost could have been really good if they just made Maui control better, maybe give him a double jump because he’s a frickin duck and it makes sense for him to flutter, make enemies not take so much hits to kill, never put an escort mission of any kind in a 2D platformer ever, let one of the buttons block attacks or something… but as it is now, it was rather annoying to get through, and I can’t recommend it. Would the Mega Drive version have been more fun? Would the PC version be playable despite its lack of savestates? I’m not sure I care enough to find out.