💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › donald-duck.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:16:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-07-10)
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The evil wizard Merlock has kidnapped Donald's girlfriend, Daisy, and it's up to Donald to save her.
A Disney-licensed platformer released in 2000, taking heavy inspiration from Crash Bandicoot with it's 2.5D gameplay. Apparently it was a pretty popular game, getting ported to 8 consoles and translated to at least 11 languages. A Russian version exists, but for whatever reason the copy I had as a kid was in English, or at the very least I remember the cutscenes not being translated, which really confused me.
Well, it's an old kids game. There are some positives: a nice cartoon aesthetic with expressive characters, a proper difficulty curve (I remember it being too difficult for 5 year-old me, but beatable afterwards), a few collectibles and extra modes, and... I guess its short length counts as a positive? I mean, even when the final stages get slightly difficult, it's still a very mind-numbing game, with generic levels, boring music, and very basic gameplay. Plus, it constantly crashed, resetting my progress. Even 3 hours of gameplay felt like far too much. It might be good by "kid's game standards" (though that's probably insulting to actual children), but I'm gonna be an old grump about it and give it a *4/10*. Don't play this unless you're really nostalgic.
It took me like 20 minutes to set up a virtual CD drive, install dgVoodoo, and to patch the game to work on Windows 10. (Yes, the game was popular enough that there's a fan-made patch to run the PC version on modern computers. Yes, the game still crashed even with the patch.) It was just not worth the effort. And yeah, I didn't even try running this on Linux - while Wine generally has good compatibility with old Windows games, it just can't handle disk-checking DRM, and often struggles with no-CD cracks and the like.
gardenapple - 2023-06-24