What I'm Playing, September '13

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

Fall at last. What a delightful treat. I've played a lot of Disney games this month for no particular reason besides that Castle of Illusion and DuckTales Remastered came out on XBLA. So, that's clearly the reason. But no other particular reason. Once I got going on the old Sega and Capcom games, it was hard to stop - they're almost universally excellent.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse (Sega Genesis)

Here starts the legendary coupling of Sega development studios and the Disney license. I've had trouble uncovering much information on Emirin, Thomas Yuuda, and the rest of the team behind Castle, but this was certainly the start of a good thing. The art and sound design are top-notch, the platforming is spot-on, and the Disney magic is there.

The game just has great atmosphere. It communicates both Mickey's wonder at experiencing these fantastical worlds - and his fear. Many environments are bright, colorful, and lively, yet the fact that such monolithic cheeriness is lined with danger lends the world a false, creepy, mechanical feel. An illusory aspect. This is exemplified by the toy-soldier death squads in the playroom and the dessert world's bizarro carnival music and vertigo-inducing spinning backdrop. The mood varies between scenes; one of the best parts of the game is the quiet clifftop calm-before-the-storm level, hinting at malevolent powers brewing while also offering a reprieve between the saccharine toy and dessert-themed lands.

The gameplay works fine, but it's unambitious. Compared to Mario, Mickey moves lethargically and floats in the air for ages, but the levels are appropriately paced such that the gameplay as a whole never feels slow. Each level has some identifiable gimmick, but most aren't used to much effect - many are discarded as quickly as they're introduced. So the platforming, while solid, has a bit of a thin feel. It's a journey more than a challenge. But we'll come back to that when we talk about the remake....

World of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (Sega Genesis)

This is the sequel/crossover of Castle of Illusion and QuackShot, borrowing a few mechanics from each game but generally keeping the air of a straightforward adventure platformer. Most of the thematic elements and the structure of the adventure derive from Castle, but stuff like the run button, crawling, and stunning enemies are straight outta QuackShot.

While Castle of Illusion isn't tough, World is woefully easy - really the main thing I came away thinking was what a trivially easy game it is. That's particularly disappointing considering that it's short (about 40 minutes - and that was with a number of deaths) and it reuses two (of five) worlds from Castle. The silver lining here is some level variation depending on whether the player chooses Mickey, Donald, or both (2P).

The Magical Quest starring Mickey Mouse (SNES)

Of course, Sega weren't the only ones making good Disney games. Capcom had control of the license on Nintendo platforms and put out a litany of okay platformers and a few great ones too. People like to declare which is objectively better: Magical Quest or Castle of Illusion. I'm going to go with perhaps most basic answer: neither, really. They're both good games, but they're so different that they don't really bear comparison. What I will say is that Magical Quest feels much more like a generic shooter/platformer with Mickey inserted, while Castle of Illusion and the rest of Sega's games feel like they were built as Disney from the ground up.

But character isn't Magical Quest's strength, so who cares. What we get instead is something like Mega Man X meets Bionic Commando meets Super Mario World, in perhaps the safest way possible. Instead of blending these games' mechanics, the developers chose to give Mickey swappable outfits that grant him unique sets of powers, so the game plays like a level from MMX, followed by a level from Bionic Commando, so forth.

That's really not a problem since the individual ideas work so well, particularly the puzzle-shootery Fireman Mickey. FM gets to interact with the environment a lot, pushing blocks around and putting out fires. Little touches, like that flammable objects are relit when they touch other flames (rather than based on a timer) make this segment that much more engaging. I still don't love Climber Mickey, AKA Bionic Commando, but for the duration of one easy level, I can tolerate 'im.

Aside from the Best of Capcom feel, I really took a strong Demon's Crest impression away from Magical Quest. Everything from the music to the art-style to the level design to the boss fights (which are unfortunately a lot easier than Capcom's typical fair) reeks of Crest - the first boss battle is a frickin' Disney Red Devil. The power selection reminds me of Crest as well, as it transforms Mickey's movement abilities in addition to his weaponry.

Games Started:

QuackShot starring Donald Duck (Sega Genesis)

A very mildly adventure-dosed shooter/platformer. QSsDD probably has more in common with Mega Man 7 than Castlevania II, but that's okay. We teach ya. Sorry I'm too tired to write another one of these. It's good. The run-and-stunning is a welcome twist that manages to introduce speed to the scrolling shooter without making it incessantly hard. The challenge becomes to get past an enemy before he gets unstunned. The open-ended structure is pretty minor. As far as I can tell, the second halves of the levels (as each level has an entrance/exit halfway) are stuck to a linear order. It's cool though, it's still more engaging than a completely straight shot like Castle of Illusion.

DuckTales Remastered (XBLA)

This one is exactly what it claims to be. I talked pre-release about the mysterious nature of "remakes" in the contemporary gaming landscape, but there's thankfully no ambiguity to DuckTales Remastered. 3/4 of it is the exact same game as DuckTales. Same environments, enemies, layouts - even the same secrets. The new parts are explicit extensions, like the additional cut-scenes, the new opening stage, and some new mid-level sequences like the Gizmoduck rampage on the Moon. I barely remember playing DuckTales as a child, so this is really my first time with this game.

The most striking thing about the design is how collection-oriented it is - in fact, it's something of a precursor to Donkey Kong Country. There is something hidden on almost every screen, giving the stage design a (sorta literal) second layer. Unlike DKC, DuckTales Remastered is ostensibly quite easy to complete - blowing through the stages while just grabbing the necessities is almost a trivial task, especially once you've picked up one or two life extensions. The majority of the gameplay quickly becomes collection, which is perfectly appropriate for an adventure of avaricious treasure-hunter Scrooge McDuck. Great concept/gameplay synergy.

What's unique about the collection is that most of the game's treasure is hidden in plain sight, but invisible. Thus the challenge isn't to solve puzzles or keep an eagle eye out for secret paths, but to traverse every inch of every screen. The challenge is in finding ways to reach all the boundaries, planning the use of destructible platforms, and navigating around traps and enemies.

It's a neat game that I definitely like (I even eventually warmed up to Remastered's jarring blend of 2D and 3D), but the levels feel long as fuck and kinda not all that varied. If I was allowed to play them in 10-minute sessions instead of 40 minutes at a time, they'd probably be less draining. As is, the five mega-levels feel bloated.

Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse (XBLA)

Wow am I loving this game. As someone who'd barely played the original there wasn't much nostalgic connection for me here (I remember Magical Quest and World of Illusion much more fondly), but it was definitely a wise move to run through the original before getting into the remake. While Castle '13 works excellently as a standalone game, one of its most impressive feats is revising and improving upon the original while still remaining faithful both to its gameplay and intentions.

The original game's level gimmicks had a tendency to fall flat and be completely under-utilized. This remake turns that train around so hard that someone's brain exploded. In fact, each individual mechanic is typically so fun and cleverly utilized that the biggest disappointment is that, like in the original, they never get a second pass or any ongoing development.

For instance, the both games have this gelatin shit that shows up in Toyland. In the original there are a few floors made of the sticky substance that work basically like a clingier quicksand. Mickey sinks slowly into the jello and can barely jump to get out. That's the extent of it - it lasts about thirty seconds and counts less as a mechanic than a thing that just happens. In Castle '13, the red goo again makes a forgettable cameo in Toyland, but it's brought back a second time in Just Desserts. This time, there are blocks of jello positioned throughout the environment and Mickey switches into a kind of swim when he jumps into one, suspended inside of it. They are mixed up with enemies, placed over pits, and used for scaling large vertical shafts. This stage also introduces green gelatin blocks with inverted properties. Instead of sinking into these, Mickey springs off like bouncing on a trampoline. The only way to get through them is to slowly tiptoe in. The multicolored blocks are mixed up for sections where Mickey is thrown around by the bouncy green blocks and caught by the sticky red ones.

It's a great expansion of what was a throwaway idea from the classic game, allowing it to feel like Castle of Illusion while developing completely new platforming ideas. The core concept is the same, it's just that more interesting things are done with it. And that's Castle of Illusion '13 in a nutshell.

Games Finished:

Killer Is Dead (Xbox 360)

Don't know if I have anything new to say about this at the moment, plus how do you expect me to remember something I beat at the beginning of last month. The ending was interesting - it had a nice unpredictable but inevitable twist that shed considerable light on the story and will make a second playthrough even more entertaining.

I have to be honest - as the difficulty of the game peaked, I found myself tiring with the gameplay. By endgame, the No More Heroes games were so dead-set on throwing curve-balls and skipping straight to boss-fights that it was impossible to get tired. By comparison, Killer (and likewise Lollipop Chainsaw) is happy to let the formula run all the way to the credits, essentially feeling like a game with no final act. It has a very "that's it?" ending. It's in keeping with overall sobering of the Suda style that Killer exemplifies, but this is one of the places where being more like popular/critical favorites is a shortcoming rather than an improvement.

Wild Guns (SNES)

Player: I am Clint the invincible!

Final Boss: I can't believe being defeated by you!

Amazing game. One of the best on the SNES, probably one of my favorite action games of all-time. Play it.

Mario Golf (Game Boy Color / 3DS VC)

Mario Golf is interesting in that, although it's the first (to my knowledge) Mario sports game, it has little in common with later spinoffs. In particular, where the later games (particularly in the Gamecube era) became wacky over-the-top arcade-style "sports" games, akin to NFL Blitz, Mega Man Soccer, and Base Wars, the original Mario Golf is for an intents and purposes a serious golf sim. While it features no real locations or golfers, it otherwise aspires to teach the fundamentals of golf and provide a reasonable and realistic (for Game Boy) simulation experience.

That is, until the first set of credits roll. Returning to the game after conquering all four courses, the player will find a final challenge: face off against Mario in the Mushroom Kingdom Club Tournament. The MKCT, or M...T for short, doesn't change the gameplay from golf bread-and-butter, but it certainly makes the holes as wacky as possible without breaking the laws of reality. Star bunkers, microscopic greens, and fairways shaped like Shy Guys - Camelot had fun with it and put together a goofy bonus round that pays homage to the Nintendo great and makes a neat reward - and challenge - for players who put the time in to make it through the main circuit.

Undoubtedly the strangest moment in the campaign comes when the player returns to his home clubhouse after vanquishing the Mush...ament. The powers that be, or whoever, sit down for a somber, sobering debate about whether the world is ready to learn that Mario has been defeated (in golf). The conclave concludes that the news should be leaked slowly, for to reveal that Mario has lost would be to destroy every golfer's goal to conquer the unconquerable. In the immortal words of Tom Never-Talks-At-Any-Other-Part-Of-The-Game, "Golf without a dream is no golf at all". I got the weird feeling that they were telling me not to tell my friends I had beaten the game.

Let's Listen: TV to Pocket

The Game Boy saw three generations of Nintendo living room consoles before changing its sound hardware. That means three generations of handheld ports and three generations of ported tunage.

DuckTales 2 - Egypt

NES version:


Game Boy version:

It's easy to assume NES and Game Boy music must be pretty similar. They've both got two melodic channels, a bass channel, and some room for noise and sound samples.

However, right off the bat, you can tell that the instruments in these two have drastically different timbre. The NES version sounds normal, while the Game Boy version exudes, uh... weirdness. The easiest track to spot this is the background bass track. It keeps a simple, rhythmic background melody going to complement the drawn out, wavering main melody. Its unusual sound gives it more prominence in the Game Boy version, however. I'm also not sure why the noise drums are missing from the Game Boy version.

Comparing the two, it's easy to see how we got the unusual Wario Land soundtracks.

Donkey Kong Country and Land - Voices of the Temple

SNES version:


Game Boy version:


Like the previous track, Voices of the Temple aims for a slow, mysterious feel. As you'd expect, the Super Nintendo's sound hardware allowed for greater subtlety, with greater attention to dynamics and instruments that sounded like actual real life things.

But the Game Boy, she didn't have the benefits of superior sound. So, when Rareware took Donkey Kong to Game Boy, they retooled Voices of the Temple to work with the ol' chiptune sound. The track begins with a familiar melody for the first 33 seconds, but from there, it launches into an adventuresome bridge for the next 20 seconds or so. There is a little bit of production to lend the feel of a crumbling ruin (note the echoing), but most of this song's flavor comes from its melody.

Donkey Kong Land's soundtrack is worth remembering if only for its ability to reinterpret the SNES version. Unfortunately, the graphics aren't as graceful, choosing to rip every asset from Donkey Kong Country and paint it in four colors. At its best, it's ugly, and at its worst, it's an unviewable mess.

Magical Tetris Challenge - Minnie's Theme

Nintendo 64 version:


Game Boy Color version:

Just for full disclosure, I don't know the difference between Game Boy and Game Boy Color sound.

I've never been fond of the Nintendo 64's sound in general, but Magical Tetris Challenge makes it sound like a friggin PlayStation. This is the best sound you'll get out of it this side of a Rareware title. Granted, it's also sickeningly poppy. At the very least, it's got a superfunky bass that would make Toejam and Earl jealous. I guess, when you put it all together, it's a soundtrack for people that really like My Sweet Passion.

The Game Boy Color translation is hit or miss. Being a poppy, melody-friendly soundtrack works in Game Boy's favor, meaning that the core of each song easily translates to a square wave. The trouble comes when Capcom tries to approach the richness of the Nintendo 64 music with its overabundance of tracks. Minnie's theme in particular works well because her background tracks remain just that when they're translated to the Game Boy Color. You get some of the Nintendo 64's depth without going overboard.

Unfortunately, there's no Game Boy Color version of Wolf's theme. There is this fan creation, though, using Konami's NES VRC7 sound to capture the appropriate funk.

DuckTales Remastered's theme song tells you everything you need to know about the game

It is pretty remasterful. It goes without saying that Dave Marcus and Phil Ryan's classic DuckTales TV theme is largely at fault - any arrangement of that earworm is likely to be gold. But Remastered composer Jake Kaufman does a perfect job of rearranging the jingle for this game. It's not just a random instrumental permutation, but a translation of exactly what the game is - a union of Capcom's DuckTales gameplay with a full-fledged DuckTales (TV) narrative complement. I've mentioned before that an RPG's title theme is paramount in setting the game's tone, but there's no reason to limit it to RPGs. In fact, Greg L. already covered the subject of title themes in a Let's Listen. It is undoubtedly the most important song on the soundtrack - it's what tells the gamer "this is what you're about to play". 

When dealing with an adaptation, the first things I want to know are how faithful the conversion is and what's new about it. DuckTales Remastered is actually a double adaptation - a remake of a '90s game that was a tie-in to a TV show. The original game was smart enough to directly convert the show's title theme into a chiptune, which saves the remake from needing to adapt two songs. Remastered's title theme pays homage to both tunes anyway - instead of using modern "lazer disc-printing" technology to include the original cartoon theme or update the chiptune's instrumental take with real instrumental recordings, Kaufman splits the difference and merges the tracks. The alternation between 8-bit and orchestral sounds blurs the line between show and (NES) game, which sets the stage for the rest of Remastered to attempt the exact same thing.

And attempt the exact same thing it does - Remastered takes the stages and gameplay from the NES original and melds them with a more direct interpretation of the show. It thus fulfills the promise of a DuckTales video game: it is a playable episode. The theme music hints at this fulfillment - the chiptune skeleton from the classic game is complemented with the instrumentation from the show theme. Likewise, Remastered injects treasured elements of the cartoon (the voice actors, the art-style, the humor) into the framework of the NES game to draw the original adaptation closer to its inspiration while still preserving its successful innovations.

So the remastered theme song does the exact same thing as the remastered game. It uses an aural experience to communicate the same effect as the interactive story, guiding the player into a singular mindset. And that is exactly what a great theme does.

The two (and a half?) sides of 2.5D - how to capitalize on depth

2.5D is one heck of a silly-ass term introduced in the PlayStation era to describe the 2D gameplay set in a 3D environment featured in games like Klonoa, NiGHTS into Dreams, and Kirby 64. More recently the term has been applied to Trine, New Super Mario Bros., 'Splosion Man, and dozens of others. It's a bit ironic - in the fifth generation, the 2D gameplay was conservative and the 3D graphics cutting edge, while in the seventh generation, it's the 3D visuals that are the norm and the 2D playing field that subverts expectations. Anyway, I mostly just said that to prove that I know what irony is, cuz no one does anymore. Even complaining about people not understanding irony has become cliche. How ironic.

See that time I used it wrong.

2.5D did exist in some sense before polygonal graphics - I'd say it's not too much of a stretch to say that parallax scrolling (Moon Patrol, Sonic the Hedgehog) is its predecessor. Parallax similarly strives to 

Man I just had to go bitch out Wikipedia for the terrible article it has on 2.5D. Don't go there, it's ugly. The page looks like a Frankenstein's Monster of unrelated articles on isometric graphics and pseudo-3D with a teeny tiny paragraph acknowledging actual 2.5D games as we know them today. If you do go, make sure to check out my bitchin' takedown on the Talk page. See, I'm an armchair armchair Wikipedian. That is to say, one can edit Wikipedia without getting out of their seat. But I don't even do that much. I just yell on the Talk pages at the actual productive editors that they're doing it wrong. But seriously, who has time to do all that research? Let a monkey do it. Did you know that infinite monkeys given infinite cheeseburgers will inevitably produce the entire content and discussion pages of Wikipedia? This is a known scientific fact. The real question is: who's cooking the cheeseburgers? Or wait, by the infinite monkey clause, are the infinite monkeys also guaranteed to produce infinite cheeseburgers the same way they wrote Hamlet? In that case maybe it'd be easier just to do hamburgers.

Where was I? Goddamnit why did I stop mid-sentence for that? Okay. Parallax. Parallax scrolling is the adjustment of the scroll-rate of distant objects to create a 3D perspective using only 2D objects. You knew that though. When 3D models turned real, they became the preferred method for displaying 3D environments (shocking!), though 2.5D didn't really take off because 2D gameplay was simultaneously going out of vogue. With 2D's recent resurgence in popularity, 2.5D games are probably even more common than strict 2D, as these days 3D visuals are actually easier to make decent-looking on TVs than are 2D sprites.

2.5D is very popular with modern fighters

I've gotten into the bad habit of spending a few paragraphs just defining my terms and thus wasting a lot of time before getting to my actual point. It's because I don't know who the audience of this blog is. I want it to be accessible, but it's almost a prerequisite for interest in this discussion that you've played 2.5D games... in which case you likely already know what 2.5D is, so you don't need me to explain it. Hey looks like this is one of those articles with running commentary - sweet!

Even the most primitive 2D games use some approximation of 3D - any game with a backdrop has extended its world beyond a strict 2D plane. Super Mario Bros. shows us hills, clouds, and castles beyond our reach. The limitation of 2D is not a graphical one, but the very distinction between the field of play and the field of observation - traditionally, the foreground and the background. Tantalizing players with beautiful vistas and distant ruins can enhance their engagement with the world, so one of the great appeals of 3D gameplay is the ability to reach those places - the unification of the entire game world into a continuous, playable space. A player who is free in all [three] dimensions can strive toward that distant castle and everything else they see, limited only by real environmental boundaries like walls and cliffs. 2.5D offers a chance to bridge the gap between these modes - to use a two-dimensional field of play to span a three-dimensional space. While this keeps movement comfortably in the 2D realm, the plane of movement itself can wind through the third dimension.

Surprisingly, most 2.5D games do not capitalize on this opportunity. Games like Little Big Planet, New Super Mario Bros., and Donkey Kong Country Returns retain the traditional 2D distinction between background and foreground. 3D visuals endow the backgrounds with more depth than is achievable strictly in 2D, but the field of play remains as limited as ever. Check out an example from DuckTales: Remastered: 

Gameplay starts at 1:45. Observe all the background objects that Scrooge can never reach. The game takes place entirely on a flat plane parallel to the screen.

This type of game remains strictly left-to-right and is really just a visual upgrade (or downgrade, if you're of that opinion) to 2D. The player's involvement in the world isn't enhanced because the dissonance between playable and observable space is retained. Prepare for a mind-blowing MS Paint graphic I made to illustrate this type of world-thickening:

The distinguishing factor of this kind of 2.5D is the continuous depth of the background.

You can see that the only difference between 2D and this approach to 2.5D is a parallax-plus-one filling-in of empty space between layers - these are very much 2D games with 3D graphics. The camera still shows only one side of the action and the environment.

More ambitious 2.5D games take advantage of their 3D worlds to eliminate this wasted space. The 2D plane of play loops and twists through a logical 3D environment, allowing the player to fully explore (in a guided fashion) everything that they see. Check out the recent Castle of Illusion remake:

Gameplay starts at 0:20. Watch how Mickey's paths curve around to span the entire room.

This type of intertwining movement can also be seen in games like NiGHTS, Goemon's Great Adventure, and my personal favorite 2.5D game: Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil. Note how these - like full 3D games - only bound the player's exploration with physical barriers. There is an invisible dimensional limit on movement that forces a fixed left-right path through the world, but the end result looks like a trace of any given run of Super Mario 64 or Bubsy 3D. The camera moves along with these curved paths, keeping the player parallel to the screen - in doing so it swoops and rotates to show us many different sides of the game space. Back to MS Paint:

Convoluted image, but hopefully you can see I'm trying to represent that the plane of player movement bends within a fixed area. The camera angle at any given point can be represented by the normal vector of the plane.

The drawing in this post gives a different view of the same situation. We can see that, removing the presence of time, a 2.5D game like Klonoa is actually identical to a 3D game. Of course, we can't remove the presence of time (or at least, I can't - I don't know if I have any Tralfamadorians among my readership), so the experience is distinct. But it's also distinct from classic 2D, in that, although the gameplay could be spread out over a flat plane, the game world could not be flattened with it. 

The term 2.5D seems often to be considered a superficial distinction, as evidenced by its application to these two very different styles of presentation. While there is certainly no right/wrong, good/bad here, it seems clear to me that the latter Klonoa-derived category are indeed games attempting to bridge the gap between 2D and 3D, while the former are just glorified 2D. Don't get me wrong, I love 2D. But 2.5D has the potential to portray a space of greater depth and complexity, which expands the applicability of 2D gameplay to more realistic world models.

It's Friday. Somethin' bout remastering Duck Tales.

coding- coding- coding-four hours to go-uh-oh / i wanna be sedated

with a mere single only one line of dialogue, i have conveyed my entire mindset of this right now. i am coding. i want to go to bed (in whatever medicated manner available), i am listening to the Ramones and i don't wanna write a blog post. but I already skipped a day this week and I can't get into the bad habit of doing that. My brain will fall off and go live in a cave.

Did anyone ever do a Phantom Menace-themed parody called "I Wanna Be Sebulba"? Seems like it'd be a struggle to come up with rhymes. That never stopped Ramones lead singer Raymond Jenkins, so why should it stop us. Hrm, the first one my brain came up with is "vulva". I'm moving on before this gets any uglier.

In all the Mott the Hoopla about a bunch of games that aren't going to come out for like a million years, let us not forget that there are still dreams to be had in this generation, games that don't require you to throw $400 into the propeller of an approaching helicopter. Although right now the only ones I can think of are Deadpool and DuckTales. The double Ds, as they say. They're from decent developers (High Moon Studios and WayForward, respectively), though I don't know that either is going to be particularly great. Luckily, DuckTales gives me a chance to reiterate a point I've already made on this blog and would be remiss not repeat. Since the main thing to do around here is just restate the same couple ideas in different ways, this is an opportunity I'm not excited to have missed. Doesn't matter, I'll prob'ly get hit by a car anyway.

DuckTales 2013 is one of these games I don't even know how to label. It has the exact same stages and gameplay as the original NES game, with new graphics and music. The assets are new, but it's not really conceptually different from all the HD collections and ports we got this gen (NiGHTS, Wind Waker HD, Prince of Persia HD). Is it a remake? reboot? remix? re-release? sequel? sidequel? froopquel? We get into this weird grey area with games where it's hard exactly to re-purpose labels. The knowledge that this DuckTales will be built entirely from the ground up suggests remake, in a completely literal sense. It's a remake in the same sense a cover song is a remake of the original, but not in the same sense a film or comic remake takes the same basic elements (character/story/tone, depending on which is most key to the original) and puts them into an entirely new presentation. Since the meat of a game is usually the interactivity, we'd want to see that element presented differently. And since presentation in a game goes beyond audio and visual to design, architecture, and mechanics, we'd expect those things to be fresh. To super dumb down the discussion so I can just get this over with, DmC is a remake. Yes, yes, I know it's been firmly classified as a "reboot", but the only different between 'boots and 'makes is that the implication of a 'boot is the impending relaunch of a franchise and sequels of its own. DmC is a remake because it attempts to take the defining elements of Devil May Cry, namely snarky tongue-and-cheek swordsgunman-on-demon action revolving around stylized combos, and put them into new levels, with new enemies, a new visual style, and some dumbass new story.

I think Capcom is calling DuckTales a woo woo "remaster", which actually might be my favorite term so far. And that's not sarcastic. If we're looking to other media for the closest cousin of this approach, I think an album remaster is the closest comparison. For anyone who doesn't know, a "remaster" is when an engineer takes the original mix of a song and re-compresses and equalizes it again to try to make everything sound better. So Steve Albini might turn down the lazer sound-effect on the guitar or make the drums sound less like they're falling down a staircase, but nothing is re-recorded. The basic content stays the same - there's no new writing or recording. That to me exactly describes DuckTales. I can't say I've ever cared about remasters. I certainly get the point, and when presented with the choice will usually opt for the remaster, but it's not very exciting. And since it'd take more torture than a grape-machine to get me to declare current graphics better than 8-bit art, neither is DuckTales.

Man, that 3D looks genuinely bad. I hope the sprites don't clash so hard in the finished product.