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.

Konami ReBirth, followed swiftly by Konami ReDeath

Around 2009, classic-style 2D gaming was at a height it hadn't reached for over a decade. Retro series were showing a second life with Street Fighter IV, Mega Man 9, Pac-Man Championship Edition, and... um... Sonic 4. The time was ripe for Konami, action kings of the early '90s, to rise like a phoenix and show the world what hardcore gaming really meant. Few classics are as beloved as Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania, but the former two hadn't seen a commercially successful sequel in fifteen years, and the Castlevania property had completely abandoned its origins. Konami smartly chose this opportunity to capitalize on a "ReBirth" for all three series, combining retro stylings with brand new content. That was the only smart decision they made in the entire process, because...

What the hell are these games? If anything the three seem to form a contained "ReBirth" subseries rather than a systemic overhaul or continuation of their respective properties. I honestly can't tell if Konami intended to continue Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania so much as they wanted to launch a new "ReBirth" branding that would visit random classics with its trappings. The decision to use the same developer, same assets, and same art-style for all three games is beyond lame. Why are Contra and Castlevania suddenly only distinguished by palette? Think of how different Contra III and Super Castlevania IV look. It all reeks of trying to budget three games for the price of one. Could Konami possibly have conceived anything more throwaway and forgettable? Raise your hand if today, a mere four years later, you even remember the ReBirths.

The games look passable, but the unfaithful pixel art calls to mind "cell-phone game" more than "NES"

I cannot stress enough how mind-boggling short-sighted this approach was. All we have to look at is the ReBirth visual presentation to know that Konami fundamentally misunderstood what was making Capcom, Nintendo, and Sega so successful at rebooting old properties. My best shot at what was going through their minds is: "well it looks like people are willing to buy cheap old games with any graphics at all, so let's make some cheap games with old mechanics and crappy graphics". It's like it completely went over their heads that Mega Man 9 was cool for identically replicating NES graphics, or that A Boy and His Blob had intricate modern hand-drawn sprites, or that Sonic 4 brought Sonic into a lush HD revision of his classic 16-bit hangouts. There's a common denominator here - the games either go FULL retro, or they go FULL contemporary. Konami tried to forge some fanciful middle ground by opting for the sorta-retro look of recent indie games like Cave Story and Super Meat Boy: pixelated sprite art that doesn't match with any particular generation of hardware. This works for indie games attempting to evoke the general spirit of classic gaming rather than any particular era, but it has no place in fucking Castlevania. Clearly Konami didn't want to spend the cash to get a real development studio to produce Donkey Kong Country Returns-level graphics, but were also scared the public wouldn't accept throwback art. This in spite of plentiful examples that both approaches pay off.

If they were so fucking scared of retro graphics, why settle for such tired gameplay? These three games show no attempt at all at advancing or even slightly varying the mechanics of their predecessors. Gradius ReBirth kinda gets away with it, because Gradius never had any variety, but all of the classic Contra and Castlevania games played slightly differently. Instead of offering a new variation, ReBirth falls back on the most stripped-down set of mechanics. So these aren't really sequels at all. I'd accept this if we were doing a "pretend it's 1988" time-shift, but the visuals have already destroyed that illusion. If Konami was so sure they could improve on classic sprite-art, why be so conservative in the gameplay department? Pick a sandbox to play in! Again, there's a very simple explanation for this: they did the cheapest thing possible. It's like they were immensely reluctant to make these games, like they had already assumed they weren't going to make any money. I wonder if Koko does make any money these days?

Gradius ReBirth is the only one that even close to fits into its series - only because Gradius always took a step back for every step it took forward. Yes, I am referring to Edit Mode. Bring it fucking back you assholes.

I'm directing my ire at Konami higher-ups because it doesn't seem fair to come down hard on development studio M2. M2 should never have been chosen for all three of these games. They can obviously construct decent (if a bit unbalanced) action, and were these games not burdened with the responsibility of carrying on some of the greatest legacies in gaming history, they'd be fairly recommendable (and still are). But these guys had nowhere near the panache and versatility to turn out what needed to be three completely distinct entries of three completely distinct series under limited time and budget. Yes, I realize that the original Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania shared quite a bit of staff, but it must be noted that before ReBirth, M2 had only been responsible for collating and porting Sega and Konami classics to other platforms. These were the first three games they had ever developed (at least the first three they're ever credited for developing), and the early-90s Konami Dream Team they are not. Besides, I doubt they were getting much financial support. These weren't exactly headline releases - though of course they should've been.

What bothers me about the ReBirth games is less their immediate quality; rather it's what a terrible stepping stone they provide for their brands. Why rebirth your series if you can't/won't build off of that rebirth at all? There is simply nowhere to follow from ReBirth. They didn't invent any new series standards; they weakly perpetuated old conventions. What was Konami's plan for ReBirth Phase 2? More watered-down semi-remakes? Did they think that's what people wanted of the series going forward? Or were they planning a return to true classic-style Contra/Gradius/Castlevania games? In that case, why bother with the ReBirth detour at all? It was a cheap way to quickly grab and then immediately lose gamers' attention. If anything, it tarnished the name of all three properties and showed the gaming public that Konami just doesn't give a shit about its classic stable. Is it even remotely surprising that in the wake of ReBirth, Contra and Gradius once again dropped off the map and Castlevania moved directly into another reboot?

God I hate that they made Contra look like a Saturday-morning cartoon. Contra should be M-rated as fuck. At least they threw in an Escape from New York reference.

ReBirth is a cautionary example that tagging something as "retro" isn't enough to make it successful, even if it's paired with fan-favorite brands. Developers need to have actual vision that they can communicate to the player. Allow me a brief fantasy of what ReBirth could have been, had Konami assigned an actual brain to the project. Start with a wave of 8-bit Mega Man 9-style direct sequels, move up to 16-bit for a second wave, and so forth until landing on the most repeatable formula or making a jump to present-day visuals/gameplay. That is to say, it could have been an actual rebirth, leading into regrowth, leading into profit and good games all around. Thanx God this is what we got instead.

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.