The classic platform remake 'Duck Tales Remastered' is available on the Wii U eShop, Steam and other digital platforms.
Here's a way to ruin your afternoon: Think back to your childhood. Pick your favourite beloved cartoon. Look it up on YouTube. Weep.
It's just the way of the world that things aren't as good as we remember - especially when you originally became a fan before you had the experience, awareness, critical abilities or guts to decide if a Thing was good in the first place.
Duck Tales is a good example. Though before descending into a nostalgia-shredding Bonfire Of The Childhood Vanities, let's first say that there is the core of a decent game here.
The game is essentially a platform adventure of the old school, filled with unpredictable and mobile enemies, varied backdrops and settings and a brutal difficulty level. Scrooge McDuck is on a journey across the globe - and up to the Moon - to find buried treasure, with the help of some ker-azy characters and his walking stick, on which he can pogo and attack enemies.
And if you loved the original game, it's hard to see how you could find fault with it. The HD graphics aren't really reminiscent of the original so much as a total redraw, but they're fluid and charming. The levels are brimming with detail and parallax elements, while the chance to swim in McDuck's vault of gold to the backing of a genuinely sad main menu theme is quite haunting.
The problem is just that the game itself isn't - and was never - all that great. It's hard, repetitive, slow and often quite annoying. The addition of some easier game modes and more saves/restart points is helpful, but we found it difficult to struggle through each of the five worlds without throwing our Gamepad at the TV.
That said, if the original NES game is one of your favourites - and we're reliably informed it was more popular in the US than in Europe - you should definitely consider it. You'll enjoy the trip down memory lane, if nothing else. But for us, 'Duck Tales Remastered' is a slick-looking remake which - while not without its charm - ultimately fails to justify itself as more than a curiosity.