Duck Tales - The Quest for Gold Longplay (Amiga) [50 FPS]

Developed by Incredible Technologies and published by Titus Software in 1990.

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I used to the love the Duck Tales cartoons as a kid, and, as a rule of thumb, most games that are based on films or TV programmes are dire. Not so with Duck Tales - The Quest for Gold!

The plot involves Scrooge McDuck in a head-to-head contest with unscrupulous business tycoon and second richest duck in the world, Flintheart Glomgold, to amass as much money as possible in a single month. The duck who grabs the most cash will be named Dime Magazine's duck of the year.

What this boils down to is a world-wide treasure hunt. Scrooge must set off in search of treasures with the aid of his nephews and calamitous pilot, Launchpad McQuack.

From your office in Duckberg, you access the world map and select a destination. This leads to a side-scrolling section where you must fly your plane to the landing strip whilst avoiding a host of obstacles, such as mountains, clouds and storms. To make matters worse, Glomgold has the Beagle Boys on his payroll and they will make things even harder for you by trying to obstruct progress with their massive hot-air balloon. It's possible to gain a cash bonus by flying through the barn/grain-silo structures at ground level.

Once you arrive at your destination a mini-game begins. There are 4 distinct mini-game types:

Cave exploration: the objective is to navigate a series of caves and find the treasure. You have a mini-map to aid you and this shows the location of caves you have visited (grey), a roaming monster (blue), the treasure (yellow) and your current location (pink). Slime on cave walls indicates that there is a pit located in an adjacent cave and you have to guess which route is the safest; it's a bit like playing Minesweeper. Each cave that is safe has a diamond on the ground that is worth an additional $50.

Jungle Swamp: a standard side-scrolling platform section; simply avoid the animals, collect the diamonds and get to the treasure.

Mountain Climbing: take control of Huey, Dewey and Louie as they climb to the mountain summit to locate the treasure. You can jump up to platforms one level above you, but you must use a grappling hook and rope to reach out-of-reach platforms. This can be quite fiddly as you have to time the moment when to let go of the rope so that it attaches to the corner of a platform; I start out quite badly at this but improve further into the game. There are various enemies to avoid, such as the Beagle Boys, falling rocks and angry bears, but you can collect diamonds along the way if you're willing to take the risk.

Photography: you must use Webigail's camera to snap pictures of rare animals. This is just a matter of reactions and timing. Snapping pictures of rare animals are worth $500, regular animals for £50 and missing a shot altogether nets you a big fat $0.

Back at the office you can invest in shares on the stock market for extra cash and you can also take a dive into the famous money-bin. In fact, you might just get lucky and find a rare coin in there worth $1000.

While all this is going on, Glomgold will show up at regular intervals to announce whichever treasure he's managed to acquire.

Once the 30 days are up, you'll be transported to the giant weigh-scales were all your cash will be compared to that which Glomgold has accrued. If you have more then you're the winner.

This really was a great game back in the day and it was still fun whilst recording the video. The artwork is spot-on, with Scrooge and the rest of the cast looking like their cartoon counterparts; this was an officially licensed product after all. The sound includes digital speech samples for some of the cast and this is pretty cool.

In fact, there's nothing wrong with this game at all aside from some of the sideways scrolling being a little sluggish. Other than that, this was a really polished product.

Enjoy!
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