First of all, I recognize that there may be some people amongst my readership that have never seen Duck Amuck. This is a travesty. Nothing short of an absolute injustice to humor and all things animated. Thus, I must demand that you drop whatever you are doing (yes, even reading my scribble) and go watch Duck Amuck immediately. In terms of animation, it’s a genuinely clever and inventive clip that plays with the whole idea of animation and character. It introduced surrealism on a level that no one had ever imagined existing in a 1951, aimed-at-children short. And it successfully broke the fourth wall in a way that endless years of drama student productions have never even approached.

All of that crammed into a six and a half minute Daffy Duck cartoon? Really? Yes, really. And rarely has a pre-existing piece of media (in this case, a cartoon character being harassed by the pencil of a sadistic animator) been such fertile ground for a Nintendo DS game. The interface for the hardware literally is the animation concept. Of course, this is a Looney Tunes gaming license, so there are still all kinds of things that can go wrong here. I mean, when is the last time you remember playing a good Looney Tunes video game? But the preview I saw over on 1up.com sounded very positive – and honestly I was expecting this thing to get destroyed by the gaming media.

Coming from a publisher that almost guarantees mediocrity (Warner Brothers’ in house company) and coming from a developer that is very hit and miss (Wayforward Studios), there was plenty to be apprehensive about. And it sounds, largely, like it’s going to be a mini-game based title rather than some epic journey through blank white paper. Admittedly, the latter could have been well done, but would have been less in line with the original concept of Duck Amuck, which is largely centered around pissing Daffy off. If what I’m getting is Wario Ware with a Looney Tunes faceplate on it, I’m actually fine with that. And if titles like Duck Amuck stretch the definition of what a game is while still remaining enjoyable, I’m excited about that.

In the absence of direct combat, gaming tropes like health bars, weaponry, power ups, special attacks and so forth lose their meaning. A game like The Sims lacks most of these concepts, but not all. You still have character bars, but instead of measuring health they measure things like bladder control. And while you don’t acquire weapons in the classical sense, you can power up your character, your character’s home and its belongings through various game mechanics. So a game like The Sims took the combat mechanic out of the classical game structure by adapting the normal mechanics to fit a lifestyle simulator rather than, say, a flight simulator.

Duck Amuck sounds like it will abstract that idea of what a game is on an additional layer, there being no bars or indicators of any kind. Just you, a stylus, and a really pissed off duck. Which isn’t as dirty as it sounds. But just might be genuinely fun to play.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.