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Playing through Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2 for NES, dumped from the Steam version of The Disney Afternoon Collection using the game-extraction-toolbox and run in the emulator Mesen.
The SNES was already out by the time Capcom was putting out this sequel to the zippy first NES Rescue Rangers, so maybe that's why they clearly put a lot of effort into making the sprites really big and ornate. Some amazing pixel art! But there are less enemies on-screen, occasional mild slowdown, and the screen is slightly narrower in the scrolling stages. Still, it looks super-nice!
Gameplay is largely the same as the first game: your tiny chipmunk picks up mini-crates or whatever's handy and hucks them at enemies. There are no health items which I found annoying because I had to save scum this thing and I hate saving when I'm not at full health. : P You pick up "RR" blocks and I had no idea what they did but if it's like the flower blocks in the first game, 50 or something probably gives you a 1-Up.
You don't pick up 1-Ups or other things you got in the first game mid-stage; but there's a BONUS sequence at the end of each stage or so where you pick up the red ball with which you fought bosses in the first game, and chuck it at powerups whizzing overhead. You only get one shot and in the first few seconds the pick-up-item button doesn't work, so I would panic (thinking it was timed, which in retrospect it probably isn't), try the other button, which would of course jump, then I'd be frantically air controlling and hammering the other button on the way down to try to pick up the ball as fast as possible and hurriedly chuck it upscreen and nearly always miss and get nothing.
(The first game has a bonus sequence where you might get lucky and find a hidden 1-Up; it felt pretty darn random and was kind of annoying, or I was just real bad at it.)
Fortunately the game is mostly pretty easy--except for a couple infuriating MINE CART sequences in one stage (was the proliferation of horrible mine cart stages in 90s games nostalgia for Temple of Doom or something? argh) where your control abruptly switches from the cart to your character when the cart hits a discontinuity in the track, and then I'd think I was braking to avoid the next swinging pendulum when in fact my character was walking off the back of the cart to their death again--
And then a jumping bit near the end of the game with small, widely spaced conveyor belt islands, constantly respawning swooping birds, and an electrical field. ;_;
But the real problem for me came in some of the boss fights where I just couldn't tell what I was supposed to do. This was never really a problem in the first game, where you always threw the bright red ball at the boss, and generally it hit them. But in RR2, you rely on whatever the boss wants to drop for your missile weapon, so there are long bits where you just have to dodge their one, often very slow, repeating sequence until they randomly grant you a missile weapon. And once you get it, what to do with it? Not so clear with two bosses who can block your shots. It took me so much save scumming to figure those out gar. Just really unintuitive to me, a goober who played the first three Super Mario games as a kid--not 100% sure I got all the way to the end of any of them, but at least most of the way--and figured I'd experienced the best platforming action there ever would be and didn't need to play any more of the genre--and didn't up this past year or so, pretty much.
Overall the action felt pretty uneven in this one, sometimes stupidly easy, sometimes stupidly hard, like it really could'a used a few more play testing and tweaking passes.
The end was weird, too--I dunno if I got a "bad" ending or something, but there was actually a BONUS stage after the last fight, then a cutscene seeming to end with characters heading off to an action sequence--then an end sequence where they just come in and it's a wrap. Maybe a final stage was cut? |
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