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Darkwing Duck (Headcannon demo)
  PCPlatformerUC  
  opened by paleface at 19:39:36 11/22/23  
  last modified by paleface at 12:27:18 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PC; cat=Platformer; reg=NA]
           

 
Playing through the ~2019 Darkwing Duck demo/prototype thing by Headcannon, makers of Sonic Mania, on PC. Supposedly also runs on Mac and Linux. It's freely downloadable from their site:
 
https://www.headcannon.com/hchc/Darkwing/Darkwing.zip
 
It's keyboard-only so I mapped the keys to my arcade stick with Joy2Key.
 
The demo runs somehow slightly taller than my 1080p screen in a weird, slightly bordered 1920x1056(??) resolution.
 
The music and most of the sounds are ripped from the NES game (see entry 1680). They pitched it to Capcom (not that Capcom could have made that happen; they'd have had to take it to Disney) as a sequel to that game so it plays kinda the same but now there's a Guard button that doesn't protect you, a battery meter that doesn't get recharged properly and isn't really clear on what it does anyway, a recharge timer on your already weak pistol that makes it really freaking annoying, and a grapple line that doesn't work as well as any game grapple should, AND recycles your pistol recharge timer just to make things more frustrating.
 
The single sewer level is bizarrely laid out, enemies and traps are poorly balanced--watch out for those broken bottles underfoot! = PPPP--the camera(!) is annoying, and uh well it's got problems.
 
Hm apparently you CAN jump over those big ducks and I just suck at it: https://youtu.be/qWzncmnRex0?t=171
 
The lead dev has a short video talking about the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIP0gfDGHpo
 
It mostly runs pretty smoothly at least and the moving platform grappling bits, while horrible, don't kill me as much as the dangling bits in NES Darkwing, which...I guess makes this my favorite Darkwing Duck game! = P
 
~ ~ ~
 
New headset! Now using a JBL Quantum 100 (see entry 1678) for voice recording during play: super-clear mic and pretty much no head-shake sounds! These things are dirt-cheap and so much better for my flaily play session recording than the more expensive HyperX Cloud Stinger I'd been using, and the plush Logitech G433, whose head-shake sounds were so bad I sent it back immediately. Miracle! ^ D^
 
  paleface 19:54:13 11/22/23
           
Correction about Headcannon on Sonic Mania: Headcannon programmer "Stealth" was a programmer on Sonic Mania. That's it.
    
downloads:
· 00_playthrough.jpg
 
references:
· Darkwing Duck (NES)

 
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