Alright, Emulation Nation, I get it, you play old games on your PC for free. You downloaded no$gba when you were in middle school and everyone started calling you a hacker. You love to talk smack about how Switch games look better on your Ayn Odin 3, and you constantly insult Nintendo’s online retro catalogue because of course you do. Everyone claims they’re down for game preservation, but I’d say 80% of you just don’t want to pay for games. I get it: finding those classic titles without breaking the bank is a herculean task nowadays. So when Digital Eclipse steps up to the plate and gives you a premium package, don’t blink and don’t hesitate. The Disney Afternoon Collection is now on the Nintendo Switch, and it’s bigger, better and right where it should be: Disney games on the Nintendo console.

Behold, the single greatest reason to own this collection.

While the original Disney Afternoon Collection has been available for quite a while elsewhere, the new release on the Nintendo Switch adds a few important things. First, two additional games have been added to the collection, both from the SNES era. Goof Troop and Bonkers, based on cartoons from the same name, make a welcome appearance in what was already a solid set, and now also loop in a much larger part of the population. More importantly, the set has gone through a bit of an overhaul in order to make it pretty and polished for Nintendo. While most of the content has not changed, there seems to be quite a bit under the hood to help make the menus snappier, the loading a bit better and the entire process to be more streamlined.

The most important things to focus on are these two “new” games, bringing the SNES into the fold for the Collection’s library. Goof Troop follows either Max and/or Goofy on an island adventure where there are pirates and puzzles in equal measure. Getting through the game involves finding and utilizing different tools strewn about the island, like a shovel to dig up hidden objects, or a grappling hook that can stun enemies and reach far away places. As a top down adventure, this particular experience reminds me of a very simplified Zelda game, focusing on figuring out the way forward with some light backtracking in a metroidvania sense. As there are no procedurally generated moments, players can potentially create a more and more streamlined “run” of the story as you memorize the best spots to pick up artifacts.

Whilst digging, I found a single pair of cherries. The most typical of underground, tropical fruits.

Of the two newer games, Goof Troop stands out in three brilliant aspects. One, this game is modestly known but not nearly as widespread as some IP titles. This gives it popularity but not necessarily high expectations. Two, the game stands on its own as a decent puzzler. Even if you swapped out the characters with some other entities, the concept isn’t intrinsically linked to the Goof Troop world, and thus you don’t have developers relying as much on winks and nudges to compel players to keep going. Three, it’s got just enough meat to fill you up without overstuffing you. A first time play can be done in three hours or so, and that’s coming in completely cold. If you get a handle on the controls and the aforementioned locations, you can bring this down to a two hour play, easily, and that’s single player. Yes, it-s co-op, too!

On the other hand, though, we have Bonkers. I loved this show when I was younger. The concept was solid (washed up cartoon star is now a cop), the opening song was really fun, and the voice cast was incredible: Jim Cumming, Frank Welker AND Ron Perlman round out some legendary names, even if the show only ran for a single season. Have you noticed that shows that go for a single season seem to resonate so well with diehard fans? Bonkers. Firefly. My So-Called Life. Anyways, Bonkers as a show ran the edges a little too hard for the intended younger audience (cop procedurals, even funny ones, don’t land with most children, and having a bizarre Who Framed Roger Rabbit? vibe of humans and cartoons working together isn’t as appealing to kids when Christopher Llyod isn’t there to create brand new nightmares.

The play style of Bonkers is like a Sonic title with minimal good interactions or speed development. You have a character who plods along at a very leisurely pace and has all their energy for attack focused into a dash move. The dash propels you along and lets you get over some gaps and bypass certain enemies, but also can be stopped by touching almost anything on the screen. The dash meter then needs to gradually refill before you can go again, combining two things speed enthusiasts adore: waiting and incremental gaming. The levels aren’t nearly as complex as the blue hedgehog’s world, but the idea of the back and forth and either going fast or going quite sensibly is a brain twister. You never really do anything better, at least in terms of powerups or character changes. You just sort of run about and call it a day.

It’s awesome to be moving fast and then get stuck in gelatin. Really helps the game’s trajectory.

This is a painful situation because it ostensibly makes the new content of Disney Afternoon Collection a 50/50 ratio. On the one hand, the Goof Troop game is enjoyable, smooth and clever with a solid amount of fan content. The Bonkers game looks great for an SNES title, but the actual gameplay is very simple while still being quite unsatisfying. It also has very little to do with the show itself, but I don’t expect most people to know that because it aired for a single season back in 1993 and most of you weren’t alive then, much less focusing all your energy on mediocre Saturday morning cartoons. It’s like if a Silverhawks brawler came out and I griped about the inaccuracies in Buzzsaw’s attacks. Speaking of which, someone get on making a Silverhawks game, I think Copper Kid could get a pretty decent following nowadays.

For people who are coming into the Disney Afternoon Collection completely cold, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of 90s gaming waiting for you, with all the caveats it entails. Ducktales is an excellent platformer that embodies the collect-a-thon mentality with some tricky gameplay elements, surprisingly difficult boss fights and a soundtrack that has no right to be as good as it is. As Scrooge McDuck, you travel from the jungles of the Amazon to the literal moon itself in a quest to regain your wealth and eat all the soft serve ice cream you can find, because that’s what ducks use to replenish HP. Both the easy and normal difficulties are crazy hard, with easy at least affording you more hits before you succumb. The rate at which enemies respawn if the spawn point is off the screen for a millisecond is daunting and a tentpole of NES difficulty.

While the original Ducktales was so beloved it eventually got a WayForward remaster that’s quite decent, Ducktales 2 is often overlooked in this scope of games. There’s enough of it that I wouldn’t consider it a DLC, but there’s no content that I would point at and say “here’s where it improved from the previous.” It’s the exact same plot of getting your money back, the same basic mechanics of jumping and collecting treasure, but a few extra mechanical bits. You’ve got a store between levels to buy recovery items, the ability to revisit previous stages to collect treasures you’ve missed, and a hidden level that can be accessed via map pieces gathered from existing stages. It’s fairly good, and it’s a nice complement to the original, but it just doesn’t scream in its own defense. Basically, if you’ve already got the Disney Afternoon Collection, why not give it a try?

“I think I went once to some sands that were Egyptian.”

One could argue the two Ducktales games are worth the price of admission alone, and that has a level of validity. As nostalgic as I am for the other titles, a lot of the Disney Afternoon Collection shows its age very quickly. Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers, as an example, was one of my favorite action platformers when I was younger. Allowing you to be either chipmunk, you run around, throwing objects at baddies from the TV series and navigate a world where a megalomaniacal cat really seems to have sway over everything that involves jewelry and military weaponry. You’ve got some really fierce difficulty, but at least the second Rescue Rangers title improves on the game by allowing you to pick up the other player and throw them as a weapon, which doesn’t really make up for the removal of the map but still makes it fun.

These particular titles should be better, and I used to think they were. But they do handle very poorly, with some weird hitbox issues as to where you are versus where the robot dogs/cactus/flying murder machines are, which results in some cheap deaths. It’s 100% a title that functions better in a co-op mode, as the difficulty doesn’t scale and having a second player to pick up the slack is so important. But it’s got the same requirements for a collect-a-thon platformer as Super Mario Bros does, but with the unnecessary complexity of boss fights and no warm pipes. Death in Chip and Dale means restarting from the very beginning, which, sure, we can get around with save states, but that doesn’t totally address the balancing issues. Having said that, the music is really fun and the sprite design is sharp, so it’s at least worth a single go-around.

Cool! Now…what will we do with it? Seriously, we’re rodents and that’s a bomb.

Tailspin is such a turbulent game to try and enjoy, and I say that as a massive fan of the animated series. It’s clear the developers wanted to somehow marry the ideas of horizontal shooters a la Gradius with a Disney IP platform experience, and it pulls up short in both areas. The way your airplane has one button to shoot and another to flip the other direction is a technical mental twister.  Enemies don’t come at you in nearly as vicious a density as something like R-Type would, but that’s for the best because you also shoot bullets exceedingly slowly. The graphics are endearing enough and the soundtrack is good, but the actual gameplay is convoluted and frustrating at times. This is the quintessential “I liked it when I was a kid so now it’s inexorably linked in my brain” game. I missed it, so I don’t have that connection.

But Darkwing Duck is a platformer of a totally different feather, due in part to me having part of the show living rent free in my head for the better part of three decades (“Don’t forget to floss!”) Yes, the button schematic is confusing, the limited ammunition is a pain in the ass, the difficulty is absurdly high and the level layouts are unforgiving. But the animation and pixel art is shockingly quality, capturing a lot of details of the game. The fact that an NES game had a fairly intricate guard/parry system for a gun toting mallard (Genesis already had their own) was mind blowing. And the soundtrack was even better than you could imagine, and you were already doing a lot to fill in the games for an NES chiptune licensed game.

Again, there is no reason for the sprite work to be this detailed, but here we are and I love it.

The biggest draw of The Disney Afternoon Collection is the collection itself, and Digital Eclipse has done good with the gathering. The presentation is clean and bright, capturing the nature of the titles themselves. All the NES titles have time attack and boss rush modes, with the added bonus of being able to watch people who’ve completed these to different degrees within the software itself. While the SNES titles are currently lacking these added features, I expect that we might see them added in the future, which would be incredible. There’s nothing like getting your ass handed to you in Tailspin because you can’t orient yourself, and then watching someone sail through the game like it’s their side hustle in a single iteration. We should be celebrating speedrunners more and more.

The Music and Museum sections do their own bit to elevate the experience, and both are appreciated. I love the scans of the boxes and manuals that are available, as well as the advertising and artwork from some of the Japanese releases. The music is truly captivating, and I love being able to loop the Moon theme from Ducktales over and over again to satisfy my own personal soundtrack. I also hope that the Museum section hints at future improvements to the collection: I often forget that most of these NES games had either equivalent or inferior Game Boy titles released around the same time, and I would love to have access to those added into the Collection at some point in the future. I know it’s a longshot, but I’m hopeful Capcom will give the green light to just update them in and not make the Disney Afternoon Handheld Collection. 

I am actively seeking a CIB copy of Ducktales at Super Potato, wish me luck.

All in all, The Disney Afternoon Collection is an equal balance of nostalgia, historic artifice and a celebration of IP gaming that soars and falls in equal measures. These games are far from perfect, but they’re relevant and enjoyable, and anyone who wants to admire the throwbacks from yesteryear owes it to themselves to pick up a copy and have it proudly on their homescreen or shelves. I would love to get a physical at some point, but you know these things sell fast, so hurry if you want to grab one yourself. After all, life is like a hurricane. I just wish I could remember where.

The Disney Afternoon Collection is available now on Steam, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series One X/S and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of The Disney Afternoon Collection was provided by the publisher.