Donald Duck/Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular (Famicom/NES Review)

Donald Duck
aka Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Kemco
First Released September 22, 1988
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

The one and only time I defeated Daisy in the sack race and it wasn’t in the “compete in all events” thing. Damnit.

Donald Duck is, on the down low, a Famicom port of the Commodore 64/ZX Spectrum satire of Epyx’s “Games” series called Alternative World Games. Instead of legit Olympic events, you sack race, throw a boot (WTF?), use a pogo stick to jump over walls, balance a stack of pizzas, shove Daisy Duck off a boat (SERIOUSLY THE HELL?) or pole vault yourself over a river (Jackass: The Movie were obviously big fans of this). You can play each game individually OR you can play a full cycle of the games. I’m not remotely a fan of Epyx’s franchise, so I was dreading this going into it. My fear was founded, because like those California Games or Winter Games or Summer Games releases, the issue is THE GAMES AREN’T FUN! Which is, you know.. the object.

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For the sack race, the brutal AI makes the game borderline unplayable. The computer opponent just doesn’t seem to make mistakes. There was ONE exception in the sack race where Daisy and I kept colliding at the start of the race. Once we did, she never recovered AND kept making mistakes. I tried to replicate this, but that was the one and only time she didn’t perfectly fly out of the gates and get a major lead on me. I’ll never understand how developers back in the day couldn’t figure out that impossibly perfect AI isn’t fun. Meanwhile, in the sumo wrestling-like boat game where you have to shove her into the water, as long as I kept centering myself in the middle of the boat (you can move up and down) I couldn’t lose. It was too easy. There’s no difficulty settings, mind you. The other games barely qualify as mini-games. The boot-throwing game literally only requires you to press DOWN three or four times to build up momentum and then press A at the right moment to hurl the boot as far as you can. I was able to consistently get 10M (30ft in the US version), which seems to be the max score. I know it was a different era, but it stinks of something thrown together in a day as a +1 to the event count.

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The pizza game is perhaps the most boring idea for a video game ever made. You have to inch your way just past the starting screen to a finish line while balancing a stack of pizzas. If you move too fast, the top of the stack will topple over, but you can keep going. In fact, as far as I can tell, you literally cannot drop the bottom of the stack, so unless you just don’t cross the finish line, you can’t lose this one. But, if you want to keep your whole stack, you have to literally heel-toe your way across the damn screen. And, go figure, this was the only game that got my blood pumping, but only because I barely beat the timer with a full stack. When I finally made it across the finish line with the entire stack of pizza, with only 1.3 seconds to go, I literally cheered. Then I did it again on the Snoopy version and had over 25 seconds left because I now understood the timing and rhythm for the movement, rendering it too easy. So much more excitement.

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As far as I could tell, Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular!, the NES version of Donald Duck, is the same game with altered graphics. HOWEVER, it’s worth noting that I beat Spike (Snoopy’s cousin and the replacement for Daisy) on my second attempt and it was the only time I successfully completed the river jumping (pole vaulting) event, where you mash A to build up speed, then press and hold B to plant your pole in the water. You have to let go at the exact right moment, and that right moment is very fickle. I spent a solid fifteen minutes on the Famicom version and never once completed it. I finally did complete it on the Snoopy version, and was stunned to discover that was the whole event in its entirety. It didn’t want me to do it a second time. THAT ONE JUMP was it. Lastly, the pogo stick event lasted maybe fifteen seconds and is like hurdles.. on a pogo stick. Again, it’s just a matter of timing your jumps and it’s not fun at all. When the best of six games is literally “move as fast as you can in a slow way” (or is it the other way around?) it makes you wonder if the whole “satire against Epyx” was worth it. While I concede that I enjoyed Donald Duck/Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular! more than Epyx’s franchise, I’m not a fan of 8-bit mini game collections. To Donald Duck’s credit, it feels like it was made for little kids of the 1980s, and that’s fine. But, I think little kids of the 2020s would be as bored as I was.
Verdict: NO!