Name: Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck
Genre: Mini Game Compellation
Platform: Nintendo DS

A few months back the preview videos for Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck started to surface. From out of nowhere came an amazingly promising game that would convert one of the most amazing episodes in all of the Warner Brothers Cartoon archives to an interactive game. The very idea is pure brilliant: a game where the artist is the player, and the canvas is the Nintendo DS. The goal: drive Daffy Duck insane.

For those unfamiliar with the short here it is:

 

Duck Amuck seems like a launch title in every way. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but for anyone who has been an early adopter of a video game system there is a certain type of game that arises, trying to highlight all of its high points. Gamers will find themselves blowing into the microphone, tapping the touch screen, and even closing it on cue for some minigames.

 

The mini-games vary from brilliant (the best example is closing the DS and following audio instructions to hit attackers by pressing the left and right triggers) to downright boring (a modified and awful version of pipe dreams will make even the hacking in Bioshock look innovative). Daffy stands on the bottom screen taunting and the player needs to figure out ways to piss him off. This is actually a high point of the game – it doesn’t tell you what to do. Some of best games are found by mistake by slicing Daffy in half or, as mentioned earlier, closing the Nintendo DS.

The game also modernizes the old cartoon by taking many of the theatrical and contemporary references of the time and converting them to something more modern. Daffy will turn into polygon form or 8-bit form for certain games. Even if they aren’t fun they are funny, which is better then nothing.


My thoughts while opening the game.

There are around twenty minigames to take part in and each one is worth a play, but unlike Wario Ware or Feel the Magic none of them are worth a second play through. I found myself taking negative points to quit games I had already done instead of playing through them again. It is also incredibly short, and to reuse an analogy this games length makes Portal look like Oblivion. Nothing will bring the player back for a second time and the replayability sits uncomfortably between none and zero.