[typing]
[dubious Christmas Clone chuckling]
Hello!
Hey can we talk?
Okay.
[chair plonks down]
'K, well consider me intrigued.
Should we be using a mask or anything?
[exhausted sigh] No, I think we're pretty much the same person.
I mean I've got one if you need it, but uh.
Yeah that makes sense.
So uh, what's going on?
Well yeah, that's kind of the question isn't it?
Because uh.
Well here's the thing.
I've been trying to get in touch with you for a couple of years now.
Years?
Oh yeah.
Yeah. Yeah at least a couple, I'm actually not entirely sure.
See here's the thing, I think you're in a simulation.
Riiiight.
I mean, I guess that would kind of make sense.
Is that why this year has been so...?
What?
No, no this year just sucks.
No, I really do think you're in some sort of computery program... thing.
I don't really know how to explain it or even why I think that except that, ehh.
It's just this feeling right?
You know have there's air around us, you wouldn't really call it a liquid
but it's definitely a fluid.
You know it's there.
You can you can feel it,
you can sense it but you can't really see it or define--
I guess?
It's just like... yeah.
Uh, so what are you trying to say, dude?
Yeah I don't really know.
Ah.
I don't really know how long I've been here, this keeps happening.
I think.
And the most I can remember is like, playing Christmas games, then doing a year of videos,
and then it's Christmas again.
But I don't really remember it.
I just remember waking up and not being able to really speak properly.
And then all of a sudden you're there and then I'm here.
But a couple years ago it was just one of those things where I woke up,
but there was another one.
And then there were two of us! Okay.
And now -- okay!
Just, you know, let's just take it one step at a time here.
What do you think we need to do about it, is the question?
I think the answer is to play more Christmas games.
Well that makes sense.
[sighs] It is December.
And that means it's time for Christmas Lazy Game Reviews.
It's true.
[questionable chuckling]
[Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hare music plays]
Growing up as a PC gaming dork in the 90s, something I looked forward to each year was
the inevitable release of wintry, holiday-themed DOS games.
Classics like Fire & Ice, Skyroads, Jetpack, and Jazz Jackrabbit all got their own standalone
Christmas editions, providing unique new levels, graphics, and music befitting the season.
Even Duke Nukem 3D got an official-ish expansion pack with twisted Christmas-y elements,
Nuclear Winter.
And of course, there was Holiday Lemmings, the first special holiday edition I came across
in the mid 90s, and pretty much the entire reason I started making these Christmas game
videos over a decade ago.
And it’s this guy’s favorite Christmas game, from what I gather.
Either that or he’s just broken, who cantell.
Anyway, the Holiday Lemmings games were popular enough that there ended up being four distinct
releases over the years, and even spawned a few imitations.
Like Xmas Lamers, which was itself based on a spoof of the original Lemmings.
None of this is news to any of you who’ve watched my previous Christmas videos, of course.
I’ve covered the Christmas Lemmings and Lamers games on LGR already and I’m not
here to cover them again.
Not exactly.
Because this time we’ve got Xmas Ducks 2000, developed for MS-DOS by Tim Furnish, doing
business as Hungry Software.
And I’m covering this not only because it’s December, but because it’s DOScember!
Something a buncha retro YouTubers are doing this month cuz I dunno, why not, DOS is fun.
Check out the playlist in the video description for more.
As for this video, yeah, Xmas Ducks 2000!
It was released in the year 2000, as the name implies, but oddly enough in January.
According to his old website, Mr. Furnish said that he’s celebrating Christmas in
January in the spirit of doing things differently for the start of a new century.
Tongue firmly in cheek, no doubt.
It probably had more to do with the fact he was busy as crap providing post-launch support
for Ducks, a game he’d programmed and released while attending university in 1998.
Turns out it did pretty well for a late-90s shareware title, getting an official expansion
pack, a fully-featured level editor,
and an active online community making their own level packs.
But if you’ve never played Ducks, well, I hadn’t either so you’re not alone.
It wasn’t until doing research on Xmas Lamers some years back that I ran across Xmas Ducks,
which led me to seek out the original Ducks, read up on its reception among shareware enthusiasts,
and see for myself if it was all it’s quacked up to be.
Because at first glance, Ducks is an homage to Lemmings, specifically inspired by the
original version for the Commodore Amiga.
You got a buncha pixelated critters to rescue, a point and click interface with tools to
help them along, and numerous hazards and traps around that promise to smash, fry, and
otherwise ruin the chance of success for anything passing by.
But if it was just a basic Lemmings clone I wouldn’t be talking about it, cuz honestly,
who cares right?
Lemmings is great, the clones can’t hold a candle to the original, and that’s that.
Ducks though, this one kinda surprised me, so let’s just jump straight into Xmas Ducks
2000 since it’s got everything from the original Ducks and then some.
[metallic sound]
“Ho ho ho!”
We’ll be checking out the full registered version 1.2 here, which was released as freeware
by Mr. Furnish himself some years back.
And the way this works is a little different
than most of the other Christmas editions I’ve covered.
Instead of a standalone executable, Xmas Ducks 2000 was distributed as an “EGG” file.
A map pack downloadable from the author’s website.
Once activated, it would transform the vanilla Ducks game into Xmas Ducks 2000, reskinning
all the old artwork and levels, and adding two new episodes on top of the original four.
I guess you could call it a Ducks redux?
Heh.
Anyway, Christmas Ducks begins the same way as Ducks, with an animated main menu letting
you start the game, optionalize some lovely options, read the readme, or quit like a quitter.
And being that this is just the full Ducks with some add-on content, many things seen
mentioned in the gameplay overview section only pertains to the larger four episodes,
not the Christmas stuff.
All it really has to say about Xmas Ducks is that it provides 8 new levels,
with “a few other changes.”
Wow, I appreciate the detailed changelog, Tim.
It’s almost too detailed, you about lost me.
So starting a new game brings up the original four episodes, but clicking “more” brings
up the two new ones titled Mulled Wine and Figgy Pudding.
And being that we’ve got the registered version, both are playable, so let’s dive
right into Mulled Wine.
[pleasant interlude sound plays]
[sleigh bells ringing, wolf howling]
Welcome to Christmas Ducks 2000.
We’ve got some nicely-animated snowfall, sleigh bells ringing and wolves howling in
the distance, decorated trees and mistletoe dotting the landscape.
And a dozen little orange ducks following around a bouncing snowman.
Plus two weird tools at your disposal,
which don’t seem to do much of anything useful at first.
Yeah, if you haven’t played the original Ducks, then what you need to do is absolutely
unclear at the beginning.
I mean, the overall end goal is obvious: rescue the ducks or don’t let ‘em die or whatever.
But how to pull that off is pretty nebulous without knowing the rules, and I found this
out the hard way back when I first started playing.
Unlike Holiday Lemmings, for example, Christmas Ducks doesn’t start you off with a few straightforward
levels to introduce new players to its mechanics.
Nope, this is a mini expansion pack, so it drops you right into the action, assuming
you’ve played through Ducks and are looking for some additional challenge.
So I went back to play the base game’s training episode, and ahh, okay.
It eventually started to make sense after finishing that up.
Despite its conspicuously Lemmings-esque aesthetic, Ducks plays more like a cross between Sega’s
Flicky and aspects of Bridge Builder.
So the tools at your disposal don’t apply to the ducks themselves, there’s no clicking
them and giving them a limited number of skills.
Rather, the tools you’re given are unlimited in quantity, and are for manipulating the
world and constructing individual paths.
Bricks and bridges for building walkways, explosive balloons and detonators for hollowing
out the landscape, that kinda thing.
And the ducks don’t wander around aimlessly like lemmings do.
Instead, they only move when they’re in the vicinity of a leader, forming a single-file
row and following behind them wherever they go.
A leader might be a wandering snowman, or a flying songbird, or even another duck.
On some levels, these leaders are just going about their routine on a loop without any
direct input from the player at all.
On other levels, there’s a special green duck that only responds to the mouse cursor.
This duck doesn’t count toward your end goal and doesn’t need to be saved, it’s
only there to help lead the other ducks to safety.
And it can only move left and right, with no ability to fly or make large jumps without
assistance from items.
The orange follower ducks have a peculiar way of forming rows behind leaders too, with
a small delay in turning around the group when switching directions, so you have to
pay extremely close attention to the way they’re moving.
Otherwise yeah, the dang dumb ducks are gonna drop to their doom and splat to death, or
get eaten by carnivorous enemies on contact, or get smashed, fried, chopped up and otherwise
killed off in delightfully pixelized fashion.
Naturally, you only have so many ducks and a specific number need to escape each level.
So the goal is to safely lead enough orange ducks into open boxes and gift-wrap them as
Christmas presents, in lieu of blasting them off in rocket ships like the base game.
Simple concept, but getting the proper number of ducks into the right number of presents
proves insanely tricky, even for a seasoned Lemmings player.
Although there are only eight levels, each taking less than two minutes to win
once you know what to do?
Xmas Ducks 2000 ended up taking me a couple of hours to finish.
And that’s because the addition of Flicky-like following mechanics and fussy bridge constructing
make this a whole lot more tedious than Lemmings.
Not to mention the infuriating nature of the extremely precise building mechanics.
Or is it imprecise?
It’s hard to say, sometimes it feels like both.
Plopping down individual bricks, horizontal bridges, and diagonal walkways has to be done
with pixel-perfect accuracy in order for the ducks to cross and not get stuck.
And once something is placed,
there’s often no way to remove it without restarting the level.
Unfortunately, the chunky mouse cursor is not optimized for this kind of
precise item placement.
So I often ended up in a situation where I knew exactly what to do and how to do it,
but repeatedly failed because a brick was a single pixel off, making the entire level
unwinnable and forcing a restart.
There’s also a good chunk of puzzles that rely on precise timing, with enemy creatures,
traps, switches, and even haphazard floaty jumps to make that require perfect navigation.
And again, many times these moments occur in such a way that being even one pixel off
or a split second too early or late means you have to restart the entire level.
So it's not impossible, just extremely tedious.
And I mean, so was Lemmings in many of the later levels and add-on packs.
But at least with Lemmings you were dealing with critters walking at a steady and reliable
way, almost like clockwork.
With Ducks though, you’ve got critters that walk around only sometimes, based on a number
of variables often out of your control, and if you run out of lives it’s game over.
Yeah you have just five attempts per episode, and after that you have to restart from the beginning.
Or just load a savegame and get all your lives back, cuz yeah, that’s a thing too.
Why even have a lives system then?
Beats me, but it’s here and it's cumbersome to deal with.
At least the atmosphere is appropriately foreboding to match the desperation going on.
In Ducks there’s no background music at all, instead opting for an ambient soundscape
giving each level an enjoyably eerie vibe.
[eerie ambience]
Yeah I dig it.
Lemmings had its own bit of dark, twisted strangeness going on as well, and Ducks follows
suit with its own brand of delightful despair.
It’s still Christmassy, sure.
But it’s a darker side of Christmas, taking place at night with monsters lurking outside
in the snow, Santa heads littering the ground, spike traps and monster arms trying to kill
you, and bizarre industrial facilities that serve no purpose other than to oppress.
And that’s Xmas Ducks 2000!
It’s an unexpected twist on a familiar formula indeed, but I’m also glad it’s over.
On the one hand I really enjoy the atmosphere, the pleasant pixel art, and the gameplay changes
in terms of follower mechanics and landscape manipulation.
Controlling ducks by controlling leaders gets my brain working in different ways than Lemmings,
as does building bridges over spikes and trying desperately to maneuver past sadistic death-traps.
When it works it’s quite fun!
For a handful of attempts anyway.
After about the twentieth time restarting, trying to get a sequence of minutely-crafted
actions to play out in precisely the way the game requires for success, eh I was done.
That being said, the full game’s freeware now and its eerie presentation has its appeal,
so Xmas Ducks may be worth trying at least once if you’re into similar puzzle games.
It’s just not exactly the most fulfilling holiday DOS game experience I’ve had either.
And after both episodes are complete, all you get is a snarky message saying you deserve
a glass of punch and some cake.
But since those aren’t available, welp, game over.
Enter your name on the high score table.
Yeeeaaah, I’d rather have the punch and cake.
Or maybe some duck, I could go for that.
Duck tacos with mole sauce anyone?
Mmm.
[jazzy Christmas music]
And if you enjoyed this seasonal LGR thing, then do check out those I’ve already made
or stick around for the new stuff I post each week.
There are also the other folks making DOScember videos, so take a gander in the description
for links.
And as always, thank you for watching!