The game had a naming problem before anyone even got it home. On some multicarts it was called Count Duckula Adventure—though the Count Duckula that kids of the '80s remember is a separate British property with no Disney connection at all. Other multicarts just called it Donald Duck. But the NES already had Donald Duck and two DuckTales games, which were the real Donald Duck material. Once information became easier to find, people settled on Darkwing Duck. I've heard it aired on Little Dragon Club? Maybe.
Back when I played it, though, it wasn't called any of those names. The cart had a white label with blue text: Mega Man 5.
At the time I had a classmate nicknamed Koushuiyu—'Slobberfish'—who had a good nose for business and liked to flip cartridges to me. One day he pressed a Mega Man 5 cart into my hands and told me to try it first, then buy it if I liked it. I plugged it in at home and within ten minutes I could tell something wasn't right. It was a Mega Man game, but the story setup featured no Dr. Wily. Instead there was a bunch of ducks. What was that supposed to be? I played it for half a month, then gave it back to Koushuiyu. 'This cart is fake,' I told him. 'I don't want it.'
Koushuiyu was not pleased. So one weekend we went to the secondhand market and found the game shop owner. The bet: if the cart was real, I'd buy it; if it was fake, he'd give me a copy of The Legend of Kage. We didn't tell the owner we were there to authenticate a cart. We just asked to buy Mega Man 5. He was friendly about it. 'There are two versions of Mega Man 5,' he said. 'The real one costs 20 yuan more than the fake. The fake is another game modified. Easy to recognize: every Mega Man, no matter which game, starts out as a little blue guy. The fake starts out as a little yellow guy.'
I won. Until then I hadn't known that a game like The Legend of Kage could even get a pirated standalone cart.
So I never actually played the real Darkwing Duck back then. What I played was a sprite-swap: Darkwing Duck with Mega Man pasted over him. Someone once brought up sprite-swapped games, and this was the first one I thought of.
This game really did come from the same lineage as Mega Man 5. People say it used the same engine, and the play is close: a health bar, a normal shot and special weapons, a similar jump feel. The one obvious difference is that Darkwing Duck can cling to walls. There's another move, too: hold up and he flourishes his cape in front of him, which can block some flying projectiles. The Mega Man-skinned version I played hadn't bothered to optimize that animation, and I still finished the game, so you can guess how useful it was.
Difficulty was so-so. Apart from a few spots where the terrain kills you, you could use the classic Mega Man trick of farming infinitely respawning enemies for drops, refilling health and special ammo. There weren't many special weapons, and their uses were narrow. Most of the time the ordinary pellet gun was enough.
Distinctive enemies were few. The one I remember most is a turtle that throws its shell at you—it's pretty funny.
One stage boss looked exactly like something out of Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2. Combined with what I'd noticed in Smart and Dumbo 2, it gave me a bold idea: could Rescue Rangers 2 be the one doing the borrowing?
The rest of the stage bosses were just... stage bosses.
The final boss is a chicken. For the first half it hides in the control room in the upper right corner, which makes it annoying to hit. Once you knock it down with a special weapon, it collapses almost immediately.
Finished!
