Donald Land
Sep. 10th, 2023 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yamamanamaThis project is equal parts TheRedEye’s 13 Days of Beta Rom Christmas and NESPlayer’s 10 Quirky Famicom Games That You Should Or Should Not Play. In fact, I discovered this game via NESPlayer. I'm not sure where I got the rom from. Probably FTP. There are a lot of things I miss about the mid 2000s but I'll tell you what I don't miss: having to private message the guy who runs the FTP to get access and not knowing if they had what I wanted.
No, I’m not going to attempt to recreate the experiences of playing this back in 2004 by playing in Sheepshaver. I could. I just don’t want to.
Also, in those days, I either wasn’t aware Photobucket existed or I thought it was a paid service, and most people who hosted images on their chocojournals also had webspace. In a way, now is a lot like the way things used to be.
I may not have access to a time machine, even a very slow one, but I do have the Internet Archive! (fuck you, Authors' Guild)
When I posted this originally back in 2004, you got for free 25 megs of disk space with 1.5 gigs monthly bandwidth. The maximum size of an image was 250 kb. Some time in 2005, they upped it to 50 megs and 150 for free users but added a 1 gig space limit for paid accounts. A PNG screenshot of an NES game weighs in at about 25 kB maximum.
The text is Engrish despite the fact that this game was never released outside of Japan. They did release a bunch of games in the US but not this one for whatever reason. Maybe because it’s a bog-standard platformer but that’s never let anyone stop them. Maybe they didn't have the licence from McDonalds to release it in the US or Europe. The game is already in English, what little text there is. I usually try to find out the history of these games but with this game, I can't find anything.
Before there was M.C. Kids, there was Donald Land. It’s called that because in Japan, Ronald McDonald is named Donald McDonald.
I know I hit the screenshot button prematurely or maybe too maturely but trust me on this one: the purple guy is Grimace. Uncle is short for Uncle O’Grimacey, the shamrock shake guy.
The observant will notice that the order that the McDonaldland characters appear in the intro is the order they appear in the game.
This guy isn’t named by the game but it’s Gumon. Or maybe he’s part of the Gumon tribe of evil demon clowns.
Mayor McCheese wishes you luck. If you’re wondering “this game was made in 1988, years after the Krofft lawsuit” and here’s the thing: Japanese copyright law tends to benefit whichever party is Japanese. I think when neither party is Japanese, it sides with whichever party is most Japanese adjacent even if they have to do it in a roundabout way, maybe via the now-discredited Altaic language family.
The googly eyed warm fuzzy things pop out of boxes.
Your attack is to throw bombs in a parabola. Picking up the apple icon allows you to throw two bombs at a time. I’m not sure if it lasts until you get hit or lose a life or lasts until you get to the next sub-area or next world or what. What I do know is that I was fighting a later boss and could only throw one bomb at a time.
Jack’o’lanterns explode.
It’s hard to tell what background objects you can and can’t stand on. Especially when it doesn’t make any sense. That’s not how trees work.
The boss takes only one bomb. That’s it.
After you beat a level, you can cash in your hamburger tokens for food and a chance to play the bonus game, or you can skip that and buy a guaranteed extra life or point of lifeforce.
I played this game because NES Player did. They made a few mistakes, which I will point out.
NES Player doesn’t even mention the second world. Granted, the boss is just a generic enemy colored red.
The woodpecker is an ordinary enemy by the second stage.
You can’t do anything about Little Red Riding Hood. Her tears are damaging but you can stand on them. It’s never necessary to do so.
This is a pretty cool setpiece. The pirate ship (even though, spoiler alert, Captain Crook is still missing, both in real life and in the game) launches a cannonade.
And you jump on the splashes to get across. Or you can jump on the bombs to give yourself some lift but it’s finicky.
Don’t worry, this guy isn’t Gnash. He’s more like the other jumping fish, the name of which I don’t have memorized because it’s something non-obvious like Fizzie, except a lot bigger.
The boss is just another dinosaur except he’s red. And he takes two hits.
In other games, if you’re standing on a higher platform and want the goodies below, you’d walk off and then curve back. not here. here, you just fall like you’re on the sun.
The beetles just move up and down.
The guys with the Moe haircuts, presumably Amazon natives, throw spears at you. The fire launches a smoke signal upwards and it hurts you if you jump into it and isn’t even animated.
Sometimes you have to stand on enemies to get across pits
This guy throws rocks at you.
NES Player didn’t even mention that you fight a giant wooden fire-breathing dagron. I played this game on iNES, which didn’t have save states.
I got stuck here because I thought that you had to defeat the guy on top and once I did so, I thought you just had to hit the eye or whatever a whole bunch times to beat him while dodging the fire, which, oh yeah, does kill you in one hit. If you die, you start at the beginning of the world, even during a boss fight and even when the world is split up into multiple areas. Getting a game over does the same thing as dying. Well, it gives you the choice between continuing and going back to the beginning but I have no idea why you’d pick the second option. It resets your score but points are meaningless. You get two continues and then it’s back to the beginning.
No, you have to go inside the mouth.
NESPlayer made it seem like this guy is the boss.
No, he just laughs at you.
And then releases Birdie, whom I assume he was going to cook and eat.
This is Sky World. Had I figured out how to deal with the dragon, this is probably where I’d have stopped playing.
The balloon fish things just fly towards you.
If these guys get too close to you, you’ll get stuckand have to wait for time to run out or load another save state. Unlike Mario, one second on the game clock feels like a little longer than one second. And if you’re stuck waiting for the time to run out because you’re playing on an actual famicom or maybe you’re trying to be 2005 me and playing on an emulator that doesn’t have save states, they’re going to be the longest 350 seconds of your life.
Five levels later, I learned that, no, the getting stuck on enemies thing isn’t a glitch, it’s a game mechanic, and you can escape their grasp by alternating left and right or mashing jump or whatever. This is what I get for playing a game in which the only instructions are in Japanese.
It’s made worse by the fact that bombs fly at an arc and sometimes they’ll get stuck in the hud instead of coming back down.
This guy just throws baseballs or something at you.
The football helmet grants you temporary invincibility. There’s also a question mark icon buried in the game data.
These guys are shaped like positive signs and negative signs, which might clue you in to what’s going to happen.
It’s like a more organic Mega Man enemy.
Strangely, the boss of this level is this derpy looking kaiju dragon thing.
I don’t know how this works. I thought that each food item gives you one chance to play the bonus game, but I played it more than five times when I bought all the items so maybe your chance isn’t over until you get a Hamburglar card on your first attempt.
I’m telling you. You’ll never see a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
The jawas are armed with bombs instead of ionization carbines.
That’s no Donald Land enemy! That’s an Albatoss.
This skeleton-dragon is the hardest boss in the game. I know I’m talking about Donald Land and therefore not saying a whole lot.
But look how many health points I lost fighting this guy.
I wonder how they expect me to make that jump.
The skeletons throw their heads horizontally.
That entrance looks vaguely threatening…
Ice physics time! Yay?
No, not yay.
The observant will notice that you rescue the McDonaldland characters in roughly the same order you saw them in the intro.
So Grimace was originally designed as the Evil Grimace, who had four arms that he’d use to steal shakes. But he was still purple and not a cyclops with a horn.
He later lost two of his arms and became good.
You can get stuck in those happy looking blob things.
Walking into the green guy hurts you.
But jumping on him makes you jump really high.
The cats dangle mouse platforms. If you bomb the cat, the mouse will still be there. The backstory I guess is that Gumon turned all the animals feral.
The composer of this game, Shogo Sakai, is more known for Kirby.
The giant alligator/crocodile doesn’t really do anything but pop out of the ground and stop the screen from scrolling, killing your momentum.
Despite what NES Player said, this tomato is the boss of Pond World and not Harbor World. Although Pond World seems less a pond and more a swamp.
This guy is just a reskinned goon from the first level.
He has a different sprite from the last fish enemy but he’s the same thing.
The cats are jump platforms.
At no point in history did Captain Crook have an eyepatch, a peg leg, or a hook hand. This guy is just a generic pirate. NES Player neglects to mention him.
I think the word BAD is written on his hat. His color might suggest seasickness.
Ocean World is even worse than Sky World, if you can believe that. You’ll get stuck on everything and the controls are godawful.
And of course, you’re higher up on the screen so your bombs aren’t always going to come down.
And if the enemies are too close, the bomb will just arc over them anyway.
The sharks will swallow you without hurting you and you might think it’s time to go make some tea or go to the bathroom while you wait out the clock (famicom) or reload your save state (emulator) but you can just mash A to escape.
The guide on Gamefaqs doesn’t mention this. I had to look at the page on Strategy Wiki to learn that.
Ocean World is really long too.
The sunken ship looks nice, at least.
Really really long.
All you have to do is jump over the octorok and he can’t do anything about it.
Captain Crook was the only character who could understand Hamburglar.
This is Ghost Town World.
I know these guys are supposed to be witches but they look like Igor from Young Frankenstein.
Their hats linger on after you’ve destroyed them.
I like how this haunted village has a police station.
The bosses are these ghosts who disappear and reappear on another part of the screen.
If you didn’t figure it out already, you rescue Officer Big Mac here. Except he isn’t given a name.
These guys aren’t jawas. They’re the knockoffs from the Asylum’s Space Conflicts. Instead of tossing bombs, they toss rocks.
Bubbles just move towards you.
And this is another reskinned albatoss.
And the crying maidens are the same thing as the Little Red Riding Hoods.
This is what happens when you don’t clear the grease traps. It becomes sentient and tries to murder you. But it doesn’t try very hard.
This world segues directly from the last one.
Knights throw axes at you.
And Castle World is a maze. Well, I don’t know if it’s a maze or a series of branching paths, all linear, all that take you to the same place eventually.
I hate when something evokes something else but I can’t figure out what it is.
It’s not boiling acid, just Surge, so it doesn’t hurt you.
The castle must belong to the Burger King.
Even if it apparently has a McDonalds inside of it.
Notice that there are no hamburger icons to pick up.
It’s the skeleton dragon from Oasis World, except the skull has been replaced with a hand. Of course they’d pick that boss to bring back.
Notice that Hamburglar says “Help” and not “Robble Robble.” Memory limits? Cultural differences between America and Japan? The world may never know.
Evil Hamburglar flies around erratically and flings his hat at you.
And finally, Gumon reveals himself.
He arcs back and forth and is much easier to defeat than the Hamburglar.
The end.
The end is basically all of the McDonald Land denizens thanking you, including the Professor and Uncle O’Grimacey, who never even showed up in the game and vanished into memory and videos on Youtube in which the tape had so degraded that the green was no longer green but a sickly grey. The rumor is that he was connected to the IRA.
burning question: In the Dené-Caucasian hypothesis which attempts to link together the Na-Dené languages of Alaska and the American Southwest, various North Caucasian languages, the Sino-Tibetan languages (which includes the obvious Chinese and Tibetan along with some related languages in South America, none of which you’d expect), and a somewhat more feasable Siberian language family, are they just dragging Basque, Sumerian, and Burushaski into it because they feel an obligation?
I think my favorite linguistic crackpot theory is Japanese and Basque.
See, the word for bread in Japanese and Spanish is both “pan” so that implies a connection, except oooops, the word for bread in Japanese is a loanword from Portuguese.
And you can’t imply shit with SVO or SOV. That’s almost 90% of all languages.
No, I’m not going to attempt to recreate the experiences of playing this back in 2004 by playing in Sheepshaver. I could. I just don’t want to.
Also, in those days, I either wasn’t aware Photobucket existed or I thought it was a paid service, and most people who hosted images on their chocojournals also had webspace. In a way, now is a lot like the way things used to be.
I may not have access to a time machine, even a very slow one, but I do have the Internet Archive! (fuck you, Authors' Guild)
When I posted this originally back in 2004, you got for free 25 megs of disk space with 1.5 gigs monthly bandwidth. The maximum size of an image was 250 kb. Some time in 2005, they upped it to 50 megs and 150 for free users but added a 1 gig space limit for paid accounts. A PNG screenshot of an NES game weighs in at about 25 kB maximum.
The text is Engrish despite the fact that this game was never released outside of Japan. They did release a bunch of games in the US but not this one for whatever reason. Maybe because it’s a bog-standard platformer but that’s never let anyone stop them. Maybe they didn't have the licence from McDonalds to release it in the US or Europe. The game is already in English, what little text there is. I usually try to find out the history of these games but with this game, I can't find anything.
Before there was M.C. Kids, there was Donald Land. It’s called that because in Japan, Ronald McDonald is named Donald McDonald.
I know I hit the screenshot button prematurely or maybe too maturely but trust me on this one: the purple guy is Grimace. Uncle is short for Uncle O’Grimacey, the shamrock shake guy.
The observant will notice that the order that the McDonaldland characters appear in the intro is the order they appear in the game.
This guy isn’t named by the game but it’s Gumon. Or maybe he’s part of the Gumon tribe of evil demon clowns.
Mayor McCheese wishes you luck. If you’re wondering “this game was made in 1988, years after the Krofft lawsuit” and here’s the thing: Japanese copyright law tends to benefit whichever party is Japanese. I think when neither party is Japanese, it sides with whichever party is most Japanese adjacent even if they have to do it in a roundabout way, maybe via the now-discredited Altaic language family.
The googly eyed warm fuzzy things pop out of boxes.
Your attack is to throw bombs in a parabola. Picking up the apple icon allows you to throw two bombs at a time. I’m not sure if it lasts until you get hit or lose a life or lasts until you get to the next sub-area or next world or what. What I do know is that I was fighting a later boss and could only throw one bomb at a time.
Jack’o’lanterns explode.
It’s hard to tell what background objects you can and can’t stand on. Especially when it doesn’t make any sense. That’s not how trees work.
The boss takes only one bomb. That’s it.
After you beat a level, you can cash in your hamburger tokens for food and a chance to play the bonus game, or you can skip that and buy a guaranteed extra life or point of lifeforce.
I played this game because NES Player did. They made a few mistakes, which I will point out.
NES Player doesn’t even mention the second world. Granted, the boss is just a generic enemy colored red.
The woodpecker is an ordinary enemy by the second stage.
You can’t do anything about Little Red Riding Hood. Her tears are damaging but you can stand on them. It’s never necessary to do so.
This is a pretty cool setpiece. The pirate ship (even though, spoiler alert, Captain Crook is still missing, both in real life and in the game) launches a cannonade.
And you jump on the splashes to get across. Or you can jump on the bombs to give yourself some lift but it’s finicky.
Don’t worry, this guy isn’t Gnash. He’s more like the other jumping fish, the name of which I don’t have memorized because it’s something non-obvious like Fizzie, except a lot bigger.
The boss is just another dinosaur except he’s red. And he takes two hits.
In other games, if you’re standing on a higher platform and want the goodies below, you’d walk off and then curve back. not here. here, you just fall like you’re on the sun.
The beetles just move up and down.
The guys with the Moe haircuts, presumably Amazon natives, throw spears at you. The fire launches a smoke signal upwards and it hurts you if you jump into it and isn’t even animated.
Sometimes you have to stand on enemies to get across pits
This guy throws rocks at you.
NES Player didn’t even mention that you fight a giant wooden fire-breathing dagron. I played this game on iNES, which didn’t have save states.
I got stuck here because I thought that you had to defeat the guy on top and once I did so, I thought you just had to hit the eye or whatever a whole bunch times to beat him while dodging the fire, which, oh yeah, does kill you in one hit. If you die, you start at the beginning of the world, even during a boss fight and even when the world is split up into multiple areas. Getting a game over does the same thing as dying. Well, it gives you the choice between continuing and going back to the beginning but I have no idea why you’d pick the second option. It resets your score but points are meaningless. You get two continues and then it’s back to the beginning.
No, you have to go inside the mouth.
NESPlayer made it seem like this guy is the boss.
No, he just laughs at you.
And then releases Birdie, whom I assume he was going to cook and eat.
This is Sky World. Had I figured out how to deal with the dragon, this is probably where I’d have stopped playing.
The balloon fish things just fly towards you.
If these guys get too close to you, you’ll get stuck
Five levels later, I learned that, no, the getting stuck on enemies thing isn’t a glitch, it’s a game mechanic, and you can escape their grasp by alternating left and right or mashing jump or whatever. This is what I get for playing a game in which the only instructions are in Japanese.
It’s made worse by the fact that bombs fly at an arc and sometimes they’ll get stuck in the hud instead of coming back down.
This guy just throws baseballs or something at you.
The football helmet grants you temporary invincibility. There’s also a question mark icon buried in the game data.
These guys are shaped like positive signs and negative signs, which might clue you in to what’s going to happen.
It’s like a more organic Mega Man enemy.
Strangely, the boss of this level is this derpy looking kaiju dragon thing.
I don’t know how this works. I thought that each food item gives you one chance to play the bonus game, but I played it more than five times when I bought all the items so maybe your chance isn’t over until you get a Hamburglar card on your first attempt.
I’m telling you. You’ll never see a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
The jawas are armed with bombs instead of ionization carbines.
That’s no Donald Land enemy! That’s an Albatoss.
This skeleton-dragon is the hardest boss in the game. I know I’m talking about Donald Land and therefore not saying a whole lot.
But look how many health points I lost fighting this guy.
I wonder how they expect me to make that jump.
The skeletons throw their heads horizontally.
That entrance looks vaguely threatening…
Ice physics time! Yay?
No, not yay.
The observant will notice that you rescue the McDonaldland characters in roughly the same order you saw them in the intro.
So Grimace was originally designed as the Evil Grimace, who had four arms that he’d use to steal shakes. But he was still purple and not a cyclops with a horn.
He later lost two of his arms and became good.
You can get stuck in those happy looking blob things.
Walking into the green guy hurts you.
But jumping on him makes you jump really high.
The cats dangle mouse platforms. If you bomb the cat, the mouse will still be there. The backstory I guess is that Gumon turned all the animals feral.
The composer of this game, Shogo Sakai, is more known for Kirby.
The giant alligator/crocodile doesn’t really do anything but pop out of the ground and stop the screen from scrolling, killing your momentum.
Despite what NES Player said, this tomato is the boss of Pond World and not Harbor World. Although Pond World seems less a pond and more a swamp.
This guy is just a reskinned goon from the first level.
He has a different sprite from the last fish enemy but he’s the same thing.
The cats are jump platforms.
At no point in history did Captain Crook have an eyepatch, a peg leg, or a hook hand. This guy is just a generic pirate. NES Player neglects to mention him.
I think the word BAD is written on his hat. His color might suggest seasickness.
Ocean World is even worse than Sky World, if you can believe that. You’ll get stuck on everything and the controls are godawful.
And of course, you’re higher up on the screen so your bombs aren’t always going to come down.
And if the enemies are too close, the bomb will just arc over them anyway.
The sharks will swallow you without hurting you and you might think it’s time to go make some tea or go to the bathroom while you wait out the clock (famicom) or reload your save state (emulator) but you can just mash A to escape.
The guide on Gamefaqs doesn’t mention this. I had to look at the page on Strategy Wiki to learn that.
Ocean World is really long too.
The sunken ship looks nice, at least.
Really really long.
All you have to do is jump over the octorok and he can’t do anything about it.
Captain Crook was the only character who could understand Hamburglar.
This is Ghost Town World.
I know these guys are supposed to be witches but they look like Igor from Young Frankenstein.
Their hats linger on after you’ve destroyed them.
I like how this haunted village has a police station.
The bosses are these ghosts who disappear and reappear on another part of the screen.
If you didn’t figure it out already, you rescue Officer Big Mac here. Except he isn’t given a name.
These guys aren’t jawas. They’re the knockoffs from the Asylum’s Space Conflicts. Instead of tossing bombs, they toss rocks.
Bubbles just move towards you.
And this is another reskinned albatoss.
And the crying maidens are the same thing as the Little Red Riding Hoods.
This is what happens when you don’t clear the grease traps. It becomes sentient and tries to murder you. But it doesn’t try very hard.
This world segues directly from the last one.
Knights throw axes at you.
And Castle World is a maze. Well, I don’t know if it’s a maze or a series of branching paths, all linear, all that take you to the same place eventually.
I hate when something evokes something else but I can’t figure out what it is.
It’s not boiling acid, just Surge, so it doesn’t hurt you.
The castle must belong to the Burger King.
Even if it apparently has a McDonalds inside of it.
Notice that there are no hamburger icons to pick up.
It’s the skeleton dragon from Oasis World, except the skull has been replaced with a hand. Of course they’d pick that boss to bring back.
Notice that Hamburglar says “Help” and not “Robble Robble.” Memory limits? Cultural differences between America and Japan? The world may never know.
Evil Hamburglar flies around erratically and flings his hat at you.
And finally, Gumon reveals himself.
He arcs back and forth and is much easier to defeat than the Hamburglar.
The end.
The end is basically all of the McDonald Land denizens thanking you, including the Professor and Uncle O’Grimacey, who never even showed up in the game and vanished into memory and videos on Youtube in which the tape had so degraded that the green was no longer green but a sickly grey. The rumor is that he was connected to the IRA.
burning question: In the Dené-Caucasian hypothesis which attempts to link together the Na-Dené languages of Alaska and the American Southwest, various North Caucasian languages, the Sino-Tibetan languages (which includes the obvious Chinese and Tibetan along with some related languages in South America, none of which you’d expect), and a somewhat more feasable Siberian language family, are they just dragging Basque, Sumerian, and Burushaski into it because they feel an obligation?
I think my favorite linguistic crackpot theory is Japanese and Basque.
See, the word for bread in Japanese and Spanish is both “pan” so that implies a connection, except oooops, the word for bread in Japanese is a loanword from Portuguese.
And you can’t imply shit with SVO or SOV. That’s almost 90% of all languages.
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Date: 2023-09-13 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-13 09:35 pm (UTC)