As mentioned, Donald is in full adventure mode, and so he's decked out in Indiana Jones-style regalia for his trip. Delivered to locations such as the city, the desert, ruins, and more via a bi-plane piloted by none other than his nephews, Donald must search high and low for treasure while avoiding enemies under orders from meanie-pants to thwart Donald's efforts. You choose which locations you want to visit, but the order in which things get done is typically affected by the kind of plunger shots you have. Different plungers do different things. The yellow plunger, for example, is your basic attack. But later plungers, such as red, allow you to create make-shift ladders for climbing sheer cliffs. Green plungers let you stick to flying enemies. Donald also has a bubblegum gun and popcorn to use against enemies, too. Nothing too deadly here -- this is Disney, after all.
One of my complaints about Quackshot both now and when it came out is that the platforming is a touch float-y. Jumping with precision, something so important for the genre, just isn't happening in Quackshot. It's far too easy to over- or under-shoot a narrow column and slip to your doom, especially since Donald does not stop on a dime. Too often you try to react quickly to keep from sliding off a ledge, and but it feels completely out of your hands. That's a bit of a fun-sucker, and it adds unneeded frustration to a relatively easy game that obviously has the younger set in mind.
Quackshot does look quite good, even today. 16-bit Donald is spot-on, and his animations are excellent -- especially when he gets fired up and goes into berserker mode. (You've seen it in many Donald shorts, where the duck just loses it.) Unfortunately, while the music is pleasing, there are no speech samples and that's a bit of a drag with a character that is so defined by his voice. Those angry animations I mentioned are cool, but if they were accompanied by some of Donald's fevered squawking, they'd be perfect. If SEGA can find the room in a football game for digitized speech, it could have found room in Quackshot.
