You are in your 30s, have a mortgage, and are saving to put your children through college — you’re an adult. But if you give Disney some money, it will happily let you pretend that you’re a kid again.
The Disney Afternoon Collection is out today for $20 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. It is a bundle of six collaborations between Disney and Capcom for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I’ve put in some time with each game, which includes DuckTales, DuckTales 2, Darkwing Duck, TaleSpin, Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, and Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers 2. These games debuted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but they still play well and provide an interactive retrospective for what games were like for the last half of the NES’s life. The studio that made the game, Digital Eclipse, did a great job porting these nostalgic hits to modern platforms in their original state while also including a crucial new feature.
Now, this collection is not a remake or an update. Instead, Digital Eclipse got the games working in their original, 8-bit state. They look exactly like they did on the NES nearly 30 years ago — although you’re probably now going to enjoy them on a high-definition monitor or television. This means you won’t see the black gap between scanlines like on an old cathode-ray tube set, but Digital Eclipse has of course included the option to emulate that effect if you want.
But the real standout feature here is the rewind and fast-forward buttons. The game maps these options to the LB and RB buttons of an Xbox One gamepad, and they enable you to undo mistakes or fly past text and more. This is a feature that a lot of emulators have and Digital Eclipse even used it in its Mega Man Legacy Collection, so it’s not new — but I still appreciate having it even if it feels like cheating.
If you want to see the games and these features in action, go ahead and click play above to watch me play The Disney Afternoon Collection.