Ahh, the old Commo 64 games, was there a better time for gamers? Yes, it’s called the present, but that didn’t mean you can’t get a kick out of playing some of the older stuff. Today’s game of choice? Donald Duck’s Playground.
The premise of this game is pretty damn simple, just run around as Donald Duck from Walt Disney’s cartoons and earn money to spend building a playground for his nephews. You can then go and play as one of his nephews to “test” the playground you have built.
Well to get the cash you need is different from other games. Instead of breaking into houses or stealing money off corpses in a lot of modern games, you actually had to earn the money by getting a job and working. The game has 4 places of employment for you and each job has its own tasks.
You can choose to either work at a Greengrocers/supermarket, in a toy shop, at a railroad or at the airport, amazingly the duck doesn’t need any qualifications to score this work.
When working at the greengrocers you have to sort vegetables that are thrown at you from a truck in different boxes. Each box represents 1 of 3 fruits. They are thrown at differing distances and Donald must catch it and put the veggie in the correct box. If you miss the veggie or put it in the wrong box then you don’t get any money. But if you put it in the right box you earn a measly 1 cent for every veggie correctly put away.
The toy shop isn’t too bad; all you do in this level is get the toys off a conveyor and put them in a cupboard. After a while a train passes and if the cupboard is open the toys fall out of storage and you lose your cash. Pretty obvious what you have to do here, but the money is better as you get 5 cents instead of 1 for each item saved.
For the 3rd job Donald is at an airport, Donald has to take cargo given to him *sigh* on a conveyor belt which is being shipped to different airports around America. Each cargo has a code on it that correlates to the airport. Hmm wasn’t there a level already like this? Anyway, Donald throws the cargo into a passing van with a matching code, and near the end the plane leaves and you shoot off with the 3 cents per item you earned.
Donald’s only other job option is to work at a railway. You have to put switches via a console on tracks in the right order so that trains can pick up their cargo from the right location and take it to the right city. 15 cents per delivery makes this much more worthwhile to do.
The monetary figures I’ve put down are just for the easiest mode. When you go to the next difficulty levels the wages are doubled or tripled dependant on if you went medium or hard.
When you have earned lots of money you can buy all sorts of equipment for the playground for one of Huey, Dewey or Louie to play on.
In the time it’s taken you to read this, you could probably be about half way through the game. It’s not long but for its time it would have entertained the kids.
Written by:
~And_ROOS
