365//365: Day 169 – Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers (NES)

During the NES days, Capcom made their presence known through some of the most imaginative and even some of the most daring titles you’ll ever find on the system. Games like Mega Man allowed you to traverse through some creative stages, defeat some tough, yet thoroughly memorable bosses and use their powers throughout the rest of the game. Little Nemo: The Dream Master let your imagination run loose with its brilliant dream worlds and vicious difficulty. Bionic Commando removed the ability to jump and replaced it with a mechanical arm that let you swing through each stage and reach higher platforms. Then there’s the game based off a well known Disney Afternoon cartoon series, Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers. While the brilliance is definitely not based on the difficulty, the rest of the package holds a sheen of quality that propels Rescue Rangers near the top of the list of best Capcom titles on the NES.

The only significant blemish comes in the difficulty. It’s definitely not the challenging game out there, nor is it the longest game. Boss battles never really push the boundaries of challenge either, offering an obvious weak spot or just themselves as a whole being a weak spot, easily exploitable patterns and little in the way of strategy. You’ll encounter a few points where you will get hit three times and lose a life, but they are not as frequent as you’d hope they’d be.

Stage D's boss is so freaking easy, you can just stand against the left side while hopping up and tossing your ball at it. The falling projectiles will never touch you.

From here on in, Rescue Rangers is one of the most enjoyable titles you’ll encounter on the NES, especially with a second player. As both Chip and Dale, you’ll run around each stage together, taking out enemies and trying not to kill each other in the process. You can accidentally stun each other if you throw an item at one another, leading to some occasional frustrations that you can alleviate by returning the favor. You’ll also need to travel together in order to progress the screens movement forward, otherwise you’ll end up jumping into a pit and dying because the platform you needed to jump onto, did not appear because one of the characters was messing around a bit too far away from the other character.

While your weapons mostly consists of boxes, apples, balls and the ultra rare Zipper invincibility, a few of them can be used in some unique and innovative manners. The wooden and metal boxes can be used to hide under, allowing you to either absorb one hit without losing health, or allow an enemy to run into you and defeat them without having to either throw the box or move. It doesn’t seem like a useful maneuver, but hiding under a box when encountering an enemy that has some sort of projectile can usually save your hide from taking an unnecessary hit. While the wooden boxes are a one and done weapon, the metal boxes can be hidden under as many times as you see fit, and double as a way to advance to another area by stacking them on top of each other.

Hiding under the crates may look silly and seem impractical, but it actually does become one of the most useful maneuvers in the game.

Throughout the game, you’ll hear some of the more well produced tunes on the system. They do sound overly whimsical, however given the subject matter at hand, it matches not only the action, but the overall look. On the subject of looks, Rescue Rangers manages to not only have a colorful and clean look to it, but an appropriate sense of scale. While Chip, Dale and the rest of the Rescue Rangers are small characters, as they are in the TV series, the world around them reflects their miniature state and helps create some imaginative stages for them to run through. One stage features faucets that you need to hop on in order to turn off the flowing water that blocks your path, while in another stage you’re running through a toy store of sorts, with jack-in-the-boxes bouncing towards you and so on. Thanks to some of the more tighter controls on a 2D platform title, you won’t encounter many instances where control discrepancies will hamper your enjoyment of the action in the game.

While there’s a plethora of 2D platform titles you can choose from on the NES, very few add the element of co-op gameplay that helps round the package out more so. Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers is a fine example of clever stage layouts, elementary gameplay and an enjoyable romp through the game, whether you’re solo or with a friend. Just be aware that these bosses offer little in the way of challenge.

Wait, what?!

Rating: 7.8