They say money doesn’t buy happiness, but perhaps someone should tell that to Scrooge McDuck and his cousin, Flintheart Glomgold. They’re the stars of a quacking (sorry) new game from those masters of animation, Disney.

To old Scrooge and his equally tight cousin Flintheart, money is everything. Put simply, they’re the kind of characters who would sell their grandmothers if they thought an easy profit could be made. And to prove how financially astute they really are, a challenge has been set – whoever collects the most money in under 30 days wins the coveted title of ‘Duck Of The Year’ in that illustrious publication, Dime Magazine.

So the scene is set. Duck against Duck in a battle where everything goes (for the right price, that is). You play the part of old Scrooge McDuck – a bad egg on the outside, but a nice old chap in the inside. With the aid of his nephews Hue, Dewey and Louie, old McDuck must grab his Indiana Jones hat and whip and go in search of treasure. He’ll find himself lost in a network of caves, swinging from vines in the Amazon Jungle and climbing mountains in search of treasure. Each of these little excursions takes the form of a separate sub game which has to be completed if McDuck is to add to his already bulging coffers.

Unfortunately, these are continuously repeated throughout the game, so the attraction soon pales. Things are made even worse by the number of disk accesses that are necessary to play the game – you can often spend more time waiting for a section to load than actually playing it!

Although Duck Tales is undoubtedly aimed at a fairly young audience, it has the makings of a great game. Unfortunately, it’s just far too repetitive to be worth more than a passing glance. It’s a shame that the programmers didn’t spend as much time on the gameplay as they did on the graphics! If they had, then Duck Tales would have been a stunning piece of software.