This Month's Most Viewed Games Tagged 'Windows, SNES, adventure, casual' on The Great Games Experiment http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/css/logo.jpg en-us Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow, also known as Donald Starring in Maui Mallard in Europe, is a platform game, released in 1996 for the PC, Game Boy, Super NES(SNES) and Mega Drive/Genesis consoles. The game was developed by Eurocom and released by Disney Interactive. The game was one of the first games to be released under Disney Interactive.

Maui Mallard (played by Donald Duck) is a medium-boiled detective visiting a tropical island when the mysterious Shabum Shabum idol goes missing. Shabum Shabum is considered the island's native guardian spirit, and unless the idol is recovered, the whole island will explode. Maui is put on the case, and his investigations lead him through a creepy mansion to a native village, where Maui is sacrificed and thrown into a volcano as a sacrifice to the native gods. Maui survives the volcano, and the islanders put him through the "test of duckhood", which Maui passes, gaining the natives' trust. The natives tell Maui that the only one who knows where Shabum Shabum is has died long since, and Maui goes through the land of the dead to escort his soul into rest.

Besides typical platform game gameplay (running around, jumping from platform to platform), one of the game's most distinctive gameplay features is allowing to switch the player character's form to suit one's needs. The player begins the game as Maui, whose only mean of self-defence is an insect-launching pistol that can launch several forms of bugs, some of them combined for greater effect. However, once the player reaches the second level, Maui transforms into Cold Shadow, his ninja alter ego, who defends himself with short-range attacks using a staff. Cold Shadow's staff is also primarily used to explore the level further, such as climbing a narrow tunnel. After the second level, the player can switch back and forth between Maui and Cold Shadow at will, provided he has enough ninja tokens for the transformation. The amount of ninja tokens Maui or Cold Shadow holds determines Cold Shadow's strength when played as him. Some levels of the game, however, prevent Maui from transforming at all, as Cold Shadow cannot bungee jump on vines, for example, which forces the player to use Maui throughout the level.

]]> 02 Mar 2007 07:45:23 Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure is a video game released in 1994 for the Super NES and Mega Drive/Genesis by Activision. It was ported to the Sega Mega-CD (1994), Sega 32X (1995), the Atari Jaguar (1995), PC (1995), and the Game Boy Advance (2001), with the last one ported by Majesco. Pitfall: TMA was also the first commercial game released for Windows 95.

In this game, the player takes the role of Pitfall Harry Jr., son of the hero of the original game, who has to find his kidnapped father.

An extra feature in all versions is the ability to play the original Pitfall! (the Atari 2600 version) after finding a secret doorway. The doorway can be found by looking for something that seems out of place. The Mega-CD, 32X and Windows ports contained extra (and expanded) levels and other enhancements over the earlier versions.

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