Once again, the modern age of globalized entertainment has come back to bite regional gaming conventions in the arse. While the yanks might be intimately familiar with the Disney Afternoon, a block of Disney TV shows broadcast after school throughout the 90s and 2000s, those of us outside of North America were never privy to such things. So, perhaps a better name in the UK would be the Disney Club collection, since that was the name which our version of the block was broadcast under. Minor gripes aside, The Disney Afternoon Collection review will let you know if this nostalgia bait is worth your time, including the swanky physical edition available for both Switch and Switch 2.
What Is The Disney Afternoon Collection?
If you’re not already familiar, The Disney Afternoon Collection brings together a bunch of Disney games from years past that are all based on shows that were originally shown during the regular Disney Afternoon programming block. So, you’ve got DuckTales, Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck, DuckTales 2 and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2, but now on this new Switch port, you also get Goof Troop and Bonkers as well. It’s a hell of a collection already, but the addition of 2 SNES games in the pack goes a decent way towards making it even more exciting.
If you’ve not heard of the new games, then you’re missing out. Bonkers is a relatively simple SNES platformer, but Goof Troop is a co-op puzzle adventure that also happens to have been designed by legendary director Shinji Mikami, who brought us Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, and Resident Evil 4. It’s certainly a vibe shift for the guy, but hell if Goof Troop isn’t one of the best games in the collection, and that’s a shockingly tough bar to reach. Either way, we’ll look at each game in turn before tying it all up at the end with a brief analysis of the new features and museum mode.
DuckTales (Woo-Hoo)
DuckTales on the NES is a classic platformer and an obvious choice for The Disney Afternoon Collection, if only because the original show’s theme tune is probably one of the strongest that the programming block ever had. This is a typical NES platformer where you control Scrooge McDuck going around to various stages based on real-world locations and have to collect as much treasure as you can to ensure there’s enough gold in your vault for you to go swimming in it.
While the world might have a more complicated relationship with such a wealthy protagonist in 2026, this is still an enjoyable game. While it does still have some of the more ‘interesting’ elements of the original design, they’ve mostly been compensated out thanks to the ability to rewind and save whenever you want. There’s a decent variety of levels available to you, and hell if it isn’t just fun to run around whacking stuff with a stick and then collecting 18 ice creams and a giant diamond before you get lifted out of there by your helicopter pilot with the physically impossible jaw and body shape.
Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers
Another NES platformer that doesn’t quite have the same star power as DuckTales (or the theme tune) but was popular enough that it’ll certainly set someone’s nostalgia senses tingling. This time around, Rescue Rangers is more akin to Super Mario Bros. 2, with a focus on co-op gameplay and the ability to throw objects to damage your enemies. The enemy sprites are a fair bit bigger here when compared with DuckTales, which does make them hard to avoid, but the plentiful boxes all over the place and the ability to disappear inside them to protect yourself do help you to manage the enemies a fair whack.
This time around, you’ll also have a map screen to explore, but you don’t even have to visit all of the places you have access to. There are a bunch of bossless levels that you don’t have to visit to reach the final confrontation against the main bad guy: Fat Cat. If you know what you’re doing (or you don’t mind relying on the rewind ability), then you can probably get this finished easily in under an hour.
TaleSpin
If you missed the show this game is based on, it’s about Baloo from The Jungle Book flying planes for a cargo business…because I’m sure that’s exactly the direction that Rudyard Kipling was planning on taking the character. Either way, this game is a pretty standard side-scrolling shoot-em-up with the added novelty of having a very interesting control scheme. Rather than being forced to scroll to the left, you can hit a button that changes the direction your plane is facing, either to attack enemies that are behind you or to give yourself more room to deal with enemies that are getting too close. You also can fire in diagonal directions both up and down as the tip of the plane rises or falls as you move, rather than remaining strictly horizontal.
There’s also an upgrade/shop screen that pops up between missions, giving the entire thing a “Fantasy Zone but Disney” vibe which isn’t exactly a bad thing. You can upgrade your rate of fire, give yourself more hits before going down, and even increase your movement speed. It gives the game a lot of extra depth that keeps it interesting, aligning with the very odd locations you end up flying through (seriously, who sets a shmup level in a baseball stadium?). In the end, I was expecting TaleSpin to be mediocre, but I ended up enjoying it immeasurably for the simple shmup it is.
Darkwing Duck
Darkwing Duck was always a show that I enjoyed as a kid, even more than I enjoyed the superhero and crime-based shows that it was parodying. When it comes to video game adaptations, the only one I’d heard much about was the TurboGrafx-16 version infamous for being the worst game on the system, though the phrase “Mega Man but with a duck” has been bandied around a fair bit. I was pretty stoked to discover that the descriptor was correct because Darkwing Duck is literally just Mega Man but with a duck, and that makes for a shockingly playable game.
You’ve got the standard jump, shoot gameplay of Mega Man but with Darkwing Duck’s added ability to pull up his cloak to deflect shots, even in mid-air. Even this slight enhancement to the format makes for interesting gameplay from the get-go, though you don’t unlock any abilities by taking out the stage bosses. On the plus side, you can find special ammo throughout the stages that have different effects and can be freely switched to as you fight. It’s useful, but the inability to stock up on powers and save them for the boss/enemy they’re most useful against does give it a slight negative point when compared with Mega Man.
DuckTales 2
Much like the first game, DuckTales 2 is a side-scrolling platformer where you control Scrooge McDuck on his mission to make himself even richer by journeying around the world and hoovering up historic treasures. Once again, you can use your walking stick to smack things and bounce on it like a pogo stick, but there are a few improvements over the original. The controls are tighter, and the levels are a lot easier to navigate without feeling like you’re going insane, though you do lose out in the music department a fair bit.
Goof Troop
This one is probably the most unique game on the cartridge. It’s a top-down action adventure game that has you in control of Goofy and his son, Max, on a journey to a mysterious island inhabited by vicious pirates. Using the different tools you find around the map, you must solve puzzles, fight enemies, and dodge hazards to make your way safely home again, taking out the legendry Pirate Pete in the process.
Gameplay-wise, this isn’t the easiest game in the collection by some margin, but it’s probably the most enjoyable co-op experience. You explore the map of each level freely, and generally you’re trying to progress each room to find the boss of each area. There are usually a fair few puzzles, enemy encounters, and obstacle courses between you and the boss, but even the enemy encounters can end up feeling like puzzles in many ways. You typically fight enemies by kicking blocks around the screen, as well as tossing items that are light enough for you to pick up. Definitely worth the experience with a friend, lover, or family member if you can pull one into playing with you.
Chip n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2
Another sequel, and this time things do feel a bit more distinct than they did with the DuckTales sequel. Firstly, progress is strictly linear now, which feels a bit like a downgrade, but the graphics are a lot nicer, and some of the boss sequences are more enjoyable. While it’s not quite as good as the original in many ways, it’s still worth a play if you liked the first game, but it felt like it needed more “video game energy”, for want of a better phrase.
Bonkers
The final game in the collection and the first one that I am entirely confused by. I have never even heard of Bonkers the show, let alone the Capcom game. This time around we’ve got another side-scrolling platformer, meaning the genre takes up a decent chunk of the collection. That said, at least this one is a 16-bit platformer, so it moves a bit faster, has some nicer graphics, and has more complex controls due to the expanded controller on an SNES versus an NES.
In Bonkers, you control officer Bonkers D. Bobcat, a police officer in the Toon Town police. You have to hunt down a thief who has stolen some precious objects from the Toon Town museum. To do this, you must hunt through various levels jumping on enemies’ heads, chucking bombs around, and generally all the sort of stuff that you’re supposed to do in a child-friendly cartoon platformer.
The controls are tight, and the gameplay is enjoyable, but the biggest drawback to Bonkers is that it’s just so easy. Most of the time, I didn’t even find myself needing to use the bombs to get through the levels, and this was to the point that I forgot they were a thing during one boss fight and wondered why I was never able to reach the ending. Another solid game but somewhat forgettable compared with some of the other offerings.
Physical Edition Contents: A Smorgasbord of Retro Goodies
So, if you manage to get your hands on this physical release of The Disney Afternoon Collection, as well as the bonus SNES games, you’ll also get your hands on some physical extras for each of the games in the collection. As you probably could have expected, you get the obligatory art cards and stickers in the box, and they’re relatively high-quality this time around. The stickers all feature the pixel art from the games themselves, even Bonkers (for some reason), so if you’re a fan of this pixel art, then you’ll have a great time finding somewhere to put these. The art cards are also pretty nice, with each card bearing the cover art of a game, and in my case at least, that was Goof Troop, Rescue Rangers, and DuckTales. These cards are 8.5” x 11.5” with a small white border, but they’d make a nice mounting if you like these games enough to display them around your home. The only thing to bear in mind is that each of these cards features information about the games on the back, so if you mount them anywhere, you’ll lose the ability to actually read the interesting information.
The final, and probably coolest physical extra is the set of 8 “Retro Milk Caps”, a.k.a.: POGS. Each of the principal characters from each of the games gets their own little cardboard circle, and if you were ever a fan of these things back in their 90s heyday, then you’re going to get a hell of a kick out of these. You might even be tempted to hit up eBay to see if you can get the stuff together to actually play a round of POGS, if you can find any fully grown adults interested in joining you. Probably the most impressive point of all of this is that all of these physical bonuses fit well in the case, so you won’t have to find extra space to store the bonus items.
The Final Word
The Disney Afternoon Collection is an amazing collection of some of Disney’s best retro games. Capcom has created some truly legendary licensed games for the NES and SNES, and even if you didn’t grow up with them directly, the collection has enough to offer to keep a newcomer interested for a long while. The physical edition takes things a step further, with some of the most interesting bonus items that any of these collections have offered in such a compact storage format. Anyone who still gets a nostalgic twinkle in their eye when thinking of the old programming block, collecting POGs, and playing Nintendo games should definitely add this to their wish list.
Developer: Atari
Publisher: Digital Eclipse
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2
Release Date: 29th May 2026
