Another format, another Dragon’s Lair port. A beautiful re-re-re-re-release for the retro masochist., April 1, 2008

By 

Jon Folkers (Silver Spring, MD United States) –

  

Fun: 

Would you like to see a cartoon character die in dozens of comically gruesome ways, again and again? Then this is for you!

Are you a fan of former Disney animator Don Bluth (“The Secret of NIMH,” and “Pete’s Dragon” are most illustrative of his style)? Then this is a must-have!

Are you looking for a cutting-edge game with retro roots to play on your Playstation 3 console? OK, give this a try — but be careful. If you’re under the age of 30 or so, you’re unlikely to put up with this old style of game.

This game was a revolution back in 1983 when it launched in arcades. It was simply stunning to see branching digital video in this pseudo-interactive form back then. The novelty wore off quickly when the game’s high price and limited replay value came through, though. At fifty cents a play, it was a better deal to watch someone else suffer through the trial-and-error gameplay while you watched the beautiful video.

The game has never looked better. This edition is leaps and bounds over any other edition yet released, and there have been dozens, including platforms you’d never think would work, such as the black-and-white Macintosh on multiple floppy diskettes, the GameBoy Color, and the low-color, screen-door graphics of the Sega CD. Even the original LaserDisc and deluxe DVD editions are trumped here.

Controls are fast and responsive, and the gameplay is true to the original The original scene selection order has been preserved and the controller timing feels accurate to me. You can play with your Blu-Ray remote or a Playstation 3 controller if you’re on that system.

Sadly, while it’s beautiful and is the best version of the game yet, it’s not perfect. The menu items don’t work properly on the Playstation 3, which is the most popular BD player at this writing. When you select the “5 lives” option, the machine conveniently forgets this and you have 1 life forever, as if your arcade machine were set on FREE PLAY. That’s not a bad thing from my perspective, but it would be interesting for people to simulate just how annoying a quarter-snatcher the arcade version was. The disc seems to request access to the internet, so there’s a possibility this could be patched, but I have a feeling this disc will remain as-is unless they do another publication run.

There are ARCADE and HOME options so you can choose to see the shorter clips as originally presented, or as seen in home versions (like the playable drawbridge scene at the beginning). Since there is no effective limit on your lives, you just play until you finish or can no longer take any more. Each scene is presented at least once (sometimes flipped left-to-right) and you can’t get to the ending unless you have beaten them all. Pauses to access the disc are imperceptible, much faster than any prior home version running off an optical disc.

The extras are nicely done. There’s a “watch” mode in which you can see the solution for each of the screens, as well as the MANY different ways your hero can die. From what I can tell, it’s the only way to see the animation where Dirk crumbles to bones, because of the “5 lives” bug above.

There are some interviews and a commentary track with 3 of the game’s creators looking bored. I only glanced at the opening, but turned it off when I felt that I could read Don Bluth’s mind. He seemed to be thinking “I’m tired of this 25-year-old ****, give me my check so I can go home.” Good for the sake of completeness, but I doubt you’d watch it again and again.

There’s a lovely clip showing the endgame with graphics from the rasterized Amiga version, the early PC version, the deluxe PC version, the original LaserDisc version, the DVD version, and this new HD version. Each one is added as a stripe on the screen until you see them all side-by-side. The comparison is stunning. When you looked at the fisheyed monitor in the 1983 arcade, you had no idea the game could ever look this good.

Finally, there are some previews of similar games that are coming soon, namely Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp. In my opinion, they’re completely non-essential because they’re so much more annoying. They’re so much more annoying because there’s a lot more speech in them, which means you get to hear the same silly dialogue again and again and AGAIN! Perhaps they’ll be bundled into a value package with a fixed version of this disc in a few years. Given the publisher’s penchant for reissuing this content, I think that’s a pretty sure bet.

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