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If you have, or come across, any laserdisc players, may I strongly suggest Ebay? They aren't made anymore, I've never been able to find anyone who can still repair them, yet I still actively collect anime laserdiscs (http://www.otakubell.com/LDs/), and am not alone. I have 4-5 players, and if I can't find anyone who can do repairs, I wouldn't mind obtaining 4-5 more (once I move to a larger house, that is).

Dragon's Lair Project, a resource for laserdisc-player-based games, has some technical reference materials that may interest you and/or your fellow viewers.

Remember them, hell I've got 2 of those (Dragon's Lair and Time Traveler) in my living room right now.

I guess IBM is going to sue me to the cleaners now.

Check out http://dragons-lair-project.com/ for more laser history and info

Gameplay. The mechanics of the core game. How it plays, how it feels, how you interact with the machine. If you haven't got it, then you've essentially got a very expensive set of polygons moving about on screen, with an occasional soundtrack. Storyline, music, characters, are all filler, not the core. If you haven't got gameplay, you haven't got a game. You've got a plausibly interactive, low quality animated feature.

From that description I take it you've played Dragon's Lair.

It's called Astron Belt

Cliff Hanger... http://www.dragons-lair-project.com/games/pages/ch .asp

That game was called Cliff Hanger.

As for the posters who have said that you can just stream some video linked to a few keypress inputs, that's only true if you've never played it before. There's a definite 'feeling' to it that most of the home ports just don't capture. (And I never saw one that was free, though there were some demos and a couple of magazine coverdisks.)

For those who know it well, you can play it just as it was in 1983 if you use the Daphne emulator.

There is also an enhanced ROM set available, which makes the moves and scene flow of the game much more logical. (The engineers apparently didn't understand quite what the animators intended, or just rushed it out half-baked. Those were crazy times!)

Personally, I played it once 'back in the day', and lost my 50 cents in about 20 seconds. Quarters weren't so easy to come by, so I didn't pile them in to learn the game. It was a fun game to watch, though - it may not have been a landmark in animation, but the visuals were truly unique for an arcade video game.

Don Bluth himself has expressed a certain irritation that this game is what he is perhaps best known for. (Coincidentally, it is 15 minutes long, so Warhol's Law applies.)

As with many things, those who like it and those who don't both think the other side just doesn't get it. They're probably both right.

Regards,

-bitrot.

As for the posters who have said that you can just stream some video linked to a few keypress inputs, that's only true if you've never played it before. There's a definite 'feeling' to it that most of the home ports just don't capture. (And I never saw one that was free, though there were some demos and a couple of magazine coverdisks.)

For those who know it well, you can play it just as it was in 1983 if you use the Daphne emulator.

There is also an enhanced ROM set available, which makes the moves and scene flow of the game much more logical. (The engineers apparently didn't understand quite what the animators intended, or just rushed it out half-baked. Those were crazy times!)

Personally, I played it once 'back in the day', and lost my 50 cents in about 20 seconds. Quarters weren't so easy to come by, so I didn't pile them in to learn the game. It was a fun game to watch, though - it may not have been a landmark in animation, but the visuals were truly unique for an arcade video game.

Don Bluth himself has expressed a certain irritation that this game is what he is perhaps best known for. (Coincidentally, it is 15 minutes long, so Warhol's Law applies.)

As with many things, those who like it and those who don't both think the other side just doesn't get it. They're probably both right.

Regards,

-bitrot.

... the Good anime movie == good game" concept.

Firefox!

The large crowd of laserdisc arcade collectors will surely be confused over a browser named after this famous game :)

Ah, the good old days. Think I'll go try to find Thayer's Quest on Ebay.

hmmm what does that Halcyon really look like?

Heres a good list of them outdated systems.. http://gamerland.com/games/systems.shtml and heres a better picture of a Halycon in case that Shacknews picture wasn't good enough for you.

I'm still waiting for the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series to be put to film...

Translating a Choose Your Own Adventure book into the format closest to a movie produces laserdisc/DVD games similar to "Dragon's Lair".

So you could make a DVD that runs full fledged applications.

Of course, general purpose computers have limited amounts of RAM as well, so in a theoretical sense the they are no more powerful, but you can do a lot more with 128 Mbytes than with 32 bytes.

Astron Belt was the first laser disc arcade game ever created, but unfortunately, constant delays kept it from reaching the US arcades until late 1983.

Finally, it's LaserDisc, not Laserdisk.

Lots of animations, sounds, etc at: The Dragon's Lair Project --mark