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Dragon's Lair 3D Not Worth The Effort
Anonymous Coward writes "While not the best source for gaming information, CNNs Technology section has a review of Ubi Softs Dragon's Lair 3D. Long story short, according to the writer Marc Saltzman, the game isn't worth it. In fact, the opening paragraph says, 'The only thing worse than a lousy video game is when it taints a well-respected, 20-year-old franchise.' One interesting tidbit from the article, the original Dragon's Lair is one of only three video games on display at the Smithsonian. The other two games being Pac-Man and Pong."
It was a "reinvention" of the original anyway. Which is good, because as far as I remember the original was basically a Laserdisc movie where you moved the joystick in a certain direction at the right time and either died or went on to the next screen - hardly the kind of game you'd want to shell out $50-$60 on for your console :) Looked like some very pretty cel shaded graphics from the screenshots - one of those adventure 3D platformer games like Zelda, Mario Sunshine or Starfox Adventures.
Also, it was planned for Xbox and NGC as well- what happened to that?
'Taint your ass and 'taint your cock.. It just 'taint.
According to http://www.npd.com Dragon's Lair 3D: Return To The Lair sold around 17K units (xbox ~13K units and pc ~4K units) from November 15th 2002. Which is roughly ~$750K. Game was in development around 5 years and the budget was probably more than $3M. Oh yeah... did I mention that I'm sooooo glad that it failed! :)
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - techno-social writer Jon Katz was found dead in his Boston home this morning. There weren't any more details yet. I'm sure we'll all miss him, even if you weren't a fan of his work there's no denying his contribution to popular culture. Truly an American icon.