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Dragon's Lair - A Forbidden Love Affair?
Thanks to WoS for its article exploring the low critical regard that laserdisc videogame Dragon's Lair is held in. The author argues that the game "is the most successful videogame in the history of the world that nobody will admit to liking. For over 20 years, Dragon's Lair games have been coining in cash hand-over-fist, while drawing nothing but bile from press and critics." He goes on to suggest: "Half-Life is almost as linear and pre-scripted as Dragon's Lair, and is just as happy to kill you instantly if you take a single step in the wrong direction", before concluding: "It's only the hardcore, the critics and the reviewers who tend to have it in for Lair and its ilk, and that may be because a game like Dragon's Lair renders both criticism and years of carefully-accumulated gaming expertise worthless."
I've always loved DL, ever since I was 13 and learning ot master this damn thing in the local Aladdin's Castle. I really felt like a big shot when I wowed the crowd with my "moves"...
who actually will not admit to liking this game? I mean, fine, if you just don't like it... but to hide it? Don't get it...
It sucked quarters at the arcade, when I bought it for my Amiga, the Sega CD and on the PC!
Nope, never did like the damn game, humm, I don't have the DVD yet.
It was way before games like "Out of this World", but lacked something to hook one for long.
;)
I loved the humour in the games though, but I think the game lacked gaming value(?). It wasn't bad, just not as good as others to play.
Dunno... it was more like a demo I guess... you played it to be wowed by effects (which were cool at the time), but not fun to play. If someone else was playing, then great!
-mumble- -mumble-
I had mixed feelings at the time, as well as now...
Yet another deprived fan, wishing his carefully memorized sequence of joystick twiddles were useful in modern games. Dragon's Lair was strictly a memory game, albeit one with slick graphics and a funny narrative.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
Dragon's Lair worked better as an arcade game. At the local games parlor, the few who knew how to beat the game (or at least get past the first few screens) were revered by the unwashed masses. The gameplay was nothing special, but the graphics were mindblowing. Hmm - I can remember the game being featured on a Beyond 2000 show, even..
When it at last was released as a PC game, it was too short and too easy, when you no longer was limited by the amount of quarters in your pocket.
The game could actually be replaced by a "guess the number" game, where you guess one single digit at a time, and have to restart from scratch when you miss a digit. You even get a nice cartoon if you guess correctly. The catch is that the number you're supposed to guess is the same every time you play..
File not found. Fake it(Y/N)? _
The reason people hate it is because it is frigging terrible. If Don Bluth had released a 30 minute cartoon of it, people would lambast it for being of lower than his usual standard and exceptionally badly written.
Instead, they released a "game" where the gameplay mechanic was watch some turgid animation, then at the critical junction move a joystick or hit a button at the right time to continue playing the animation.
Unfortunately, 9 times out of 10, the required direction or button wasn't clearly explained or worse still made no sense at all and then you got to watch the stupid death cartoon yet again.
Most people prefer pacman because in that game up makes you go up and right makes you go right.
By comparison, Dragons Lair requires you to press a single button during a very short interval to choose between death and life. It is just a series of binary choices, with no hope of variation, ever. The beautiful graphics tend to wow people, but once you play the game you quickly realize it isn't a game at all.
Try playing Stuntman! One mistake, and you get to watch the loading screen for 20 seconds. A repetitive death animation or two wouldn't have hurt there ...
Anyone else notice that rather than trying to prove the worth of Dragon's Lair on its own merits he instead try to prove it by insulting every other game remotely "similar" to it?
Didn't like playing it too much... there were parts that I didn't instinctively know which way to hit the joystick or button. So, I just had to burn a quarter. "Space Ace"... now that game I loved... I think they took it up a notch with that one. Another game... which I never see mention of was "Cliffhanger".
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Looking at the first 11 comments I see every argument that I would want to make, but since I am drunk I figure that I should state my case anyway.
The game was OK. It was more of a memorize/pattern match sequence than it was a true game.
There was humor. I know I laughed when I saw a few of my death sequences, but beyond that I don't think it brought much to the table in terms of "gameplay".
I liked it but I liked it for what it was. I don't claim that it was halflife. DL is so far from half life that a comparison is weak at best.
You know what. In reading the article I think that the author is full of crap. What was written was nothing more than a fanatic trying to bolster more support for the game and or himself. I guess the job was well done because I am another person that clicked on a link.
In summary: game ok for what it was; article lacked weight and read like a "look at me" type rant. Dont forget to notice the paypal link.
-drew
oh ya. mispellings and gramatical errors be damned.
This
Ciao
Look at the "Myst" series. Myst and Riven topped the charts for years (I think it was the best-selling game on CD-ROM since the format came out) and all it ever got were bashings in the (gamers') press by the critics.
I never played it when it came out in the arcade. It was far too expensive, especially when you died after about 30 seconds. The way to get your money's worth is to practice it. You can't practice because it's too expensive. But there was a retro area at E3 this year, and there it was. I was stuck there for about half an hour playing it. It was great. I really enjoyed it. I'm sure it would be easy to get bored once you've been through it, but I didn't get anywhere near through it. Space Ace was there as well, but it wasn't as good. Dragon's Lair randomly chooses a section when you start it, giving at least some variation, but Space Ace is pretty much linear right the way through. Excellent character design on the both of them though.
I liked Dragon's Lair.. then I liked Dragon's Lair II (the level with the piano playing was fantastic).
:)
Nowadays, I like Dance Dance Revolution. All pretty much the same interface (except Dragon's Lair didn't have any moves where you had to hold the joystick/sword button down for a long period of time if I'm remembering right).
The day someone can combine the fitness involved in DDR with a game that looks like Dragon's Lair, I'll be there too
This guy is being a knob. I like Dragon's Lair. Sure, it wasn't an execptionally good game, but it was fun in it's simplicity and I don't blame him for singing it's praises. But does he have to shamelessly knock modern games, sometimes games that have little or nothing to do with DL to do so?
Dragon's Lair is little more than Simon with a Don Bluth cartoon. Some people will like this, some people won't.
When I was a kid in the 80's and I saw Dragon's Lair, I was amazed at it and thought that more games coming out soon were going to look just as amazing. Boy was I wrong!
Dragon's Lair looks great. It has an interesting story. The lead character is interesting. But in the gameplay department, it is SORELY LACKING.
Draogn's Lair was designed to eat quarters, and eat them it does, faster than any other game on the planet probably. Move the joystick three times and you have to put in another quarter. It's amazing anyone continued to play.
"Half-Life is almost as linear and pre-scripted as Dragon's Lair, and is just as happy to kill you instantly if you take a single step in the wrong direction"
That is a load of crap. I can put a quarter into Dragon's Lair and be dead three times in less than 30 seconds, barely having even touched the stick.
Half Life on the other hand, you can walk around for quite a while without encountering a monster, and when you do, you are very likely to kill it. And not only are you likely to kill it, but you are likely to actually MOVE THE STICK/MOUSE AROUND A BIT WHILE DOING SO.
Half Life is very interactive, Dragon's Lair is not. As a game, Dragon's Lair's only success is that it does what it was designed to do, and that is to eat quarters, and look better than all the other games sitting around it so people gravitate towards it and put quarters in.
One thing I miss about Dragon's Lair outside of the arcade was the different "versions" of the game that made it more difficult to play. There were 2 or 3 newer revisions of the game that changed the difficulty by playing certain scenes "out of order." These scenes didn't follow what you knew about the scene, nor was the timing the same, so you'd have to rely on major experimenting to figure it out.
For instance, the scene with the dropping platform. You'd normally get that scene after 3 (I think) other scenes. You could stay on the platform until Dirk screams twice and then get off at the third stop, for a total of nine stops. If you got the scene out of order, it would only be three stops total, so if you were trying to maximize your points and didn't realize you got the scene at the wrong time, you'd die.
Another scene was the tilting platform that would start dropping tiles and fire would come out. The out of order version of that scene would have the timing *WAY* off, so you'd have to experiment many times to be able to complete it.
Many scenes in DL had the ability to extend them. You could have a quick way to finish the scene, or play the scene until the very end. It was a lot of fun to wow people by playing the scene all the way through.
Space Ace had a similar setup. In many places you could choose NOT to turn into Ace, and the scene would be different. At the end battle, you could fight Borf (was that his name?) without turning into Ace for 4-5 moves or so. It was always funny seeing you battle Borf as the wimpy guy.
DL2:Time Warp brought the ability to collect items, which I didn't think was nearly as exciting, since it seemed to be "outside" of the actual storyline. TW was a cooler, faster story, but it didn't really hold the same feel to me as the original. Of course, I was getting older and didn't frequent the arcades nearly as much.
Anyway, as far as I know, the special versions of DL never made it into home versions from what I've found. I haven't played the PC DVD version though, so I couldn't be sure.
The reason it's so popular is because it's really, really easy to port. You need large storage, the ability to stream video, the most basic of branching logic and a few inputs. That's about it. That's why, as the article points out, it's been ported to just about everything. And most of those versions are completely free. Manufacturers would include a copy as an incentive to buy the system and to show that you could even play games on it, so I don't know that most of the money that the game brought in was from players, per se.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
You might want to try the Dragon's Lair 20th Anniversary set produced by Digital Leisure. It basicaly uses the original laserdisc video of DL, DL2 and SA converted to MPEG format. It's pretty enjoyable, although I wasn't to pleased with my continual dying in DL2.
[insert coin]
L R R Die
[insert coin]
L R L U D Die
[insert coin]
L R L U D R L Die
I can't think of any other game that wasted quarters so fast.
The reason that so many people despised the original Dragon's Lair was its unresponsiveness. If you were a millisecond early or late (their definition of the proper time was the key) in hitting a control, you died. You had no real control over the game. It was a long movie with the ability to fork off into numerous death scenes.
I'll date myself (something I couldn't convince others to do at the time) and say that I was a video game fanatic when Dragon's Lair came out. I loved the classics like Missile Command, Defender, Aliens, Galaga, and Asteroids, as well as liking less-well-known games like Moon Cresta, and Sundance. I drained about $5 into Dragon's Lair before the horrible gameplay made the graphics annoying rather than astounding. I could play Missile Command and it was skill, not memorization, that decided the score. Same with Defender, Asteroids, and most of the other classics. Sure, there were some people who memorized patterns for some games, but we serious players viewed them as losers with quarters (or tokens).
There will be people who say that memorizing the Dragon's Lair game requires skill, too. Well so does playing polka music, but you won't find Eric Clapton high-fiving an accordion player and giving him backstage passes anytime soon. Just because something requires skill doesn't mean that it deserves praise.
Allow me to pick off a couple of points the article makes.
1. Comparing it it DDR and Wario Ware. While these game's machanics, compared to DL are similar, the main difference is the changing and adjustible difficulty. Almost every DDR song has at least three step patterns, each with their own degree of dificulty, and even those can be adjusted even further with options like flipping the step directions and trying to play on both dance pads. WW also has three degrees of difficulty on each game, and as you go on, they get faster and harder. DL, I see no adjustemt whatsoever. Just random scene progression in the first game and the occasional mirrored scenes. This essentialy lowers the replay value of this game greatly.
2. Narative Driven titles have taken over. Just curious, where is the "narrative element" in blowing away that lame camper's torso with a flak cannon in a UT deathmatch, or trying to fend off an Orc tower rush with your puny archers in Warcraft? Users don't want narrative gameplay, they want engaging gameplay where they have control over most of the things they're doing. (Although a good story may help!)
3. Not a counter-point, but one of my own observations, Humor. What made DL a fun game for me and my friends is that it was really fun to see the many ways Dirk kick the bucket. This made both winning and losing a fun element of this game.
4. And finaly, Dirk does speak in the game. His only words are "Uh oh!", "Hmm?", "Whoah!", "WOW!" and my favorite, "AAAAARRRRRRGH!"
Well so does playing polka music, but you won't find Eric Clapton high-fiving an accordion player and giving him backstage passes anytime soon. Just because something requires skill doesn't mean that it deserves praise.
Well then how do you explain this?
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
Dance Dance Dragon's Lair Revolution
You're right-- it's the same damn game. "Memorize sequence of arbitrary steps/directions and enter them on the pad/joystick at exactly the right moment.
You could probably hook the dance pad right up to an old DL machine, and play the game that way. If there's a PC version of DL, I'll bet you could use a PC DDR pad with it out-of-the-box. Of course, the steps are farther apart, if my old amiga version was any guide. Not quite as active.
...that anyone ever played more than 30 seconds of it before dying.
Seriously. I considered myself something of a hard core coin-op gamer back-in-the-day, and just when I was getting bored with Ms. Pac Man and Galiga, along comes Dragons Lair, placed right in the middle of the place. I think, if I remember correctly, while every other machine in the place took $0.25, this thing took a full dollar. Well, look at the graphics...it's probably worth it.
I dutifily lined up like everyone else to give it a go, and that game retired each and every one of us. I actually brought a book, thinking I'd be waiting for an hour while somebody mastered it, but all of a sudden I was at the front of the line and within 30 seconds I was toast, watching Dirk turn into a skeleton.
I gave it a few more tries, as did every one else, but it soon became the game that no one played, and it was like this isle of desolation in a rather full arcade.
In short, it was the first game that I truly *hated*, because it made me feel like a complete idiot for "not getting it". Of course, I was in good company as no one seemed to "get it". I think it was finally removed when the first Mortal Kombat came in. Even though I didn't get that either, I could still button-mash some good moves once in awhile!
While I agree that DL and its ilk provide an entertaining experience, the gameplay involved feels clunky compared with a "real" game that uses sprites or 3d models. There is a lack of precise control, so much so that you inevitably get the dreaded complaint:
"That's not what I wanted to do!"
A graphic adventure like the "interactive movies" of the early 90s is comparable in asthetic beauty, but it makes its limitations much more tolerable by allowing some room for error and a less obtuse control scheme.
Sega made a hologram game that had similar gameplay mechanics to Dragon's Lair. Meaning you watched a scene, and then pressed a button or a direction at the right time. Only instead of a cartoon, it was a projected "save me Obi-wan, you're my only hope" style hologram.
Anyone remember what that game was called? It was pretty neat at the time.
http://www.yigle.com/java_games/reflex.shtml
-m
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# Modus Ponens
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The real reason I loved Morrowind : You can kill literally any single (or almost any random group of about fifty) person (people) and still finish the game just fine. What other game can say that?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
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.
FIXME: Add a sig here
All of us D&D nerds at the time had stormed the castle and destroyed the dragon a million times, but only in our imagination. Here's a game that showed it in greater detail than ever before, and *we* were in control.
Yes, the gameplay and controls sucked, especially when compared to the masterpieces of simplicity that were Pac Man, Tempest, Galaga, Joust, etc. Half-Life comparisons are ridiculous to the point of laughter.The merging of video games and adventure stories was inevitable, we already had Neverwinter Nights, Ultima and even Zelda in our minds at that time, we just couldn't get it up on the screeen then. Dragon's Lair was like a temporary fix, something to get us excited until something better inevitably came along.
That being said, I wouldn't expect anyone that wasn't conjugating verbs in the early 80s to *get* Dragon's Lair. That'd be just plain weird. It's all nostalgia, more than anything.
Holy crap, somebody beat us to it! Ah well... I suppose the lesson is "no matter how dorky you you are, there's always someone dorkier."
Kudos to the folks setting this up-- it may be pointless, awkward to play, and a pain to set up, but that hasn't stopped me from wasting thousands of hours on similar futile excercises in geekery in the past, either.
could actually be played now on just a dvd player.. think about it-- you could go up/down/left/right +enter with a remote... channel choices could be the individual clips....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
you sir, are a google master.
While I am a huge PC, Xbox, and PS2 gamer that enjoys Far Cry, Quake, any Unreal Tournament, Halo, Half Life, etc., I always like to go back to the arcade classics. I have a DVD version of Dragons Lair, Space Ace, and Dragons Lair 2 that plays perfectly on my modded Xbox.
For a generation that grew up with arcades, these classic games and the arcade games ROMs that run under MAME are just as much fun to play today on my modded XBox and PC as they were back then. These games set the standard for game play that we use to judge the games of today.
MAME: http://www.mame.net/
DVD Dragons Lair, Space Ace, and Dragons Lair 2:
http://www.digitalleisure.com/
When I played DL and another similar game, Mad Dog McCree, my basic impressions of them were the same. These aren't games, just greed gone completely overboard! Basically all they were saying to you was "Opps! You didn't move fast enough, you lose your quarter for that." over and over.
This quickly devolves into utter pointlessness for the player. Because it's like playing any multiplayer deathmatch game (quake3/counterstrike/etc) in a quarter fed machine would be at the arcade - a real loud invitation for everyone around you to believe you failed your insanity check...
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
I think another great thing about this game is that it brings together two very abstract styles of expression: Cartoon animation and videogames. Cartoonists like Bluth have long known how to invest audiences emotionally into their abstract creations. Lesser games try to do the same with "photo realism," but if you can make me cry over the death of a mouse (Bluth's Secret of Nihm), you're onto something.