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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."
regardless of that you have always only one way to advance(and what is this 'tackle problems in different ways'? where half-life gives you choices in how to advance? it mostly has no problems at all beyond scale the walls and find the exit to next room). it was heavily scripted to be straightforward with no strays from the main script. if you don't try anything different on the first time you play it through it may seem like you have choices... but in reality you don't(painfully obvious when you've played it through for a few times, going back the levels a bit has no meaning when nothing there changes). it ain't any more free than doom 3(which actually gives you couple of small dead end alleys and locked lockers you can either skip or find the codes for).
half-life was a good game, sure. but it was not one that you had much freedom in(compared to say, morrowind, all ultimas, deus ex, nethack..).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Try Daphne with an arcade conroller of some sort and you'll get pretty much the real deal (minus the scoreboard) -- if you buy a real Dragon's Lair scoreboard, you can build an interface to have Daphne control it, though.
Sure there is. Dragon's Lair for the Amiga was spot on (and quite an achievement for its time as well). If you don't have an Amiga, get an emulator (Amiga Forever/WinUAE) -- a decent PC rig will give a smooth play experience.
Btw, Dragon's Lair for the C64 was a completely different game. It was actually more playable than the arcade (but no fancy graphics).
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.
Myst *was* the best-selling game on CD-ROM. Now The Sims is.