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."

Comments

Dragons lair as linear as Half Life?

[johannesg]

What a bunch of crap is that. In Half Life you at least have freedom to walk around as you want, look at the environment as you want, tackle problems in different ways, go back to earlier locations (you can go back to the big escalator from nearly halfway through the game!). And although the locations can only be visited in, effectively, on order, it gives a damn fine impression that you have absolute freedom.

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.

Re:Dragons lair as linear as Half Life?

[Jahf]

Show me how I can take Dragon's Lair, connect to the net, and proceed to randomly KILL KILL KILL^W^W^W^W deathmatch with my friends. Or write a mod for it to add new weapons or rules.

Sorry, but in using Half-Life you only remembered 1/2 of what Half-Life is. And even in the single player game (and there are plenty of linearly scripted single player games) at least I don't have to twitch my hands in some repetitive illogical pattern every few seconds to survive. I can go about things in many different ways.

The poster seems to be using the weakest point of Half-Life (linear script) to say that Dragon's Lair was good because it shared that same weak point and took it to an extreme. Sorry, not a good comparison.

Re:Dragons lair as linear as Half Life?

[gl4ss]

if you think that having the ability to go BACKWARDS(to areas where nothing has changed, so you don't really have any need to go there) or wielding different weapons is CHOICE then you really haven't played any game that really gives you choice on how to advance.

the only option you have to actually advance the game in any way would be to do the single one thing the script wants you to do(that would be pushing the button in dragons lair, or walking to the only possible next room in half-life).

basically the 2 games stil give you very similar choice: either 'press a button' or don't get forward.

I didn't exactly say they're comparable, I'm just saying half-life isn't exactly anything else than a pre-scripted movie with 1 choice of how to advance through the game(and as such is comparable to super mario bros, hell, super mario bros actually gives you few different routes because of the warp zones).

Re:Dragons lair as linear as Half Life?

[Ahnteis]

There's a difference between "press THE button at THE exact moment" and "press some buttons to do what you wanted to at your own pace".

Re:Dragons lair as linear as Half Life?

[bVork]

Dragon's Lair sucks ass as a game. It's a group experience. You memorized the moves and you played it in an arcade to amaze and impress the people who couldn't finish it. At the end, everyone cheered, patted you on the back, shook your hand and shit like that.

Wow, that sounds a lot like one of the most popular arcade games of today. Can anyone else see the similarities between Dragon's Lair and Dance Dance Revolution (or any of those other rhythm games)?

Not all popular games are critically acclaimed

[ambrosine10]

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.

Re:Not all popular games are critically acclaimed

[sammaffei]

That's because 'Myst' was a non-addicting sleep aid.

Knob

[Perseid]

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.

My thoughts...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That was fun ... NOT

[baywulf]

[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.