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

DL was better as an arcade game

[Zawash]

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..

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.