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Dragon's Lair Remastered in HD
JamesO writes "Digital Leisure has announced the development of Dragon's Lair HD, for release this autumn for the PC. Remastered is usually a term associated with DVD movie release, usually referring to the cleaning up of the film's print. It's not that odd then that the term is being used for what is essentially an interactive cartoon. Dragon's Lair HD promises to do what it says on the tin, offering the original game in true high definition.
" I still remember the first time I saw Dragon's Lair in an arcade. I'd love to play it again in HD — in the arcade it was a quarter eater.
I remember the first time someone banged into it while I was playing and F-ed up my game... :(
Pong HD... lets see those pixels shine!
(end of post)
Actually the secret to Dragon's Lair was standing right behind someone with a giant stack of quarters being pumped into the game.
And throw in a few barely audible mumbles of "you suck" when they screw up.
Best/cheapest way to enjoy the game.
Dragon's Lair made for some nice eye candy at the time, but as a game, it totally stunk. Despite sharing my first name with the gallant hero, it held my interest for about 15 minutes before going back to the rest of the arcade.
Dragon's Lair was a very early example of the game that looks so much better than it plays.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Not only does it have a more interesting plot and better gameplay than the Metal Gear Solid games, now it looks shinier, too!
How many times is this freaking game going to be repackaged and rereased? Apparently somebody out there gives a crap and keeps buying them, but I've never met anyone. The only version of this game I own was some crummy mpeg version I stole out of the bargain bin when I worked at ElBo.
This came to my local arcade and I was convinced it was the future of gaming. And then I played it. The scenes took a while to load and the user interaction part wasn't always obvious. You got virtually nothing for your money and everyone hated it for that. We all went back to Mr Do, Asteroids, and Astro Blaster very quickly and then they took it away. Hadn't thought about it since then. Don't see how a HD version is going to improve the clunky gameplay.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I'll stick with the real classics...
- Tetris
- Super Mario 1 & 3
- Frozen Bubble
- Sonic the Hedgehog
- Dig Dug
- PaperBoy
- Dr. Mario
Need I say more?But for me, a very casual gamer, it was fun. It was the games that required elaborate A-button/B-button/joystick sequences that I couldn't stand. Not sure HD will improve things that much, though.
Dark Reflection
Don Bluth originally planned to release Dragons Lair as a movie, but then changed his mind and decided to make a game out of it, so a "Remastered"version isn't such a bad name.
don't ask me where I got this wisdom, I read it somewhere when the game was just eleased originally.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
In the arcade where I played this game, it was a multi-player game. Everyone had their special boards where they had memorized all the right moves. Personally, I was the only one who could get past the black knight.
Okay...now I feel old again.
As the review doesn't show any graphics, here are a number of screenshots on Digital Leisure's site. Their site also has a trailer here.
Insert coin. Randomly mash joystick. Insert coin. Randomly mash joystick. Insert coin. Randomly mash joystick - success!!!! - randomly mash joystick. Insert coin etc.
I actually liked the second one "space ace" more.
Although there was a Laserdisc centric game which I cannot remember the name of which used footage from Lupin III (anime) for it's content. That was the most interesting because to this day I can still hum the music from it.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
And quite playable. See Daphne.
You'll need to locate the graphic files yourself, of course. But anyone who has done the Mame thing should know how to do that.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
According to the HDTV arcade, Dragons Lair 3D is available for the XBOX in 720P and 1080i:
o com=custom&page=xboxd
http://www.hdtvarcade.com/hdtvforum/index.php?aut
The follow-on to Space Ace and Dragons Lair was some 'Wizards Apprentice' type game with a full membrane keyboard.
;)
It was even more of a gnarly quarter muncher because you had to move from a joystick and an action button to a full 101 key keypad and an unfamiliar user interface. Anyone remember the name of this game?
Anyhow, SPACE ACE ROCKS, DOWN WITH DRAGONS LAIR!!
I always felt like players should charge their audience an admission fee.
While they're at it they should make a HD version of Jill of the Jungle. I'd love to see what people could push into her pixels.
-tgpo
Now, 23 years later they tune up the graphics.
But the gameplay is still the same bitch as it was 1983.... like most of the current games.
(This is not a anti-something-fanboy-troll. I highly respect brand loyalities of any kind. Please don't mod AC down)
I don't seen how making a cartoon HD will make it any better. I remember this in the arcade and as others have mentioned, it was a quarter eater that wan't very fun to play. It definately looked good but gameplay was all guesswork or memory. Minimal to zero skill was involved. You either knew where to go and lived or you didn't and died.
I also remember when it came out for the PC around 1991. It took 7-9 floppies and looked nearly as good as the original. It was fun for about one night.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I don't remember; was DL pretty much the first game that cost 50c per play?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I was considering downloading Daphne as it is one of the few classic emulators I don't have.
http://www.daphne-emu.com/
I am a big fan of software preservation. However, if I only emulate the original copy would that be considered warez now that a new shiny version is back on retail shelves?
Honestly, I wonder if this might spin off a retro-trend in similiar twitch-movie gaming. I don't see why people couldn't make similiar games with DVD systems today. You just branch to various chapters on a disc and hit a button at precisely the right time.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Problem is there aren't enough levels, I finished the 100 levels with the ubuntu package, now I want more.
Is a high-definition cartoon really better than a regular cartoon? I don't think so. Either way the cells are coloured or shaded. More detail in a cartoon isn't too impressive because it's not the kind of detail that matters, compared to real-life actors.
What made this game stand out in its day were "graphics" that couldn't be rendered in real time, back then. But today, they could be. Imagine the look of the original, but with fully interactive gameplay -- that's what I'd like to see.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
most of the time the machine was broken
Thayer's Quest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thayer's_Quest
One thing I didn't like about Dragon's Lair was that if you died a couple times at the same place, the game would automatically bypass that scene. I understand that it was done that way because the designers knew that people would be standing around watching and they wanted people to be able to see as much of the game as possible, but they should have put in some way to turn that feature off.
Technoli
I have one of the old Sony "LaserMax" 1453 Laserdisc players that went into the console in the arcade. All I need is a Dragon's Lair Laserdisc and the schematics for the controller board (plugs into the RS-232 port on the player) and I can have my own MAME and Dragon's Lair console! Woohoo!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
6 used and new available from $7.00
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Dungeon Escape is fun. :)
http://www.studiohunty.com/dungeon/
I liked Dragons Lair when it came out but as games go now, it can be somewhat annoying to play.
Dragon's Lair was interesting back in the day, but god, I think there's been a remake for almost every new generation of gaming technology that's come out. Commodore 64, NES, SNES, Amiga, 3DO, PC, Gameboy, CD-i, AtariST, Sega CD, Jaguar, Gamecube, XBOX, PC, and some more. http://www.mobygames.com/game_group/sheet/gameGrou pId,427/
I don't think any game's been remade as much as this one.
For those who want to see what Dragon's Lair is like, but prefer stick-figures to cels, there's the excellent flash game Dungeon Escape!.
Anyone beat that one yet?
The follow-on to Space Ace and Dragons Lair was some 'Wizards Apprentice' type game with a full membrane keyboard.
Thayer's Quest
With the glorious, hard to understand, speech synthesis. The nice thing about that game (other than the first decision you need to make in the game) is that it played more like a choose your own adventure book. It wasn't all just a 50-50 chance of losing when a decision was to be made.
Come on, Dreamworks! Please let this classic game be remastered is high-resolution video!
For the most part it WAS the future of gaming. Pity Mr Do, Asteroids and Astro Blaster weren't...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
if the trailer gives any insight, the new shiny HD version will be encoded in WMV-HD
I hated this game in the arcade....
There is a war going on for your mind.
Hey! Don't give away the secrets - it took me £30 to get that good!
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
It's a quarter muncher for sure, so I never really played it. Back then though, word on the street is that at the very ending scene you were rewarded with rescuing the very buxom princess. Alas, I never got to see that scene to this day. Anyone have any screencaps? :)
Actually now that I think of it, that might be a nice proof-of-concept for resolution-independent animation recording... lots of CPU though...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I actually own this one for the PC! :) I've had it for years; it's called "Kingdom" for the PC.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
IIRC, Dragon's Lair was the first game that took TWO quarters to get a credit. At least in my city where the game made the local news.
I spent 25 cents on it. I put my quarter in and started the game. I watched the intro, and then I was dead. Evidently the intro was actually the game. Anyway, this pissed me off so much that I've hated it ever since.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
I remember being in awe of this game as a bystander. I'd watch people play it for hours thinking it was the greatest thing ever. Then I played it. After only 50 cents I turned away from the machine and never looked at it again.
"...in the arcade it was a quarter eater."
Sure was. It was the first game I ever saw that was fifty cents a pop.
And for all those who are complaining about how random the play was, this game had patterns, same as any other game. When you're trying to get past those two spinning Q-Tips, you press the stick when he lunges. In the water, you go towards the lighter stream, etc. Remember kids, this was nineteen eighty freaking three--Dragon's Lair looked WORLDS better than what else was out there. Who cares if the gameplay was less than perfect. Besides, that princess was a piece of ass. (No surprise, I guess: reading the Wikipedia article, the studio couldn't afford a model so they just looked at Playboys. Ha.)
Gameplay suffered because there was only one laser disc in the system so there was a short blank-screen delay when the scenes switched from the 'setup' to the 'result.'. I heard that Space Ace had two and it would switch back and forth between them with no delay, but reading Wikipedia I see that there were conversion kits to make DL into SA, so who knows--I might be remembering wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Lair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Ace
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Great animation, poor game unless you're an obsessive compulsive. I played a few times and it was enough to get tired of the digital controls. Dragon Lair's control scheme and game play is so simplistic and boring that I really am surprised that anyone would still be interested in it , unless it's purely for a sentimental reasons.
....... Thus ends my attempt at wit or whatever
While holding the joystick up and to the left, hold down the sword button while inserting your quarter. This will give you lives until you finish the game... really use to piss people off when I would do it and die 50 times in the same spot...
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel...
Real life actors don't have more *informative* detail, because you already know what they look like. We all know Angelina Jolie's face so well it hardly matters whether we can see it clearly... and of course her most important "details" are too large to be helped much by HD.
In a cartoon, many of the lines are only a pencil-width thick. On a conventional DVD, these lines disappear, and the expression of a character becomes less readable. The cel colouring isn't important, but the linework sure is. Those details matter so much that an animation assistant makes $25 per drawing to make sure every little line is exactly right.
Worst controls ever. Can't even tell if they are working.
I finally got to play this game recently, through an emulated version for Sega CD, and I must say...it does look cool and all, but if I didn't have the ability to save my state whenever I wanted, I'd never play it. The number of times I'd have to start over would drive me nuts.
"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."
Try 'never'.
It made me LOL in the middle of a crowded lab...
All this talk about Dragon's Lair, reminded me of that game that came out in the late 80's to early 90's that played like Dragon's Lair, but the display was a reflected screen that made it look like a holographic projection. Does anybody remember what that game was? I remember that was a quarter muncher too, not because of gameplay, but because of the unique display.
I think that is the sequence to slay the dragon and get the princess. Ah... to be a fat, loser kid again.
While I never got to play Dragon's Lair for all the reasons people have posted (too expensive, line too long, looked way too tough) there was another game that came out that had the same annimation and interface that I did get to play.
It was some type of spy/noir game set in the 40s or something like that. You had to drive up some curvy road hitting the joystick at just the right moments. That game was pretty cool and i seem to remember it probably because it was animated so nicely.
I'll have to hunt around and see if I can find what it's called unless someone else remembers.
It was a fighter, I only saw it once at a Chuck-E-Cheeze in NJ, no idea what the name is . Anyone know?
DL is being re-released for the nth time... Big whoop. I remember DL from Showbiz Pizza the day it was first powered up there. I remember the line of tokens on the marquee holding places for a chance to play. I remember it was the first game I ever saw that demanded two tokens or 50 cents to play. I do have some fond memories of the game, but playing it was not one of them.
To be honest with you, I think we can attribute Dragons Lair whole concept to today's game model - Solve a puzzle, move on to the next area, solve another one, move on, beat the game, that's it. Dragon's Lair, as far as gameplay goes, was horrible. The appeal was the display, the cartoon. We wanted to see what happens next, we wanted to see each area and the action that took place. We wanted to know more of the storyline, wanted to see how it unfolded. We wanted to see someone beat the game, and ultimately, do the same ourselves. The problem was that once you beat it, like pretty much every game released these days, you're done with it. There's no real reason to play it again. That's the problem with Dragon's Lair and every other game like it; ZERO replay value.
To their credit, the programmers DID try to make a few games that were more like traditional games, they just happened to use a laserdisc for backgrounds, storylines, etc. M.A.C.H. 3, FireFox, and Bega's Battle (which used footage from the anime "Harmageddon") were better games than DL simply because they had more traditional interaction than DL (I blistered my fingers on MACH3 several times).
That said... Space Ace, from a storyline point of view, was a better experience. The story was far more linear than Dragon's Lair, and the characters themselves were more fleshed out and not as one-dimentional as Dragon's Lair's. It was more entertaining to watch and arguably more interactive than Dragon's Lair. The same goes for Cliffhanger; better story, better characters, better experience most likely because it was based on a real movie (I freaked out the first time I saw "Castle of Cagliostro" some 10 years later).
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Eight year old's response after watching Marty McFly play the arcade shooting game in the diner in 2015: "You mean you have to use your hands? That's a baby's game."
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
"Are you like in your 30's or 40's? The real classics are games like Space Travel for Unix."
t ml
Thanks for the laugh! Really interesting game, and how it led to the Unix being created first on the PDP-7.
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/spacetravel.h
My other OS is the MCP!
Worst actual gameplay ever. It was just a big money waster until you figured out the moves.
I did very much enjoy watching people who had learned all the moves go to the end but I personally thought the gameplay was crap. I was much happier to step across the isle and play Tron. Man would I love to own that cabinet today.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Played off a laserdisc, output on a standard definition video monitor mounted inside of an arcade cabinet surrounded by the flashing and noises of other video games?
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Someone ripped the video and posted the whole thing to youtube. No quarters needed.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Man, it just goes to show my state of mind in 1983...i remember she had a hot face and nice rack, but man i didn't remember those nipples!
That's because "toon rendering" isn't the same thing as a real cartoon.
It was available as a CD as well, circa '92 or '93. It still sucked, but you didn't have to swap disks.
Yeah, I'm dating myself, but I used to have to squeeze past all the other kids playing this game in the arcade to get to the back of the place where the pinball machines lived. I always thought video games were just a passing fad. Gimme "Eight Ball Deluxe" any day over Asteroids or Ms. Pac Man or Dragon's Lair.
"I'm one of the ... *counts on fingers * ... 8 people in the world who bought an Atari Jaguar."
;-)
Big deal! I'm one of the three people in the world who bought a Jaguar CD! Just for Jeff Minter's VLM!
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
The story/animation in that game captured me in a big, big way. When I discovered the Miyazaki film within the same year, (or rather, some story books using stills from the film; getting an acutal copy was somewhat more challenging), I was similarly blown away. --Manga and anime were unknown words back in '83, and I was of the first wave of Westerners to fall under its spell.
Good times!
-FL
At a time when most arcade games cost a quarter, they usually cost at least fifty cents, and in some arcades, as much as a dollar. Then end result is I never played it more than once. I died quickly. It sucked. I went back to Robotron: 2084, my one true love and never looked back.
There were some other laser disc games that were fun, though:
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Check out Plasma Pong.
:D
http://www.plasmapong.com/
Should look nice in HD.
Yeah, the intro would come up, and you had to push right a couple times to jump across the bridges before he even went in the castle.
Most machines had this turned off. Perhaps your experience is why they turned it off. I figured it was to decrease game time and thus increase throughput.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I feel the need to reply, although I cannot comment directly on Dragon's Lair, I'm a fan of both Laserdisc technology *dodges tomatoes* and classic arcade games. I own a number of full-sized arcade machines, and I own a number of still-working laserdisc players, and I have to say, I can't imagine this game was that great in its original form. First off, LDs are pretty slow to scan, so the "load time" must have been somewhat obtrusive. How about the loading screens? Was it that ugly blue that most Pioneer players have when switching tracks?
I've long been a fan of Pioneer equipment (especially the Pioneer Elite line) and I'm sure what the Wikipedia article on Dragon's Lair says is true... the equiptment was good, but it broke a lot under the strain of constant scanning. I've had a few players die from just normal use... the discs are so heavy and have to spin so fast that the motors break easily, but I've seen more of a problem with the sensors than the motors. For example, I had one Pioneer player that refused to acknowledge that there was a disc in the player. Another would pick up the disc, partially spin it, then put it down and eject it. Today's players wouldn't suffer from nearly as many problems... DVDs aren't heavy and can scan a lot, relatively quickly, without breaking.
As far as duplicating the "arcade experience", any new version of the game certainly could not do that without the lights and the big-ass clunky machine. However, the Wikipedia entry states it has a joystick and one button, so it couldn't be too hard to get a similar experience in the controls with even a DVD remote or $2 joystick. Also, you could hook it up to a larger screen than the arcade likely had, and the remastered "cartoon" would look much better.
So, in conclusion, perhaps this really WILL give the effect the creators of the game originally intended... more seamless game-play and the possibility of a more immersive environment... still... why?
The original Dragon's Lair players were the Pioneer PR-7820 and the Pioneer LD-V1000 for the US release.
Just because it's been remade over and over again doesn't mean you will get the same authentic experience that you got with the arcade. The only way I know of to get the arcade gameplay experience is to play Dragon's Lair using Daphne.
This time, Digital Leisure is giving us something that we can't get ourselves: high quality scans of the original film. Most laserdisc game enthusiasts (myself included) have the original Dragon's Lair laserdiscs, so the CD-ROM or DVD releases offer nothing that we don't already have (when you realize that the DVD's are just NTSC, same as the laserdisc).
I've seen the trailer for this HD release and it looks absolutely astounding. The color is awesome, the detail is awesome... I will definitely be looking to get my hands on this one.
While the gameplay probably won't be authentic, I'm sure we'll get it working in Daphne soon enough, and then we will have the best of both worlds (awesome video, authentic gameplay).
My idea of the real Classics - Go back to the '60s when games were played by flipping a set of various switches and you waiting for the machine to do anything as you stare at a seven inch b/w CRT, all done at MIT, input with punch cards. THAT is classic, people, and it started the whole electronic games industry.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I own the three volume DVD set from Digital Leisure with Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair II and Space Ace. You play the game by using the arrow keys on your DVD remote; for the most part these games are unplayable, especially Dragon's Lair II. The problem is that when you make a "move", the DVD will pause for a second as it seeks to a new video segment. With games like Dragon's Lair II that have you making many moves in quick succession, the delay is intolerable and the audio just skips the whole time you're playing. IMHO, the only thing these releases are good for is either (a) watching the video to the game or (b) source of video and audio clips to be used for making your own version of the game to play on a computer (no/negligible seek delay).
Unfortunately, the article doesn't specify if these releases are actual computer games, or just interactive DVDs. If they're actual games, and play smoothly, then they're probably worth the money.
Retro is in. All the boomers and their kids are digging back to their roots for satisfaction and the simple pleasures of a good time. Seems to me with all the new technology that is coming out at a seemingly alarming rate these days, just doesn't give the same amount of fun, before the next insane game comes out.
I don't need complex combo moves and 26 button joysticks to have a good time.
A fine example of this phenom, I had some friends (men and women) over for a barbeque that got rained out. I was in the basement and pulled out my old Intellivision and dusted it off. Put in Burgertime, and with the opening melody..there was a crowd around the TV, amazed that it still worked.
3am and 3 cases of beer later, they finally left. How many of them you think logged onto eBay to find their own systems?
This game will sell to our generation, as a retribution to all the quarters we put in machine for almost no result *raises my hand*.
Just like the GTO's, Mustangs, and Chargers...they are coming back, get ready.
I suggest you 16 year-olds, put down the Vicodin and grab a paddle.
I'm pretty sure that was "Eon and the Time Tunnel" which was never verifiably released to arcades. I have a magazine from the early 80s that talked about it. Space Ace definately only had one LD player, as did "Dragon's Lair II" and "Space Ace II".
...why anyone would want to play that horrible game again. It wasn't just difficult, it was frustratingly impossible. The "gameplay" consisted of mashing random buttons at random times with perfect timing. The only way to really win the game was to fail over and over and over again, so you know to mash the button the next time you get to that part. Pretty much everything in the game killed you. It wasn't fun, and the only reason it was even remotely interesting when it came out was because it was the first time anyone had ever seen an interactive cartoon. Now, we have the chance to relive exactly the same nightmare in HD. Goody. I'd rather play a REAL game, thanks.
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
Yes, the flexibility was great.
:)
But my CYOA book was I think $1.95 at the time, that'd get me about 5 minutes of game play on Thayers Quest
Great! Now I can pick up right where I left off -- falling off that god damned burning rope into the lava.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I spent hundreds of quarters on that game and can consistently finish with the finite number of lives. Be a real adventurer... RISK SOMETHING! ...or perhaps you are not worthy of the hand of Princess Daphne?
This game has had it's time...IT'S TIME TO MOVE ON!
Ironically enough, Dragon's Lair was one of the very few original Xbox games to support full 1080i.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"This time, Digital Leisure is giving us something that we can't get ourselves: high quality scans of the original film."
Well so much for the public domain. I'm sure shorter terms will ensure we always have only the source material to draw upon.
The arcade game also remembered who you were if you returned later to play some more! :) If I remember right, you typed your name or something and it brought up your game state. Did it have a hard-drive or something to store this data?
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^