Read review by Nightbird
Graphics: 10 ‧
Music: 2 ‧
Playability: 1 ‧
Overall: 2
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I think the only fair judgement for Dragon's Lair on Amiga is on the effort spent to deliver an experience that is at least comparable to the laser game. Judging it by the same parameters as other games would make no sense as it's possibly the most sui generis title on Amiga. It was designed to impress audiovisually, and impress it did. That Randy Linden must have had a real penchant for low-level programming, given that he would go on to develop the Bleem! PS1 emulator (remember?).
Then of course, not many scenes were included, but what would have been the cost of producing a complete conversion on a dozen floppies or so, and at what retail price?
It is pointless to criticise the gameplay other than for the input response and how faithfully the command sequences were reproduced. The former is acceptable - consider, for one, the 3DO version which expected input well ahead of the corresponding animation. For the latter, commands were actually quite simplified, even taking into account the heavy cuts on some scenes.
So in summary? It's good enough to retain its identity as Dragon's Lair, so a far as I'm concerned it's a pass.
View all comments (274)
A great laserdisc classic from 1983! Basically an interactive comic. Unfortunately the Amiga port makes no sense, as only random scenes were ported and those are even repeated several times. They could have made a proper port by putting more effort into it, games like Flashback and many other titles show what the Amiga is capable of.
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This game suffered the same disk drive crippling frustration as Dragon's Lair although with less disks. It did look amazing, especially to show off what your Amiga could do but it was impossible to play!
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On the tech side, it was really awesome. But there were only few levels, many of them heavily edited, that must be played in mirror view too. They fixed this in the Escape From Singe's Castle version, but this one can't go over average. Vote 5/10
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Simply put this isnt a game. It could best be described as a barely interactive animated movie that lies to you in the trailer by conning you into thinking you will have full control of Dirk on your travels, instead of no control besides one brief, blink and you'll miss it moment where you have to guess what joystick move or button to press. Be a millisecond too soon or too late and you lose a life.
The graphics are stunning and what sound there is is excellent but its simply not fun. A few years ago they released a game for the consoles and pc called Dragon's Lair 3D and for all its flaws it does at least give you complete control of Dirk and as such is far closer to what the trailer promised than the actual game delivered.
View all comments (53)
Not at all a bad conversion of the original coin-op laser game. This is a faithful rendition of a small bunch of levels, even tho the graphic is clearly not the same but a pixel-grained rendition. Unfortunately the amount of data required was such that the game had many disks for just a few "rooms" of the original game. It was a very nice try by the programmers at a time when playing the original laser game was possible only on a cabinet, but today there is very little reasons to play this on Amige when we have Daphne. (7)
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Like the arcade version, Dragon's Lair is pure eye-candy. Fun to watch, but the playability is lousy. I'd much rather play a low-res 2D platform game or shoot'em-up any day. (4/10)
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Couldn't disagree more, although I can understand it. Some people don't like this type of game. Fine. I do, and this is one of the best ever! Graphically, beautiful! Sound was great! (Not sure what you were listening to?) It was a perfect match for the game. Gameplay, that depends. Some (most?) people don't like this type of game. Personally, I find it fun and enjoyable. It's very responsive, not like trying to play the DVD version on a DVD player! That is bad!!
And then there's the technical accomplishment of streaming that video from floppies!!! It's in my top 10 for Amiga games ever. And to date, this is still the only game I've ever paid more than $50 for ($59) and I never regretted it...
p.s. It wasn't based on a cartoon. A cartoon was based on it.
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To Darktear - The reason I played this game is because I had NEVER seen the end of the arcade version. It was fun to see what came next. A lot like today's Playstation RPGs (think Final Fantasy).
To All - As for why I kept playing? Because it was fun! It was a challenge to figure out which moves you were supposed to make, and the graphics were incredible. When you set Dragon's Lair next to its contemporaries like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, DL looks incredible. I played this game again-and-again because it was just fun to look at. Dirk's expressions and death scenes are hilarious. (Ditto Dexter in the later game called Space Ace.)
When my friend showed me this on his Amiga, I immediately went-out to buy Dragon's Lair for the Commodore 64. And it was junk. So I begged my parents to get me Amiga just so I could have the full-scale video-based game. I loved it. I loved Space Ace too.
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There's a question that's bothering me. After I saw that this game was totally based on the cartoon... Why on earth would you play this game if you already know how it ends? And after all... How many times you have to die before passing a SINGLE SCREEN? For the first one there's my personal record... 9 times, and the only way to pass it... Is with a walkthrough guide in hands... Good graphic, gameplay inexistent and the most irritating game ever seen on the face of the earth, even more irritating than Akira
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Serie of the games which are barely playable but full of absolutly amazing graphics (especially when you bear in mind that the conversion was done in years of ECS chipset domination). Nevertheless, seeing does not mean having good fun. Games are not only difficult but also stupid, boring and irritating. Very poor.
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Too much disk swapping, maybe you'd prefer playing the whdload version. I must confess I'd been playing it so much on Amiga just for hte graphics. I came by the original version at the arcade. I remember I was always there and felt sorry when they took it away. My dream was owning the real thing at home! I have the PC DVD version but I found it quite disappointing.
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Unless you had this game on a hard drive then it was almost suitable to play because of the amazing GFX & sound converted it meant you had a lot of disk swapping but the gameplay was limited & sometimes tedious on slower machines
View all comments (522)
Superbly digitized graphics and speech and music straight from the coin-op. As arcade perfect as you can ask from ECS machine. But you either love or hate the game. I love it. Nevetheless, I agree that the gameplay is way too limited. Therefore I give it 5 like all the other Don Bluth "laser" games on Amiga.
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All said (see below). Stunning graphics but nearly unplayable.
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Yes, I have the same opinion. It is nice to see only, when instaled on HDD and when you insert the cheat which causes, that the whole game plays itself like a big movie scene. Otherwise it is painful to play it!
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Magical when I first saw this in the arcades.
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